Who’s Still Holding the Baby???
In the Cockpit Gallery 3 – 30 September 1980
An exhibition of images, montages, cartoons and collages, made by the Hackney Flashers, a feminist women’s collective in 1978. In no way outdated is their juxtaposition of the myths of individual motherhood against the struggles for collective, neighbourhood-based childcare. The exhibition consists of 29 laminated card panels (30″ x 20″) and case.
BY: THE HACKNEY FLASHERS COLLECTIVE
DATE: 1978
SIZE: 29 panels
FUNDED: Retrospectively funded by THE GULBENKIAN FOUNDATION
SYNOPSIS: The Hackney Flashers was a collective of ten women working in education and the media. It was formed in 1974 and its work was centred in Hackney because most of its members lived in or near the borough, and also because like many other working-class inner-city areas with a high immigrant population, Hackney’s hospital, housing and other services were coming increasingly under attack through cuts in public spending.
Who’s Still Holding the Baby? took two years to complete. “The limitations of documentary photography became apparent with the completion of the ‘Women and Work’ exhibition. The photographs assumed a ‘window on the world’ through the camera and failed to question the notion of reality rooted in appearances. The photographs were positive and promoted self-recognition but could not expose the complex social and economic relationships within which women’s subordination is maintained. We began to juxtapose our naturalistic photographs with media images to point to the contradictions between women’s experience and how it is represented in the media. We wanted to raise the question of class, so much obscured in the representation of women’s experience as universal.”
First exhibited at Centerprise Community Centre in Hackney.
A tape/slide show based on the exhibition, entitled “Domestic Labour and Visual Representation” was available from S.E.F.T. at 29 Old Compton St.Wl.
The six panels shown below were part of the original exhibition but are not held by the Madrid museum and therefore missing when the exhibition was shown as part of Women in Revolt at Tate Britain in 2023/4.
The exhibition is now owned by the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. They have 23 panels which can be viewed on their website.
Cockpit Gallery Exhibitions & Cultural Studies projects 1973-89 