We’re holding a Garage Sale!

Inspired by the work of Martha Rosler, our Garage Sale – as well as offering some great bargains – challenges the viewer to take a critical look at the second-hand market in the UK, particularly the pricing policy of charity shops as they strive to find new audiences. Come along to find out more. We’re at the top of the escalator in the Eastgate Centre.

Stay tuned for further blog posts and activities around objects and second-hand goods.

Martha Rosler is a feminist artist, theorist, and educator who works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Focusing on public life, her art has explored gender, war, the built environment, and media, often in relation to women.

Appropriated elements of pop culture, such as television and magazine advertisements, are a hallmark of Martha’s work. In her widely recognised 1975 film Semiotics of the Kitchen, which was inspired by cooking programmes of the time, Martha uses satire to express her frustration with the oppressive roles assigned to women in a patriarchal society.

Martha’s Bring the War Home series (c.1967 – 72), created at the peak of the Vietnam War, comprises twenty photomontages that combine images of war from Life magazine with pristine domestic interiors from House Beautiful. These collages offer astute political commentary, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad and bringing the latter into public consciousness; the images were photocopied and distributed among the anti-war community and in ‘underground’ periodicals.

In 1973, Martha held her first Garage Sale – Monumental Garage Sale – at the Art Gallery of the University of California. Clothing, books, toys, and household items were sold alongside personal items such as the artist’s private letters and her son’s baby shoes. The work interrogated the economics of the garage sale and those of the art market at large; locating the sale within a gallery space, Martha probed notions of value and ownership in an arts context.

Martha has published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification. Her work has been shown internationally, and her writing has been published widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst.