In the last thirty years or so, traditional hen parties have also involved outlandish costumes, but there’s a residual snobbery about this rite-of-passage. Halls has a longstanding interest in theatre and cabaret (her studio occupies the saloon bar of a former 1930s London theatre, now a Bingo Hall) and she works from photographs, her models abetting the creation of scenarios that lend themselves to multiple narratives. Similarly, Dada was renowned for the puppets of textile artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, for its now legendary 1916 event at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich where Hugo Ball was carried on stage because blue cardboard tubes restricted his legs and torso and a red-lined gold cardboard cape his upper body. The 1929 Metal Party: guests wearing tin foil clothes and spoons. Photos give a hint of the innovative costumes. It also had the role of organising the school’s parties and when the Bauhaus was based in the industrial and conservative town of Weimar, local inhabitants were shocked by the antics of these bohemian students.
came together to collaborate on productions. Under the direction of Oskar Schlemmer, the theatre workshop at the Bauhaus was where students from painting, sculpture, textiles etc. And even if the cohort remained mostly (three-quarters) male, and Walter Gropius, one of its directors, expressed the belief that women were only able to think in two dimensions rather than three, women thrived there, as is evidenced by the successes of Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, and others. Unlike many art schools at the time, the experimental Bauhaus welcomed women from its inception in 1919. Halls describes the scene as ‘a kind of Bauhaus/Dadaist hen party,’ this description in itself a neat collision of popular culture and fine art.
It’s a bittersweet painting for her as the central figure of a black woman, Michelle, has since died of breast cancer. In Laughing While Marauding the models were once Halls’ students, one of her first groups in fact, to whom she has remained close over the years. The painting belongs to one of Halls’ most renowned series, ‘Laughing While…’ (2012 onwards) in which she referenced the writings of French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, particularly Cixous’s essay ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ (University of Chicago Press, 1981), claiming ‘for me écriture féminine is most alluring as an enduring provocation.’ These acts of provocation might appear as commonplace as laughing, eating, talking, and so on, but the point is that even such actions can become subversive when they are censured or performed in “inappropriate” contexts. Roxana Halls’ Laughing While Marauding, 2020 (oil on linen, 90 X 120 cm) captures the rebellious spirit of collaboration and collusion which marks InFems’s inaugural exhibition Biting Back And Enjoying The Taste.