Linder

June 2013

Since the mid-1970s, Linder has explored the terrain of socially and culturally reinforced norms and expectations of gender identity and represented desire. Ripping images apart and reassembling them in a way that shows us the artificial construction of social image, Linder embraces a radical and uncompromisingly feminist approach to the pervasive commodification of the female body in mass media. Collages such as ‘Penetrating the Interior’ and ‘Door of the Corporeal Soul’ set forth a collision of images that questions, analyses and destroys the coded representations of gender regularly found in everything from household, cooking and ‘women’s interest’ magazines to pornography and the use of women’s bodies to market products such as cars in men’s magazines.

Linder’s career began in Manchester in the mid 1970s, amidst the culturally explosive moments of punk and post-punk. The anarchic creative energy of the time forged the spirit of her early music, performance, publishing and visual art. Among her best known works from that period is a collage of found images taken from pornographic and household magazines that featured as the cover for band Buzzcocks single ‘Orgasm Addict’, an iconic image of the era and an apt forerunner to the concerns of her increasingly complex and sophisticated works since.

Linder herself is at the centre of many of her works, whether as the subject of self-portraits that play with notions of personal invention, or in musical and choreographed performances. Founder of the post-punk music group ‘Ludus’, Linder infamously performed through the early 1980s at venues such as the Haçienda nightclub, and since then has done numerous performances in galleries and museums that test conventions of taste and audience participation. Fusing capitalism, sexuality, violence, feminism, desire, morbidity and hope, Linder’s unique subversive language across all media has perhaps only gained in biting currency in the media-saturated climate of today.

Over the past three decades, Linder’s work has been shown at numerous museums and galleries worldwide, including in recent years at the Musée d’Art Moderne De La Ville de Paris, Kunstverein Munich, Germany, the ICA, London, the Barbican, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA, Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria and Tate Britain, London.