These photographs are part of series that tell stories of twelve women who found themselves at different points in their life at time when they refused to leave. Many were rejected by their partners, landlords, employers or they have been denied by the state. The burden of these rejections caused them to escape into fantasy. Some of them did not find suitors or refused to marry for the sake of status, so they opted for equally stable, rooted and good looking ‘Queen’s subjects’ – lamp post, tree, traffic sign – London landmarks…
I encountered this group of women in 2007. I wanted to capture them on photographs, but their dramatic life stories needed to be reflected differently than in documentary reportage and media where they are usually portrayed as victims – battered, bruised or crying, surrounded by poverty and children.
The project took place at and around the Migrants Resource Centre (MRC) and my home. The women are from various countries – Iran, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Iraq, Ethiopia, Bosnia, Turkey, Eritrea, Rwanda, Kurdistan, Lebanon and the UK… They were posing as on a fashion shoot, providing a touch of glamour rather than of a dreary everyday with the troubles they have to encounter – queuing for food vouchers, immigration control, bad press…
Wedding dresses are surrounded by other wedding iconography, but the image is not a joke – it is an event of desperation and illusion shot as on a true wedding ceremony. The paradox of this loss of reality due to pressure of life circumstances questions the situation the women are in – is it real or is it imaginary – a concept shared by the audience and by the person in the picture.
A bunch of brides hugging the street objects is not a wedding anyone thinks of as real, but it provides a neighbourhood spectacle and encourages debate about the impact of borders on human relationships and social changes of the areas we live in.
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the Artist
Mining agreement: III-5-192/06.09.2022.
Inventory no: 167
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Nela Milic (1974) is an artist and an academic working in media and arts and Senior Lecturer and Contextual and Theoretical Studies Coordinator in the Design School at London College of Communication. Throughout her career, Nela has delivered creative projects for organisations including the Royal Opera House, Barbican, Arts Council England, John Lewis, Al Jazeera, Campbell Works, Oxo Tower, LIFT, and London Film Festival. Nela is interested in the intersection of time and space, which has brought her to many multi-media and mapping projects where she’s dealt with memory, narrative, digital archives, city and participation. Between 2003 and 2006, Nela ran Refugees and the Arts Initiative – a British national organisation for the ‘refugee arts’. She is a recipient of the European Cultural Foundation Artistic Grant for the project Wedding Bellas and her work has been displayed at the Olympic stadium in London. Nela developed the project ‘Balkanising Taxonomy’ for her PhD where she researched the city as a site of spectacle and the culture of protest. She continues working on art and public space in Belgrade through Kulturklammer, centre for cultural interactions. She won Southwark community arts award for her project Here Comes Everybody in 2015, which she wrote about in the book Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape (2017). She conducted research for Gulbenkian Foundation about participatory art, Greater London Authority about creative responses to COVID-19 and worked on the project TimeCase: Memory in Action with a Grundtvig grant. She has been funded by Association of Art Historians and British Society of Aesthetics for research projects about the sculptor Olga Jevric and inauguration of Postsocialism and Art research platform at UAL. She is na Associate of TrAIN research centre and Social Design Institute. She is a reviewer of UCL Press, Palgrave MacMillan, the Journal for Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Memory Studies Journal, Studia Politica and Feminist Review. She is a co-chair of Art and Memory Working Group of Memory Studies Association (MSA) and a member of Community for Artistic and Architectural Research (CA²RE). She evaluates EU COST network applications in humanities and is a consultant for the Science Fund of Republic of Serbia. Nela is part of the AHRC funded Peace and Conflict Cultural Network and Arts and Reconciliation research project for which she has created an installation Text Illuminations. She is a member of Space and Place and Design Activism research hubs. Nela is co-editor of a Special Issue of the Journal of Organisational Aesthetics about London Design Festival at LCC and is on editorial board of the Journal of Arts and Communities. Nela is a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy. She is part of PhD supervisory teams. She has acted as an external examiner at UNSW, Sydney and UPV/EHU and is a member of Care2Care.