Sex Workers of Aotearoa: A Day in the Life of

Sex work­ers and artists have gone hand in hand for hun­dreds if not thou­sands of years.  Think of basi­cal­ly near­ly every nude woman in a clas­sic paint­ing by a white dude, or Moulin Rouge, or ‘Vic­to­ria’ or count­less oth­er exam­ples and you get the idea. Oh sure, they’re mus­es. But what if we did­n’t cen­tre their expe­ri­ence through the male gaze? What if we actu­al­ly looked at art by the sex work­ers, not just about them?

Sex Work­ers of Aotearoa: A Day in the Life of asks what are our pre-con­ceived notions of sex work­ers’ lives.

This exhi­bi­tion is about sex work­ers them­selves as image mak­ers, as objects mak­ers, sound artists, poets and per­for­mance artists; it is about the sex in sex work but is also about the unseen labour involved in being paid for ‘sex’. Through art the sub­tleties of the pro­fes­sion will be explored; bound­aries, con­nec­tions, plea­sures and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, stig­ma and stereo­types, bod­ies and the val­ues we place on them.

This exhi­bi­tion is an inter­ro­ga­tion into the way sex work­ers are seen, and val­ued, with­in both a fine art and wider social con­text. Above all, it is a refusal to occu­py just one kind of rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al lane.

Many pieces will be for sale, with a per­cent­age of the pro­ceeds going to The New Zealand Pros­ti­tutes Col­lec­tive.

Check it out at the Welling­ton Muse­um from July 4–25.