The Showroom presents Slits are Girls, a new commission by artist, Ângela Ferreira (born Mozambique, based in Lisbon).

Ferreira’s sculptural practice addresses sites and moments of revolution, exploring how culture moves, adapts and transforms across geographies and histories. At The Showroom the artist brings together two narratives, two versions of punk – from the UK and from South Africa. Both histories read their respective revolutionary moment in different but related ways.

Slits Are Girls originates from a series of photographs taken at the very earliest moments of punk. Captured only yards from The Showroom, the images testify to how punk’s formative energies emerged in this part of West London. In turn, Ferreira connects this local history to her own experiences of punk as a teenager in South Africa, through the band, National Wake. Just as The Slits pioneered a feminist rebellion at the heart of UK punk, National Wake modelled cultural resistance in apartheid-era South Africa. Formed in 1978, in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the band comprised two white and two Black members at a time when living, playing, let alone performing together, was proscribed.

Like much of Ferreira’s work, Slits Are Girls examines architectural forms that speak to their political era. A major element of the installation references a historical photograph of the Athens Gardens housing estate on the Harrow Road, where an early piece of graffiti announcing ‘The Slits’ seems to anticipate what the band would become, and was almost certainly made by a band member or someone closely connected to them. The graffiti suggests that The Slits were always more than a band – they represented an idea in formation. Evidence of contemporaneous similar interventions in the surrounding area indicate a kind of pre-emptive fandom, marking out territory, manifesting, even before the band’s public identity.

Ferreira’s reconstruction aligns with her long-standing interest in the way that architectural forms communicate political hierarchies, in order to engage with the social as those hierarchies of form are dismantled.

In another work, the corrugated iron outside the squat on Daventry Street, NW1, where The Slits rehearsed, is reimagined in sculptural form. The reverse of the structure is rendered in wattle and daub - an allusion to the iconic 1979 photographs of the band covered in mud, for their first album cover, and featured on the front of New Musical Express, as well as National Wake’s uncannily similar appearance for their own album. For Ferreira, the simultaneous resemblance of these two bands - one in London, the other in Johannesburg / Soweto - constitutes a powerful, if independent, convergence.

The exhibition becomes a type of mapping – of the local area directly adjacent to The Showroom, while simultaneously marking how ideas, forms and images move across the world and are transformed by context; seeking to build a bridge between these two sites of resistance. If The Slits can be understood as quintessentially punk precisely because they refused – even within punk – to conform, National Wake used punk not only as an act of refusal and protest, but as a lived experiment in anti-apartheid integration.

Ultimately the conjunction between these two bands proposes that punk’s legacy has no fixed orthodoxy beyond its immediacy. It was always a ‘democracy’ of accessibility. In this way punk may be understood as a site of political upheaval that, fifty years on, continues to offer possibilities of social critique and resistance.

Slits Are Girls is curated by Andrew Renton, who has collaborated on projects with Ângela Ferreira for more than thirty years. He is a writer, curator and Professor of Curating at Goldsmiths University of London.

About the artist
Ângela Ferreira, born in 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique. She lives and works in Lisbon, teaching Fine Art at Lisbon University, where she obtained her doctorate in 2016. Her work is concerned with the ongoing impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society. She also develops multimedia decolonial homages to figures like, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Miriam Makeba, Angela Davis.

Selected works: Campo Experimental: Ângela Ferreira in collaboration with Alda Costa, 2024 / 2025; Klucis goes to Algeria, 2023; Rádio Voz da Liberdade, 2022; Talk Tower for Forough Farrokhzad, 2021; Dalaba: Sol d’Exil, 2019; Pan African Unity Mural, 2018; A Tendency to Forget, 2015; Brigadas do SAAL, 2014; Indépendance Cha Cha, 2014; For Mozambique, 2008-2022; Maison Tropicale, 2007; Zip Zap Circus School, 2000-2024; Double Sided, 1996-1997.