Whor3s Forever, 2023
Curated by Katie Winten
Firstdraft
Pleasers, body stockings, diamontes, impulse body spray. Condoms, dental dams, black gloves, dildos. Foot worship. Worship us. Sluts snacking. Sluts are bored. It’s labour, it’s hard, you’re hard and we like it if you’re paying. We want it bad. Hookers against ankle monitors. Hookers near you want dead cops now! Hot, kinky pros want their passionate rights by night. Decriminalisation makes us wet! If you like steamy consensual encounters, help us realise our naughty fantasies today and abolish the state! While the system sets an example of our punishment, we speak to each other in symbols, in codes, through our perfect set of pointy acrylic nails. We spot each other in elevators, in hotels, carrying piles of towels. Our roller bags roar down city streets and we clock each other in all those spots where you know you can pick up a client. We create our own identity. Legacies of stripper-spite re-invented as High Art. Dumb baby. Mommy. Spin me. I’m waiting. Don’t be shocked, be impressed.
Wh0r3s 4eva is an exhibition of experimental art by sex workers and allies. Responding to the frequent erasure, censorship and deplatforming of sex workers, this exhibition celebrates the creativity, innovation and perseverance of sex workers who continue to make work both online and offline. Wh0r3s 4eva includes emerging and established artists who are showing work on instagram, in alleyways, in film festivals, in museums and galleries across the world, in zines and on Onlyfans.
Wh0r3s 4eva references sex workers who find secretive ways to communicate with community, in encrypted language to circumvent censorship. Sex workers continue to find inventive and creative ways of advertising, sharing information and staying safe as doors to digital connection shut in our faces on the internet we built.
This exhibition is about complicating the reductive sex worker narratives that dominate popular culture, and about challenging the pernicious victim/empowered binary. The exhibition does not ask sex workers to make an argument for their existence or legitimacy - sex workers are visual and performance artists, our stories expansive, astute, complicated, devastating, funny and tender.
Like sex workers, this exhibition contains multitudes and gives nothing away for free; Its surface is intentionally intricate and slippery to impede any outsider who tries to pin down sex work as a singular, abridged narrative. It honors the kaleidoscopic verse of sex worker voices.