Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling
ph: Mark Blower
Staring into the face of a beguiled man, a woman gouges her eyes out with a fork.
Such is the opening of Linder Sterling’s retrospective at the Hayward. A multi-disciplinary look at the artist’s 50-year career, Linder’s oeuvre is a timeless warning against the danger of the male gaze – one that remains strikingly relevant in an age of AI girlfriends, tradwives and revenge porn.
Employing everything from sculpture, video, to Linder’s iconic photomontage, her distinctive approach keeps each room, each passing decade, surprisingly fresh. Charting course from 2D photomontage to 3D sculpture, the evolution of Linder’s practice sees her graduate from photography to ballet costumes, glass installation, and a pair of high heels with flowing blonde hair.
Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling
ph: Mark Blower
The exhibition begins in the 1970s, where Linder’s photomontage focuses on the domestic sphere, reflecting the feminist frontiers of the time. Female torsos are cooked in pots, boiled in the room of their subjugation. We treat images of women – and therefore women themselves – as a commodity to be bought and sold. Her flagship 1977 ‘It’s the Buzz, Cock!’ (here imposingly displayed in a floor to ceiling lightbox), gives an iron face to the increasingly intimate relationship between woman and machine. Today, women are marketed machines that zap, burn and stretch the skin, machines that mould the ideal body (from reformer Pilates, to Pelotons, to inescapable treadmills under your desk) – even machines that deepfake you having sex.
Those machines were made to edit and adjust, as Linder does in her photomontage. As Szarkowski states in The Photographer’s Eye, ‘the central act of photography [is] the act of choosing and eliminating.’ A photograph is characterised in equal measure by what is left out of the frame than what is included. In her most contemporary photomontage, as feminism faces an increasingly borderless struggle, Linder departs from the scene of domestic life in favour of atemporal backdrops, like the fiery sunset of Linder, The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time (2025). Her adjustments seek to undermine the prevailing patriarchal hegemony by highlighting its presence – by shifting the lines that decide ‘in from out.’
Linder at the Hayward Gallery,
ph: Hazel Gaskin
Working with advertising and pornographic imagery, Linder edits the contents of the frame, rather than the frame itself. Her deliberate exclusion of female faces (at its most prolific in Pretty Girls, 1977, where binoculars, Hoovers and TV sets sit atop nude female bodies) highlights the sublimation of female identity and personhood in the face of sexualisation. Her practice mirrors those of the media industry itself, selling the image of an ideal woman concocted from an assortment of female bodies, all combined to create a purposefully unachievable outcome. Photomontage acts as an early predecessor to the professional tools of airbrush and Photoshop, or the amateur facial filters of TikTok or Snapchat. Linder disrupts the internal composition (and therefore the intended effect of the photograph) by overriding its key feature – the face. Her edits demonstrate that – like the items she pastes in – women are objects to be consumed, to be bought. They are handy tools to make life easier and more enjoyable (particularly when compared to her untouched, intimate photography of working-class drag queen culture).
Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling
ph: Mark Blower
That agency extends to us. Walking through the exhibition, Linder’s work provokes a point of realisation. Who are the women performing for? As they arch and contort their bodies, as those (who have their heads intact) stare out at us, there is a sudden consciousness of being the viewer, of being complicit in the same structures the work undermines. The phrase Private Collection summons the capitalist eyes of private ownership, the blue tufted eyeballs of Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes (2015) accusatorily look out from their central spiral at the photomontage on the surrounding walls.
Over the course of her career, Linder has moved from reclaiming bodies to creating her own method of perception – this time the faces remain, but the bodies are gone. Replaced by flowers and owls in The Pool of Life (2021), or by the stony faces of male statues of Oedipus (2022) and It was flesh! (2022), Linder’s most recent work highlights women’s own internalisation of the male gaze. Displayed in the penultimate room of the exhibition, the triptych Danse Sacrale (L'Élue), Action Rituelle des Ancêtres and Glorification de l'Élue (2011) is a stark contrast to the seductive temptresses in Linder’s early photomontage. The thick and gloopy act of sploshing arouses a feeling of disgust – disgust at the sight of a female body with agency, a female body escaping its shackles. The evolution of Linder’s body of work, here shown in full, is one that roots out our own biases, our own expectation of ourselves.
Installation view of Linder: Danger Came Smiling
ph: Mark Blower
Thank you to the Southbank Centre press team for providing the photography for this article.
The exhibition is on at the Southbank Centre from
11 February to 5 May 2025 at the Hayward Gallery.
More information here.
