Life is more interesting when the carpet doesn’t match the curtains. And blocking out the light in the top floor flat of Raven Row are dark drapes created by artist Martine Syms, decorated in kaleidoscopic motifs of arses and underwear. Behind it, a 360-degree video installation plays out an improvised monologue inspired by Syms’s great aunt. It all takes place in a residential flat reminiscent of a 1965 ‘Coronation Street’ set, where patterned wallpaper and leafy floor designs scream at one another through muddy shades of brown and green.
The space is rarely accessible to the public, but the doors have been flung open for ‘56 Artillery Lane’, an exhibition with a feminist gaze that swallows the idea of ‘home’, digests it, and projectile vomits the concept across Raven Row’s five floors in conflicting forms, featuring installations from 14 different artists. Start in this musty tower and work your way down the Huguenot building, allowing yourself to stumble into video art like ‘Poison the Cure’ by Jenna Bliss, an oblique 25-minute look at birth control trials on Puerto Rican women. Relive a 1974 feminist squat exhibition ‘A Woman’s Place’ by SLAG (South London Art Group) using a well-researched, print magazine for the audience to keep, and find physical paintings from SLAG member Kate Walker just around the corner. It doesn’t always come off (cue the inclusion of a dowdy Stanley Spencer painting, which rests beside copper painted furniture, oxidized with piss) but the incongruity breeds excitement. Every step brings another non-sequitur: the art comes from different decades, different cultural viewpoints. It has the uncaged, DIY feel of the Spare Rib era, when feminist issues weren’t treated as a monolith for handy PR spin. In A Woman’s Place magazine, Kate Walker is quoted on feminist art saying, ‘We must invent it as we go along. Here is a start, please carry on.’ Raven Row is carrying on, knowing that there will never be a consensus, and that the curtains will never match the carpet.