A provocative new art exhibit at Bristol’s Spike Island gallery is turning heads and sparking conversations about Britain’s entrenched class divides. Titled “Grey Unpleasant Land,” the show brings together an eclectic array of readymade objects – from antique silver to ceramic chamber pots to the velvet curtains of disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell – to shine a harsh light on the nation’s yawning social inequalities.
Everyday Objects Take Center Stage
At the heart of the exhibit are two seemingly mundane items: a set of Georgian silver dinner pieces recently relinquished by an aristocrat, and a collection of 240 antique chamber pots purchased on eBay. The jarring juxtaposition of these objects, associated with opposite ends of the digestive process, serves as a blunt metaphor for how the trappings of different classes circulate through the machinations of the market economy.
From Maxwell’s Curtains to Empty Frames
Other evocative pieces in the show include a set of faded red velvet curtains, revealed to have been salvaged from the former London home of Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker; and an ornate but empty picture frame that once held the Wilton Diptych, a piece of medieval propaganda art commissioned by King Richard II. The artists, Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane, have dubbed these forlorn objects “framing devices” – quite literally in the case of the vacant frame.
Without framing devices, none of these objects would be considered art in the first place.
– Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane
Infiltrating Institutions to Critique Power
In a sly move, the artistic duo even placed a classified ad in a September 2024 issue of the conservative magazine The Spectator, seeking “English landowners burdened by carrying costs to participate in an endeavour of artistic significance.” The ad, which provides the Spike Island gallery’s phone number, cheekily invites beleaguered gentry to divest themselves of their ancestral estates – a pointed jab at Britain’s entrenched systems of inherited wealth and power.
As immigrants to the UK themselves – Al-Maria hails from Qatar and Ourahmane from Algeria – the artists are keenly attuned to the hostility and class barriers that newcomers face in British society. By infiltrating establishment institutions like The Spectator and Spike Island itself, they aim to subversively highlight the absurdities of the status quo and the human toll of inequality.
Art as Trojan Horse
At times, the exhibit feels like a Trojan horse smuggling radical ideas into the heart of the art world. This is especially true given that “readymade” art – the use of off-the-shelf objects in gallery displays – has been a staple of the avant garde since Marcel Duchamp infamously presented a urinal as a sculpture in 1917. By embracing this venerable tradition of institutional critique, Al-Maria and Ourahmane join a lineage of muckraking artists that includes the likes of Hans Haacke and Cameron Rowland.
Of course, as the artists readily acknowledge, inequality won’t be undone by art alone. But in a Britain convulsed by the shockwaves of Brexit, a historic cost-of-living crisis, and the widest rich-poor gap in over a century, “Grey Unpleasant Land” offers an urgently needed provocation – and an invitation to imagine a society less divided between silver spoons and chamber pots.
