Nov 4-6 / 2022
OXO Tower Wharf, London
Opening Nov 3 / 2022
Cluster Contemporary is pleased to present the solo exhibition Right to Rage with a series of new works by British-Russian visual artist Tribambuka. Right to Rage embraces women’s anger as a cathartic and emancipatory force. Female anger in particular is traditionally embedded into patriarchal social narratives as a destructive and dangerous power that needs to be pacified and sublimated. Tribambuka instead makes us reconsider women’s rage as a sign of the violation of boundaries, a reaction to injustice and threat and to things that went wrong in the world, and a “dark” power to be unleashed and reckoned with.
The narrative and imagery around women’s virtues and identities have historically been determined by the dominant perspective of the male gaze and forced into reductive categorical archetypes. Yet women have always sought to challenge this fraught status-quo and to create new imagery and definitions around their identity - be it through literature, art, labour or protest. Female (in its inclusive, not exclusively cis-gender sense) anger is a crucial, progressive force within this historical movement of resistance; and the main focus of Tribambuka's new series of paintings and works on paper. The artist’s works mix a range of influences from myths, fairy-tales, Jungian archetypes and dreams with feminist history and current socio-political references. Her figurative style is influenced by 20th century movements such as Russian Avant-Garde, Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism, albeit with what she calls a “feminist pop-folk” twist and the revolutionary flavour of the swinging 60s.
As an artist of Russian descent, whose work revolves heavily around the concept of belonging and shifting identities, the current ongoing war initiated by the country she used to call home has had a drastic effect on Tribambuka’s practice and her approach to this particular body of work. The horrors suffered by women in the Russian-Ukrainian war in particular (but all wars historically) struck the artist as a pinnacle of the deep-rooted patriarchal structures of society. Treating women as objectified symbols of the country that has to be conquered, defeated and humiliated reveals how the degrees of misogyny and male violence against women range from the domestic scale up to national warfare. As a response, the artist was driven to embrace the collective rage felt by her and fellow women, and channel it into her artworks. Her pieces trace the central narrative of women’s struggle to reclaim their voices, stories and power back to various archetypal female characters throughout mythology, such as Medusa, Eurinome, Kali, Judith, the Furies. By retelling their stories from an emancipatory, female perspective, Tribambuka creates a new visual vocabulary around femininity, defined by strength, resistance and rage.
Right to Rage is an experiment of looking at anger more closely and welcoming it into shared discourse as a force that can bring balance and amplify the voices of those unheard. Tribambuka views the exhibition as the start of a conversation, inviting the audience to feel empowered by the ‘monstrous’, furious women of history to share their emotions, thoughts and opinions in response.
Right to Rage: Solo Exhibition by Tribambuka
part of Cluster Contemporary 2022 Fair
3-6 November 2022
OXO Tower London
Barge House Street, SE1 9PH, London
Panel Discussion SheSays x Cluster x tribambuka
'Fierce women: The power of female rage at work and beyond'
4 November 7PM
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