Tour Linder: Danger Came Smiling with Bimini and Ione Gamble

The words of Ione Gamble, founder and editor-in-chief of the intersectional feminist arts and culture zine, Polyester, as she explored our celebration of 50 years of the pioneering British feminist artist, Linder: Danger Came Smiling, at the Hayward Gallery.

Gamble visited the exhibition in the company of drag queen and recording artist Bimini and the pair began their tour with Linder’s early photomontages and her subversion of images created for the male gaze through the insertion of consumer products; pairing the fantasy of sexual desire with ‘the fantasy of domesticity’.

In this video Bimini and Gamble discuss how, in both her photomontage and her photography of 1970s drag artists, Linder brought the underground ‘taboo’ of queerness and ‘queer bodies embracing each other’ to the foreground. The notion of testing the boundaries of what society permits to be seen continues through Linder’s practice, and is present in later works highlighted by the duo that draw on the fetish of ‘sploshing’.

Another common theme they address is Linder ‘asserting her agency as the artist’, after a traumatic experience had led to her ‘using herself as a canvas’. She has continued to appear in her works since, including one of her most recent series which draws on the surrealism of artists such as Salvador Dali to highlight the dangers and exploitation presented by deep-faking; bringing Bimini and Gamble full circle on the subject of the male gaze.