Combining art history with sex worker movement history, this workshop will discuss why certain images are so powerful, how they perform this power, and the essential roles they serve in conveying messages of resistance, and in rallying together communities. Art and protest have always gone hand in hand – but what exactly is it that creates an effective visual campaign?

We will look at art that displays resistance in their contents, and also how they function. Understood as a form of soft power, we will unpick, bit by bit, not only the visual language of political messaging, but also the way these works are displayed, shared, distributed and consumed. Afterwards, participants are encouraged to take this new knowledge into the badge making workshop.

Chaoying Rao aka Femme Castratrice is Glasgow-based visual artist, and whose creative practice explores the weaponisation of desire under patriarchy and western myth-making structures about the orient. Her research materialises in photography, live art, moving image, sculpture, and installation. She found herself working in strip clubs from the age of seventeen. It became the place where her movement and performance practice were born and, in the many years that followed, honed. It was the prompt for her interest in how power is negotiated through the body, through images of the body, and in the histories and legacies of racial fetishisation. Often using humour as a tool to disarm and charm the viewer, her work utilises the visual tropes of misogyny, abject femininity, and the grotesque to play with that fine line between attraction and repulsion.