Michal Cole

In Michal Cole’s textile pieces Inferno, 2013 and Clamare, 2013, Cole referenced famous art pieces such as Sandro Botticelli's Mappa dell’Inferno and Edvard Munch's The Scream with lavish colours and cheerful compositions through textiles. She attempted to bring religious figurative paintings back to life through the more contemporary medium of tapestry that more accurately depicted current views and beliefs as a reflection of society.[3]

Exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Michal Cole created a work titled Top Gun in the Pavilion of Humanity, which was made of tens of thousands of used men’s ties including those of men she knew and men who had either harassed her or her friends. The ties were strenuously tied together to cover the floor, walls, a fireplace, a sofa, a pipe, a mounted moose on the wall and a rifle which all encompass a traditionally masculine styled living room. Ties were specifically chosen as they represent a piece of clothing typically worn by men for historically masculine activities such as boardroom and workplace life, witnessing business deals, hiring employees, and winding down at a pub. Cole’s intention of the subject was to comment on the oppression of women that is more apparent under Donald Trump’s government than ever before; including issues such as the gender pay gap, sexual harassment and a predominantly male political office. The piece similarly spoke to personal inequalities that were apparent in Cole’s life, such as her being a victim of sexual abuse, serving mandatory time in the military where hundreds of cases of sexual assault are disregarded, and her grandmother being a child bride.[4]

Michal Cole’s use of textiles has been exhibited in pieces such as After Caravaggio and Roses in a process where she replicated famous paintings and destroyed them before the paint had dried. The pieces were later transformed in to fabric textiles, which involved mapping out and recreating the paintings with materials such as Tibetan highland wool, Bikaner wool, Chinese silk and nettle.[5]

Michal Cole exhibited a site-specific video installation at Ex Bazzi Gallery at the 2015 Venice Biennale’s Pavilion of Humanity titled Mute-Ululation. This work addresses Cole’s identity as a resident of England who is of Sephardi ethnicity. For this installation, Michal travelled to Morocco and Israel and filmed women’s mouths while performing the traditional celebratory ululation: a long, repetitive, high-pitched vocal sound that involves the rapid movement of the tongue side to side in the mouth. On three walls in a darkened room, the videos of these women assemble frame-by-frame until there are hundreds of mouths simultaneously performing the ululation at a loud volume. This work was used to showcase a unifying bond amongst women that transcends geographical borders, religions and ideologies, while empowering these women and showcasing their poetic happiness and expression. It similarly is a piece in which Cole grapples with her own identity as having significant elements of her life that are tied in Middle-Eastern and Moroccan culture while having adopted aspects of Western culture due to living in the United Kingdom.[6]

After numerous visits to Istanbul, Michal Cole met Ekin Onat, a Turkish Muslim artist who addresses female and political issues of contemporary Turkey. The two staged their joint project Objection in the Pavilion of Humanity at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The project revolved around the notion of the home, based on their independent yet complementary artistic interpretations.[7]

The exhibition, which featured a number of rooms in an artificial home included Cole’s textile room Top Gun and raised the question of the role of arts and culture in times of crisis, political upheaval and change while uniformly making an argument of compassion and non-violent protest.[8] Both women transformed the Venetian villa “to give an artistic home to women’s rights and free speech.”[9]

Through the numerous rooms in the home, both artists contemplate with political oppression and the power of speech, which is shown in Cole’s Domestic Godless, a video installation in the kitchen which showcased different videos coming from screens inside cups, bowls and teapots, in which the subject is shown to be screaming. The videos are meant to be representative of a time in Cole’s life where she was left ‘howling like an injured dog’ and addresses the role of women across all planes of human existence. Specifically it showcases how inner frustrations at unrealistic pressures are universally placed upon women, such as being beautiful, smart, maternal, and sexual. In the traditionally feminized location of the kitchen, the screams and female outrage can be heard coming from the videos, giving the voice to the woman, where she would have traditionally taken on a role of servitude.[8]

The upper floor of the home held collaborative works by the two artists titled The Journey Between Human Being and Being Human. Voices could be heard coming from behind a locked door and when the listener approached the keyhole in an attempt to get the clearest sound, the voices became increasingly overlapped making it apparent that different languages were being spoken between the women. The themes of speaking and silence continued in the master bedroom, where Absent Presence is a lifelike model of the artist sitting with their backs facing one-another on the bed.[8]