(co-convened by Maria Fusco and Beth Hughes, Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, 10 April 2026)
review by Derek Horton
A recent report by Create London and Arts Emergency on inequalities in the creative industries identified that only 18% of people working in music, performing and visual arts come from a working-class background. As the barriers to entry get higher and the costs and debt burden of higher education get greater, that shamefully small proportion will only shrink still further.
Throughout a long career in the visual arts and university education I have always been conscious of my working-class origins. Consciously proud of them, determined to retain my regional accent and my connections to the working-class society that formed my values and interests, but conscious also that economically, culturally, and socially, I am more often than not surrounded by people who live in another world. As a straight, white man, my ‘otherness’ in this context is of course not magnified in the way that it is for so many, and my awareness of the intersectionality of disadvantage and exclusion has increased with the knowledge and experience that has accrued over many years.
“Class bites into everything we do in art and so the process of confronting it must be worked out among ourselves. To do this we will need to talk a lot more about class. And for this to be successful, the deaf ears to class cannot dominate the rooms and pages in which the question of class must be raised as a problem for art.”
So wrote Dave Beech, in his essay Talking in Class, in Art Monthly no. 489, September 2025. Happily there were absolutely no deaf ears to class at Who does not envy with us is against us: a conference on working-classness as method in creative practice, convened by Maria Fusco and Beth Hughes for the Working-class British Art Network at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in April 2026, not least because here, for once, working-class artists filled the room. That was pretty much a unique experience for me, and I know for many others in the room, and it made the day an emotional one.
The event’s brilliance lay in all the contributors’ ability to engage the audience with everything that is normally absent from academic conferences, everything customarily elided by theoretical perspectives and middle-class politesse. (As Maria Fusco succinctly put it, this conference was for those who have a sophisticated vocabulary but sometimes prefer to say 'fuck'!) The day was filled with an unusual degree of humour; sometimes bleak and self-deprecating, more often at the expense of the middle-class pretension and entitlement so pervasive in the art world. Unapologetic subjectivity usurped the often alienating detachment of academic objectivity that normally dominates academic presentations, as the invited contributors passionately shared their profoundly personal experiences in ways that clearly resonated with those of the audience. This mutually empathetic relationship between speakers and audience pervaded the day and played a big part in making it such a unique experience.
United by this as we were, the day was no simple assertion of class solidarity, rather a celebration of the diversity of working-class experience. Feminist and queer perspectives were foregrounded; a range of very different childhood and educational experiences were described; and the contributors worked within and across genres and media including painting, photography, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, writing, music, stand-up comedy and more.
This kind of positivity is easily and often undermined when we are confronted by the entitlement and sense of superiority that is prevalent in so many parts of the artworld in which we have to fight to find our place. It was encouraging to be reminded by Dave Beech at the end of the day that, rather than succumbing to working-class imposter syndrome, we would do well to recognise that what we really suffer from is the consequence of middle-class belonging syndrome.
The day didn’t pass without some reservations though. I was uncomfortable, as I often am at so many artworld events, at the whiteness of the room. The reasons are complex of course, and related to the very barriers to inclusion that were the subject of the conference, but with notably few exceptions (and interestingly nearly all of those were invited speakers), this was a gathering of the white working-class. It brought to mind an observation made by the photographer and writer Jonny Pitts at another Working-class British Art Network event recently, that when he’s invited to speak about class he’s often the only Black person present, and at events where he’s invited to speak about Blackness, he’s often the only working-class person in the room.
This was, rightly, and as I already said, joyfully, a celebratory event that completely punctured the myths inherent in middle-class stereotypes of working-class life, and as such was immensely valuable and all too rare, so I understand that no-one would have wanted to bring down the mood or, worse still, reinforce or contribute to negative stereotypes. But from my perspective, a significant elephant in the room was any considered critique of negative aspects of working-class culture. My working-class dad was by no means alone amongst his peers and workmates in his racist attitudes or in the fact that he voted Tory. And my working-class mom’s homophobia was not only upsetting but also seemed deeply at odds with her passionate pacifism. Regardless of the arguments, I loved my parents, and hold them dear in my memory. Their culture and values were not exceptional (as borne out by the success of Reform UK amongst working-class voters, or the millions of working-class Americans who helped elect Trump) but undeniably they reflected class alienation, economic and educational disadvantage, and susceptibility to popular media (mis)representations. My parents’ attitudes did not make me ashamed of my class, nor wish in any way to disown my origins, but they did make me angry, and still do. And so, while I remain proudly working-class, that anger was the beginning of a need to find a more tolerant milieu and a more nuanced attitude to my working-class allegiances. It has left me profoundly sceptical of any adherence to a kind of class exceptionalism or blindly sentimental assumptions about ‘working-class values’.
We badly need to celebrate working-class artists, to counter the crass stereotypes that still prevail in the middle-class art world, and to come together in joyous solidarity. We need to assert with pride that we’re here to stay and, as Michael Dean put it in his stirring talk, “we’re gan fucking nowhere!” This conference epitomised that spirit, and Maria Fusco, Beth Hughes, and every one of the speakers* deserve our immense gratitude for that. So, whilst accepting that this rare day of collective pride may not have been the occasion for it, if we are to fully acknowledge the intersectional complexities in our exclusion, and avoid romanticising working-classness, we might need to temper our celebration with a degree of introspection, and a self-critical approach to some of our own assumptions too.
