SESSION: Beyond Barbie: Queer, Crip, Feminist and Anti-Racist Approaches to Pink

In the widely declared Year of Pink, thanks to the release of Barbie (2023), Pope.L expanded his iterative performance Eating the Wall Street Journal into Hospital at South London Gallery, an installation of ruined interiors with broken wooden towers, fragments of bathroom suites, and mystery liquids in misshapen glass containers. The walls of the main gallery were painted a pale pink as a nod to the influential experiments of psychologist Alexander Schauss with prison inmates in the US, mostly black men, whose physical strength and aggression were reportedly diminished through exposure a vibrant pink. Hospital evokes two additional dimensions of this celebrated and maligned mixed colour. Firstly, the prevalent assumption of global minority European complexions as the universal skin colour, from highly consequential medical guidelines to the white supremacist trope of visible blushing (‘blood in the face’) as an indicator of morality, whose mainstream application persists in heteropatriarchal gender norms. And secondly, pink as the (imagined) colour of the body’s interior, which highlights its penetrability and vulnerability, as in Pio Abad’s series of etchings on pink marble Giolo’s Lament (2023), re-rendering the hand of a tattooed enslaved Miangas islander whose skin was partially removed post-mortem and preserved for the Anatomy School collections at Oxford University. This session brings together contributions that nuance and/or resist celebratory approaches to pink as the colour through which women and femmes are addressed as consumers, foregrounding queer, crip, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial approaches.

Session Convenor:

Alexandra Kokoli, Middlesex University & VIAD Research Centre, University of Johannesburg

Speakers:

Elisabetta Garletti, University of Cambridge

Pink Defacing: Chromatic Politics in Monumental Protests

This paper examines the recurrent deployment of pink in the defacement and re-dressing of monuments across Europe, North America and Australia, proposing that pink operates as a chromatic strategy of dissent that disrupts colonial and patriarchal hierarchies in the public space. Historically dismissed as frivolous or feminised, pink has nonetheless been persistently used in feminist and queer activism, from the ACT UP “Silence = Death” triangle to the Pink Dot movement in Singapore, demonstrating its affective potency as a
colour of social mobilisation and revolt.

Building on David Batchelor’s Chromophobia (2000) and its diagnosis of Western chromatic anxiety as a fear of the feminine and racialised ‘other,’ this paper reads pink as a tactical contamination of the monumental. Case studies include the pink defacement of
monuments such as those of Sir John A. Macdonald (Toronto, 2020), Queen Victoria (Guernsey, 2024), and Jefferson Davis (Richmond, 2020), alongside Cigdem Aydemir’sPlastic Histories (2013). These vernacular gestures are examined alongside Cigdem
Aydemir’s Plastic Histories (2013), a series of public interventions in which Hobart’s colonial statues were wrapped in blush-pink plastic to ‘queer,’ in the artist’s own words, their authority.

By foregrounding pink’s associations with embodiment and fleshiness, I argue that these chromatic interventions destabilise the masculinised solidity of stone and bronze, reinscribing monuments within the corporeal and affective economies they seek to By foregrounding pink’s associations with embodiment and fleshiness, I argue that these chromatic interventions destabilise the masculinised solidity of stone and bronze, reinscribing monuments within the corporeal and affective economies they seek to that unsettles the visual grammars of power through which patriarchal and colonial public memory is maintained.

Paula Chambers, Leeds Arts University

Powder Pink: Faded Femininity and the Embodiment of Aging

In 2024 I made three sculptural works whose colour palette was predominately pink. Ranging from a satiny salmon pink more closely aligned to the fripperies of girlhood, through to a much paler, grubbier pink; peachy but tinged with beige, these are shades of pink you might expect to encounter in an old lady’s bedroom.

This paper investigates this washed-out shade of pink through the analysis of my sculptural works Jump, Last Bus Home, and Bad Faith, created as materialisations of my embodied experience of inhabiting an aging female body. Analysed in relation to sculptural works by other women artists who also strategically employ the use of the colour pink to reference the women’s embodied alignment with the feminised objects and spaces of home. Feliza Bursztyn’s (1972) Las Camas: Construcción en Movimiento, Eva Fàbregas’(2019) Pumping, Rachel Harrison’s (2004) General Challenge, and Phyllida Barlow’s (2018) Untitled: Pinkspree.

Early colour theorists proposed pink as a corrupted colour, impure and weak. A passive and weak form of red, pink was seen as a deceptive colour often associated with seduction, contagion and foreignness. Penny Sparke (1995) identified pink as a consumer colour associated with the 1950s when the material culture of domestic modernity was overwhelmingly feminine. In the ensuing decades, pink became associated with the homes of our grandmothers. As the colour faded with time, it became old-lady pink. Through the analysis of sculpture, I propose to trouble these cultural and historical associations of pink as a reclamation of older women’s embodied being-in-the-world.

SaeHim Park, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Testimonial Pink: Roh Seung Bok’s 1366 Project and the Digital Colour of Domestic Violence

IRoh Seung Bok’s 1366 Project (2003-2007) reclaims the colour pink from its commercial and gendered associations, deploying a bright, digital pink to articulate hidden trauma. The work’s abstract, thermographic aesthetic derives from the artist’s process of zooming in and digitally reconstructing photographs of domestic violence survivors’ scars. The title “1366” refers to South Korea’s Women’s Emergency Hotline, grounding this use of pink in a framework of crisis and testimony.

This paper positions Roh’s work as a critical, feminist antecedent to contemporary pink discourse. Her use of the colour resonates with the CFP’s interest in pink as the “colour of the body’s interior” and explores how pink becomes a testimonial medium. The vibrant, almost haunting palette visualizes the ethical challenges of representing internalized and often unpunishable violence that remains beneath the skin or hidden from view. Unlike Alexander Schauss’s pacifying pink, Roh’s is one of urgent witness; it does not suppress aggression but bears visual testimony to that inflicted upon women’s bodies.

Created between 2003 and 2007, the project pre-emptively resists celebratory pink consumerism by linking the colour to institutional memory and activist praxis. By analysing Roh’s strategic aesthetic, this paper offers an anti-patriarchal and feminist approach to pink that foregrounds its capacity to encode trauma, challenge visual regimes of evidence, and serve as a colour of collective testimony.

Matthew Cheale, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Paul Thek’s Pink Triangle: Towards a Queer Resistance

The American artist Paul Thek’s departure from the US in 1967 left behind numerous pink objects from a body of work entitled Technological Reliquaries (1966–67), of which he exhibited in New York in 1967. While recent studies have analysed many of these sculptures as instantiations of minimalist defection and countercultural sensibility, my paper focuses on one of the exhibited works that has all but vanished from the art historical record: a small triangular relief titled Tribute to L.B.J. (1967). Thin chrome frames enclose drawn phalluses and inhabit a candy-pink frame. I trace the link Thek’s choice of colour establishes between queer camp sensibility and politics; to see the pink triangle as a reference to the fabric patch gay men had to wear in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and as a queer activist symbol framing the relief. Despite being associated with hippiedom and femininity, Thek’s pink has yet to be evaluated in terms of queer resistance and memorialisation. Linking the colour to his politics is both illuminating and complex. By bringing the symbol of homophobic violence to a country responsible for similar persecutions under the Lavender Scare, Thek reveals a more foreboding sense of transnational memory. At the same time, via the initials LBJ as an irreverent attack on Lyndon B. Johnson, Thek points to the intersection of American imperialism and anti-queer rhetoric. This paper thus argues that Thek’s pink sculpture confronts this history of oppression and pays homage to these moments of multidimensional queer formation.