Doorways

Doorways:
Women, Homelessness, Trauma
and Resistance

Photographs, Essays, Interviews

Bekki Perriman

with
Laura E. Fischer, Andrea Gibbons, Janna Graham, Pippa Hockton, Anna Minton, Mary Paterson, Moyra Peralta, Lisa Raftery, Shiri Shalmy and Andrea Luka Zimmerman

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It was an honour and a pleasure to be invited to contribute to this book by Bekki Perriman, documenting and reflecting on her artwork ‘Doorways.’ My essay is about the visual culture of homelessness. I explore the idea that homeless people are forced to comply with a discipline of being seen as un-seen. Other essays explore politics, policy and resistance, and are intertwined with interviews with street-homeless women, and photographs of the doorways in which they have slept.

Kate Tempest, who has written an afterword to the book, says:

‘Doorways is an urgent book in this time of social crisis. The devastating stories of homeless women hit hard, while the essays show how this brutality is no accident – it’s the result of a deliberate policy against women and working class people. The book demonstrates the full scale of this tragedy: from housing policies designed to benefit developers to a collapsing mental health service, it is women who pay the highest price.’ – Kate Tempest

The publishers say:

We might—most likely—walk on by, we might drop some change into a cup, we might even stop and talk for a moment, but how much do we know about the trials of life for the growing number of women forced to live on our streets, in hostels or in homeless shelters? Their presence is not just a personal tragedy, but a social and political act of violence and injustice.

As the effects of capitalism and relentless property speculation blight and restrict the lives of millions, Doorways delivers an urgent and uncompromising dispatch on the realities of austerity, gendered violence and social cleansing in Britain today.

Growing out of the extreme personal experience that informed the sound and photographic works of artist Bekki Perriman’s The Doorways Project, at the core of the book are interviews with one of society’s most marginalised groups — women experiencing street homelessness.

Alongside Perriman’s images, new essays and commentary by renowned academics, activists, journalists, therapists and practitioners explore the cultural, social and political dimensions of homelessness, as well as the role of artists and institutions in challenging it.

Written and produced entirely by women, Doorways creates an expansive, deeply textured, informed space of creative resistance that has never been more necessary.

Launch on 13th May 2019 at SET, Dalston.

More details from the publishers here