IN COLLABORATION WITH COB GALLERY: PISSING WOMEN

In 1995, against the backdrop of a newly corporatised and surveilled London, Pissing Women transformed the city into a stage for feminist defiance. Dressed in sober office wear, Rickett and her two collaborators performed acts of public urination across the capital’s zones of power: outside MI6 on Vauxhall Bridge, within the financial heart of the City, and in the post-industrial landscape of Silvertown. Each of these “hero” images engages with a site emblematic of male hierarchy and authority — Vauxhall Bridge speaks to power, the City to finance, and Silvertown to communication. Turning an act usually hidden into a reclamation of visibility, territory, and agency, the work directly confronted the spatial and symbolic structures that shape who is seen, and on what terms. There was no artifice, no staged illusion; the gestures were direct, physical, and unapologetically transgressive.

Through these interventions, Rickett confronted the codes of behaviour that govern who may occupy public space, and how. The resulting images are not mere documents of rebellion but meditations on power, control, and the spectacle of the female body in the urban night. Pissing Women collapses the boundaries between performance, protest, and portraiture, capturing the charged energy of a city poised between liberation and surveillance. First exhibited in the late 1990s, Pissing Women remains one of the most provocative and incisive feminist projects of its era.

Presented now in Paris, a city equally shaped by its own histories of protest, visibility, and the politics of public space, the work takes on renewed significance. In the context of Paris Photo 2025, and amid the city’s ongoing dialogue between tradition and transformation, Rickett’s images invite reflection on how bodies, especially women’s bodies, continue to negotiate visibility, power, and belonging within contemporary urban life.

Thirty years on, and far beyond the streets of London, these photographs remain startlingly urgent. They remind us that the right to occupy space, messily, bodily, and without apology, endures as both a political and a poetic act.