Deborah Findlater: Sacred Space

Sacred Space is a new commission by South-London based video artist and filmmaker Deborah Findlater.

New work exploring the healing power of touch and restorative rituals is presented across a multi-channel video installation, floor work and written text panels. Sacred Space asks how one preserves, protects & maintains themselves as part of a community? How the self functions in relation to others and what wholeness looks like for Black Womxn?

The works have developed from an auto-biographical position and positions shared that centre a politics of pleasure – pleasure in being made up, of getting one’s appearance tended to, as actions of intimacy, presence, power and sensuality. Whilst also thinking politically about the spaces where these acts and rituals happen, the home, the bedroom, the beauty salon.

Sacred Space sites its references with Black feminist practices, discourses and writing that investigate pleasure and erotics including Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown & Audre Lorde’s uses of the erotic, as political and social tools of resistance, subversion, and imagination.

Sacred Space continues Cubitt’s Structures That Cooperate programme curated by Louise Shelley, a 15 month series of exhibitions, events, workshops and research departing from Cubitt’s position as an artist run cooperative and how this can shape and support collective concerns as cultural workers.