Bio
ITZIAR BILBAO URRUTIA
Itziar Bilbao Urrutia is an artist, pornographer, and activist based in London. She is the creator of ‘The Urban Chick Supremacy Cell’, a dystopian femdom fetish porn project inspired by Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, Andrea Dworkin and Ulrike Meinhof. Her work operates outside the magic circle of contemporary art and goes straight into the adult consumer. As a radical feminist who is also a porn performer and producer, her practice draws its ideas from these apparently irreconcilable views of women’s bodily autonomy. Urrutia also writes about the history and censorship of female sexuality.
TALK PARTICIPANTS
MISHA MAYFAIR
Misha Mayfair is a sex worker and artist involved in porn, art, and activism. Whilst still a student, she started a union for student sex workers at Goldsmiths since they were receiving little support or recognition. She has organised art shows for and by sex workers and has co-hosted the film festival ‘Alien Sex Tapes’ in the last porn cinema of Paris, exhibiting ‘taboo’ porn and video art that is otherwise too risqué to screen. She tries to use her voice to speak out about sex work issues with the aim of humanising the ‘bad women’. Her own art practice deals with the psychology/psyche and physical process of being a ‘bad woman’.
MYLES JACKMAN
Myles Jackman is Britain’s leading obscenity lawyer. Jackman has dedicated his career to challenging the legal framework by which sexual morality is constrained through activism, litigation and advocacy, campaigning for the recognition and rights of the BDSM, LGBTQ, Adult-Industry and Sex-Work communities, and lobbying for privacy and freedom of sexual expression for all consenting adults.
Talk
Urrutia will present to UNCENSORED the talk Yes, but is it porn? In the outer reaches of sex: fetish and obscenity. Since February 2019, it is legal to watch, possess and distribute images of consensual sex acts between adults that, until recently, were illegal to view (but not necessarily to perform). These so-called ‘extreme porn’, included fisting, facesitting, female ejaculation and activities that might leave marks or harm that is not transitory. From April 2019, however, all adults in the UK wishing to watch porn online will have to give their personal details to a governmental database under the Age Verification Act. One step forward on one side is ten steps backward on the other side. So where are we? And why, asks Urrutia and her guests at this screening and round table, is female or queer produced/performed porn disproportionately discriminated in legislation? What’s behind this compulsory ‘coming out’ expected of porn users? What is extreme porn? What is obscene? And why does it victimise female and queer subjects, while demonising porn users, largely (and falsely) characterised as male? Sex on the outer reaches can be a radical act, a threat to ordinary life and the status quo. In this time of post-truth and post-politics, sexuality is again a danger to a decaying sense of a society where new forms of community emerge but surveillance and data mining rule our lives.
The talk will also involve two experts in pornography and censorship to discuss the recent and forthcoming changes in the UK legislation.
SATURDAY 18 MAY: 19.30 – 21.30 @The Yard Theatre
