Sarabande reframes femininity for International Women's Day
At the London art foundation, three artists-in-residence slash taboos and rethink the significance of inhabiting a female body

For Camilla Hanney, Shannon Bono and Paloma Tendero, a residency at the Sarabande Foundation has meant the opportunity to deepen their individual perspectives on womanhood and femininity. A sculptor, a multimedia painter and a performative image-maker, this particular constellation is formed at the Sarabande Foundation, Alexander McQueen’s legacy to the creative world. For International Women’s Day, they present their first exhibition together, ‘Live Flesh’.
One quickly gathers that the exhibition is carnal, definitively disruptive and a little voyeuristic. ‘Live Flesh’ sees the female form take centre stage: often nude, sometimes disembodied, other times crossbred with seemingly unrelated forms, like a broomstick or an oyster.
Camilla Hanney, Domestic Pleasure, 2019, Broomstick, hair.
All three women look to employ ‘violence, brutality, illness; narratives around the physical past and present’ explains exhibition curator, Charlotte Jansen. The artists bend and morph the female form in order to understand it, each dissecting and amalgamating in a way that calls to mind the work of a scientist or Mary Shelley.
Camilla Hanney’s sculptures give her the ‘freedom of form’ to subvert the constraint and demonisation of female sexuality, claiming back the power of female reproduction and desire. Hanney’s approach to femininity is willful and salacious. In discourse with her own Irish Catholic experience, her disturbing hybrid pieces are intended to ‘celebrate the more unruly aspects of the maternal body’. Her work is both humorous and hideous and blurs the boundaries between human and animal.
Shannon Bono, Wetin you de look?, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas.
Shannon Bono’s paintings use the black female body as a ‘second canvas’ and are a reaction against the limiting cultural narratives that currently contextualise the black female experience. Her multilayered motifs and use of traditional African textile print can be read through the bodies of the figures in her work – faint but still traceable. Establishing her work in a tradition of ‘artivism’, she demonstrates how cultural history is inevitably codified on the body. Bono’s work reconstructs the gaze to include and reflect the viewer.
Paloma Tendero, On Mutability Series, 2020, C-Type Colour Photograph.
Paloma Tendero, whose work establishes appendages on her own body, explores the genetic materiality of womanhood. Her self-portraits are both performative and sculptural, using her body as a base to build upon. Tendero’s images seek to decrypt inherited mysteries and retrieve lost histories, creating a visual language for biological determinism versus self-will. ‘Clothed’ in papier-mâché eggs, the naked body in her work feels fragile and vulnerable.
Paloma Tendero, Flawed Beauty Series, 2016, C-Type Photograph.
As she curates, Jansen is mindful that ‘Live Flesh’ isn’t an exploitative International Women’s Day venture of needless consumerism. She reflects instead on how to ‘challenge the status quo and push real-life change’. For the Sarabande Foundation, the event is another potent way to provide an open forum for creative minds to examine and confront contemporary issues.
Shannon Bono, Untitled, 2020, oil and acrylic on dyed canvas.
Pillow Talk i & ii, 2020, cast plaster, white flock. Photography courtesy of The Sarabande Foundation
INFORMATION
A panel talk for International Women’s Day will be held at the Sarabande Foundation on Sunday 8 March. For more information, visit sarabandefoundation.org
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
’Live Flesh’, 4 - 8 March, Sarabande Foundation.
ADDRESS
Sarabande Foundation
22 Hertford Road
London N1 5SH
-
A 432 Park Avenue apartment is an art-filled family home among the clouds
At 432 Park Avenue, inside and outside compete for starring roles; welcome to a skyscraping, art-filled apartment in Midtown Manhattan
-
Kitchen Trends 2026: luminosity, colour, and unexpected materiality
These are kitchen trends shaping interior design in 2026, from collaborative kitchens to warm luminosity
-
A gallery in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales showcases work inspired by nature
Thorns Gallery opens in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, with founders Jonathan Reed and Graeme Black aiming to showcase artworks inspired by the natural world
-
Shop the gloriously mad inner workings of Gary Card’s brain in London’s Soho
Set designer and artist Gary Card has taken over London's Plaster Store – expect chaos and some really good accessories
-
Meet the New York-based artists destabilising the boundaries of society
A new show in London presents seven young New York-based artists who are pushing against the borders between refined aesthetics and primal materiality
-
Leila Bartell’s cloudscapes are breezily distorted, a response to an evermore digital world
‘Memory Fields’ is the London-based artist’s solo exhibition at Tristan Hoare Gallery (until 25 July 2025)
-
A bespoke 40m mixed-media dragon is the centrepiece of Glastonbury’s new chill-out area
New for 2025 is Dragon's Tail – a space to offer some calm within Glastonbury’s late-night area with artwork by Edgar Phillips at its heart
-
Emerging artist Kasia Wozniak’s traditional photography techniques make for ethereal images
Wozniak’s photographs, taken with a 19th-century Gandolfi camera, are currently on show at Incubator, London
-
Vincent Van Gogh and Anselm Kiefer are in rich and intimate dialogue at the Royal Academy of Arts
German artist Anselm Kiefer has paid tribute to Van Gogh throughout his career. When their work is viewed together, a rich relationship is revealed
-
Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse delve into art’s ‘uckiness’ at The Courtauld
New exhibition ‘Abstract Erotic’ (until 14 September 2025) sees artists experiment with the grotesque
-
What is recycling good for, asks Mika Rottenberg at Hauser & Wirth Menorca
US-based artist Mika Rottenberg rethinks the possibilities of rubbish in a colourful exhibition, spanning films, drawings and eerily anthropomorphic lamps