Amid the rise of the so-called “manosphere” of rampant online misogyny and pressures to perform palatable womanhood to a global audience via social media, is it time for a resurgence of feminist art? Many would surely say yes. The movement first emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, and many cult favorites have been enjoying renewed popularity in recent years, including Linder. The English artist, now aged 70, is the subject of a short retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, on view through May 5.
Much writing about Linder has focused on her wry photomontages from the 1970s and ’80s, which cut up and reassembled imagery from men’s and women’s magazines so that pornographic scenes were overlaid with domestic appliances that foreground the real drudgery inherent to many women’s lives. Though these works are rightfully celebrated, “Linder: Danger Came Smiling” proves that the artist’s roving eye never stopped eviscerating society in the intervening decades. In fact, her recent works are among her most exciting.
Linder certainly believes her montages, old and new, “seem more vital than ever,” as she said during a recent interview with the Hayward’s director Ralph Rugoff. “You hear about deepfake A.I. and women’s bodies being grafted,” she explained. “The head of a pretty 18-year-old can be grafted onto a pornographic body and sent out into cyberspace. We have very very little control over our images.”
Linder, Linder, The Most Sacred Monster of Photomontage in Her Time (2025) featuring portrait of Linder by Benoît Hennebert. Image courtesy of dépendance, Brussels.
In an attempt to wrest back some control, Linder decided to deepfake herself “before anyone else got to do it” for her two most recent works in the show, including from 2025. A black-and-white headshot of a younger, frowning Linder hovers over a fiery red landscape and a woman’s naked torso. Scissors, a shell, a fork, jewelry, and a snake have been collaged together to make a crown-like headpiece.
The title refers to Salvador Dalí’s (1939), which manipulates the young actress’s image by placing her face onto the body of a sphinx with strangely pert breasts. It has often been read as a commentary on the sexualization of child stars.
Considering the darker possible applications of A.I. to humiliate women is not the only way in which Linder’s work continues to engage with our time. Nearby, (2023) prominently features a portrait by Hazel Gaskin of the former porn star-turned-media personality Mia Khalifa with a snake woven through her crown. It is a fitting tribute by Linder after so many decades spent studying the silent women who fill men’s magazines.
Linder, Did he prefer her to us? (2023). Photo: Hazel Gaskin, courtesy of Modern Art, London.
These days, Khalifa is a vocal advocate for sex workers’ rights and her portrait was taken just after she had spoken at the Oxford Union about how she learned to protect herself in the adult entertainment industry. In another portrait, (2023), her strength is apparent as she wears Linder’s old breastplate, which the artist once used for boxing, a practice she adopted for self-defense.
“[Khalifa has] been taken to hell and back again for one film that she participated in during her early twenties, threatened with death, yet still she stands proud and loud,” Linder said for the exhibition’s catalog. “It was extraordinary working with Mia, witnessing her control of her image within the frame of a photograph and her innate understanding of her body in space.”
One constant in Linder’s work has been her use of what she terms the “scalpel” to dissect her source material before physically piecing together a montage. “When you have Photoshop, it’s quite an eccentric act to still print media and to cut it up and to glue it,” she said. “It’s quite a visceral way of working because of the smell of must in a lot of those magazines, or maybe perfume or pipe smoke.”
Installation view of “Linder: Danger Came Smiling” at the Hayward Gallery in London featuring The Pool of Life (2021). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
One of Linder’s largest ever photomontages, (2021), was recently blown up to become a billboard in the central shopping district of Liverpool to advertise the city’s biennial that year. It is filled with classic Linder motifs, including flowers out of body parts, butterflies, shells, and disembodied lips and eyes. Its name references psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s famous description of Liverpool, although he only ever saw it in his dreams.
The work was “on the front line of of popular culture in the city where I grew up,” mused Linder in the exhibition catalogue. “That work is my love letter to the women and queer communities of Liverpool.” She added: “Goods moved through the city at a tremendous pace, along with ideas, pop music or pilfered swag from the docks, football stars, fashion. And from Liverpool they went out across the country and often across the globe.”
Renewed interest in Linder’s work is proof that feminist art is only becoming more relevant. “When we look at artists’ careers, it can look like a glorious ascent,” remarked Linder, during the recent talk at the Hayward Gallery. “But we know that for various reasons, artists more often become visible, then invisible, then we become visible again. It often just depends on the culture at large, rather than our practice, which we sustain quite faithfully.”
Arguably, the artist’s ideas have only been sharpened over the decades, culminating in even smarter works. “In recent years we have seen the full force that is Linder explode in her depth of research and her realized ambitions that span photography and photomontage, performance, music, fragrance design, and fashion,” commented Linder’s gallerist Tim Blum. “She continues to mine subject matter and explore form—always experimenting, always illuminating new shadows of the collective unconscious with her radical feminist visual lexicon.”
Linder herself took a moment to reflect on the occasion of her retrospective. “The experience of regarding decades of work is quite sublime,” she said. “So many of my generation did not make it to this point.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
