Sunday, March 5, 2023, 10AM PST / 6PM GMT (Please check your own time zone).

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Fifty years ago, Penny Slinger was preparing for the opening of her second ever exhibition. Titled Opening, the exhibition at Angela Flowers Gallery, London, married eroticism with food. It was at Opening that the world was exposed to Slinger’s ‘Bride’s Cake’, a 1973 performance piece exhibited in photographic form, and not everybody was ready for it. A provocation on the institution of marriage, and the rituals which accompany the transfer of patriarchal power, ‘Bride’s Cake’ is characteristic of Slinger’s art in that it positions her own body as a protest.

This illustrated in-conversation event will explore the significance of ‘Bride’s Cake’ for the wider feminist movement, as well as investigate its curatorial presentation from the 1970s to the twenty-first century. Beyond the exhibition space, Slinger has furthered ‘Bride’s Cake’ into new and unchartered territories through the means of cut and paste, and digital, collage. From the vantage point of ‘Bride’s Cake’, Slinger and Rachel Ashenden will discuss how the artist’s subject matter and media continue to evolve in the present day.

Penny Slinger (b. 1947, London, UK) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has been exploring the connection between eroticism, mysticism, feminism, and art for over fifty years. Slinger mined surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s to plumb the depths of the feminine psyche and subconscious. She continues to work in many mediums including collage, photography, drawing, sculpture, and video.

Rachel Ashenden is an arts writer and independent researcher specialising in the feminist avant-garde. She is the co-founder and editor of The Debutante, a magazine dedicated to illuminating the legacies of women surrealists in contemporary culture.