Exhibitions Archive

8 December 2023 - 5 March 2024
Screening Room

Venus Patel’s film Eggshells (2022) revisits an incident in which the artist was assaulted and pelted with eggs. Filmed in twelve parts or acts, it explores the incident and the artist’s response to it through several archetypes, each of whom perform with an egg. For Venus Patel art is her means of processing traumatic experiences rather than internalising them.

Using the weapon of the assailant the egg itself becomes a tool with many psychological and symbolic meanings within it. The power of reincarnation, birth, nature, hope while also pointing to the power it has to utterly humiliate and embarrass if used in a certain way’ writes Patel.

Each of the twelve characters - which range from 70s housewife to alien to chicken – are based around the artist’s personal understanding of herself and how she reacts and perceives the world around her. They deal with emotions beginning from sorrow, to internalised then externalised anger, to acceptance.

There is an embrace of the absurdity of these performances while still speaking to the deeper subject matter. By placing the outlandish characters into public spaces, they confront a preconceived notion of pushing true queer expression into only hidden spaces or only at night, into the daylight and into the normal everyday experience.

VENUS PATEL: Eggshells is part of The Power of Us Programme.