Stream: Sophy Rickett | Rut Blees Luxemburg
Forthcoming exhibition
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Opening & Book Launch 9 September, 6 - 8pm
In 1995, against the backdrop of a newly corporatised and surveilled London, Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women transformed the city into a stage for feminist defiance. Dressed in sober office wear, Rickett and her collaborators performed public urination across the capital’s zones of power, outside MI6, in the shadow of corporate HQ’s at the City’s marble thresholds, turning an act usually hidden into a reclamation of visibility, territory, and agency. There was no artifice, no staged illusion: it was direct, physical, and unapologetically transgressive.
Rut Blees Luxemburg, then working alongside Rickett, turned her lens to the socio-cultural ambience of these performances. This series, titled Chance Encounters, captured Blees Luxemburg and Rickett engaging city workers at night, infiltrating the corporate scene, as counter-agents in a playful yet charged reversal of gaze and agency. Their mutual exchange of roles, performer, photographer, provocateur fuelled a creative synergy that helped shape the irreverent spirit of Pissing Women: “We often worked together, cross-referencing, inspiring each other.”
Blees Luxemburg's nocturnal images distilled the charged stillness of London’s streets once the bodies had gone, making visible the traces, atmospheres, and social currents the act had disturbed. Rickett and Luxemburg first exhibited this work in the late 1990s, in the artist run space Plummet, on the 16th floor of a high-rise off the City Road. Their twin approaches, performative and photographic, feeding into a shared investigation of how women inhabit, claim, and reframe the urban night.
Now, thirty years on, these works return to a city transformed yet still shaped by contested ownership of its public spaces. In an era of privatised streets, proliferating CCTV, and persistent gendered codes of behaviour, Pissing Women and its nocturnal counterpoints remain startlingly urgent. They remind us that the right to occupy space be it messily, bodily and/or without apology- is both a political and a poetic act. London is still the backdrop, but the questions they raise are as much about the present as they are about the past.
For Stream, Cob is pleased to present the three defining images of Rickett’s Pissing Women series alongside a previously unreleased image of Vauxhall Bridge from Rickett's original shoot. Blees Luxemburg contributes two vintage prints from the Chance Encounters series, together with London – A Modern Project, High Rise, a nocturnal view of a London tower block. The photograph has since achieved iconic status as the cover of The Streets debut album, capturing a defining moment in the history of London’s music scene.
The exhibition coincides with CHEERIO’s 2025 publication Pissing Women - featuring essays responding to Rickett’s series from a range of female writers and critics to include Hettie Judah, Patricia Nilsson, Juno Calypso, Holly Blakey, Sophie Fiennes, Eileen Myles, Sophie Duke, Chila Burman, Lily Cole and St Vincent.
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