“Popular interest in folklore has rarely been greater. Post-pandemic and in the shadow of hastening climate disaster, many people are turning to the ‘old ways’ to find new modes of living in harmony with nature, marking the passage of time and connecting with each other.

However, it is rarely acknowledged that the canon of folkloric materials collected during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is both partial and exclusionary. Scholars privileged the rituals associated with men, tacitly side-lining women and other marginalised people, and emphasised the preservation of a supposedly ‘dying’ oral culture, ensuring that historical inequities persist in the present day. At the same time, an ongoing and marked gentrification of folk leaves out the working-class communities who were—and continue to be—the primary originators of folk culture.

This exhibition of work-in-progress explores the intersections of folklore, feminism and fetishization and poses the question, what if folk was not just a niche interest but a potent agent for resistance and change?”