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As an outsider, you can imaginie the gifts that sex workers are given by clients; Champagne, flowers, sex toys and lingerie all make the list. Marks & Spencer’s jam, however, doesn’t come to mind. Neither does a Twinings tea gift box, a Mizuno golf visor or a history book. But Red Gallery’s ‘Objects of Desire’ exhibition proves these preconceptions wrong. The exhibition presents a curated selection of presents given to London’s sex workers by the people who pay pay for their services. Each item is presented alongside it’s origin story, which is written in the words of the sex worker who donated it. Overall, the exhibition reveals more about their world than any debate about the legality, morality and safety of their job.
It’s the stories behind the objects that make the exhibition so powerful. Some are funny: the history book, for example, was bought for one worker after her boyfriend accidentally put it on her Amazon Wishlist. Others display some clients’ need to involve the worker in their fantasy world by providing them with almost a fancy dress box of BDSM-wear or the literature and music their dream girl would listen to. It means a Sybian sex machine gifted by a widower whose dead wife loved riding it sits metres from an album of a client’s own music. Walking around, it’s clear that clients use the gifts to project fantasies onto the sex workers and to prove their relationship are more than just transactional, but it also reveals how difficult it is for sex workers to keep their personal and business lives separate. These gifts often blur that line. In fact, most interestingly of all, the exhibition space itself has been funded by a client, making it as much of an ‘Object of Desire’ as the stuff exhibited in it