* Full list of speakers:
Leanne Green, Maria Fusco, Hannah Perry, Paul Clinton, Damien O’Connell, Michael Dean, Julia Rosenstock, Jacqueline Donachie, Jessie Jones, Kelly O’Brien, Michelle Hannah, Marley Starskey Butler, Mike Pinnington, Bharti Parmar, Belinda Scarlett, Twayna Mayne, Caitlin Shepherd, Matthew Wayne Parkin, Deirdre O’Neill, Dani Child, Jade Bradford, Stuart Whipps, Adam Benmakhlouf, Dave Beech.
by Karen Whiteson
The shadowy quality of the work’s documentary vestiges will act as a memento to the missing body of the book. Printed as a statement of intent on the back cover of the sculptor Katrina Palmer’s book ‘End Matter’, this extract underlines that which the title suggests, i.e. this is a book constituted entirely of its own supplementary material. Whether or not the main corpus ever existed in the first place is one of several riddles which serve to baffle and fascinate the collective figure of the Loss Adjusters. A metaphysical version of the insurance agent who assesses the amount of compensation to be paid following a claim, the Adjusters’ main remit is to account for the loss of land mass from the isle of Portland, and attempt to counterbalance it with presence. The title of one their (missing)dossiers is ‘Compensating for the Depletion of Real Things with Fictionality’. Here, the idea of fiction as a hallucination arising out of emptiness is embedded the landscape. Portland stone supplies the building material for the bulk of London’s civic edifices; a million square feet was quarried for Saint Paul’s cathedral alone. The hollowing out of the bedrock renders it a site acutely vulnerable to fabulists. And, one might add, allegorists; at least going by Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that Allegory is in the realm of thought as ruins are in the realm of things.
According to Benjamin, the gaze, charged with a sense of transience, falls upon its object, hollowing it out of any meaning except that which it acquires through interpretation. For Benjamin the melancholic gaze is the essence of the allegorical mindset. Hence The Loss Adjusters are at all times woeful: an inherent disposition confirmed by their proximity to Portland stone. The allegorical emblem par excellence is the ruin; through its re-absorption into the landscape the built environment becomes memento mori. In allegory, Benjamin states, the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Only here, the ruin is not the crumbled edifice but a terrain hollowed out by the quarrymen and convicts; those who cut the stones which go to build the capital, leaving behind a negative space, an ancient landscape palpably charged with loss. The landscape as its own ruin and memorial in one: the ruin as readymade. At least, so it becomes as witnessed by the Loss Adjusters: What is not here is commemorated at the site of its disappearance. The entire island is a Portland stone memorial, carved out and immense, shaped by convicts and quarrymen, sliced and dissected by the machine, and perceived as an ongoing sculptural production created by loss.
In ‘End Matter’ missing bodies comprised of both text and flesh – dislodged stones and the sound of implements hitting rock – are some of recurring motifs embedded just under the surface of the narrative, where the threads of the story merge and loop to form a subterranean labyrinth. Dense with ideas, the book also delivers a rattling good yarn.
These tales are presented as deleted fragments, retrieved and pored over by the Adjusters; the work of a writer in residence who has herself gone awol. These fragments concern the quarryman’s two “deviant” daughters, a Carniter and his dealings with a Rogue Loss Adjuster and Ash, a young convict. The first tale features sisters Celestine and Hazeline, themselves supplementary creatures who having outlived their father’s traditional occupation of quarrying, have no place in the social structure. But here we are. As Celestine says. Displaced by time yet stubbornly present in space they’re like the mound of earth which appears when Ash buries the Rogue’s corpse. Their excessive love of the landscape binds them to the island. One day Hazeline recounts to her sister a peculiar encounter with the Adjusters. The encounter begins with them questioning her in the interests of their bureaucratic research, but this soon turns into a group sex scene described in terms of a machinic assembly of moving parts, a merging of flesh with stone. As Celestine wryly comments: There’s a long history of banging and cutting on this island. I hope they thanked you. The link between the sex scene and the exertion of labour required to extract the stone is continually evoked throughout the book, underlining its theme of sacrifice and expenditure.
This orgiastic scene triggers the event of a runaway horse whose mad dash across the island culminates in the dislodging of a huge boulder which crushes Hazeline’s hut, along with a human inhabitant of the island, (the identity of the crushed remains supplies one of several story hooks). The elemental force of the runaway horse is conjured in a singular sonic image: Its heavy hooves powered down and into the ground. Those hoofbeats sustain their echo in the recurring descriptions of men working stone: Co-ordinated sound resonated throughout the arena; the repeated impact of iron against rock. The power required for a human body to force a pickaxe through stone required this rhythm.
This book is part of a tripartite work commissioned by Artangel and these interlocking tales have been repurposed for an audio piece which accompanies a site specific walk, as well for a broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This juxtapositioning of the written with the spoken word is intrinsic to the dynamic tensions of ‘End Matter’. For Benjamin too, this tension was key to the liberating potential of allegory, which he saw as a space where: [W]ritten language and sound confront each other in tense polarity. The writer-in-residence leaves behind an audio file which records her speech and footsteps in real time; its immediacy mediated by the Adjusters bureaucratic method and presented as a forensic exhibit. Benjamin continues: The division between signifying written language and intoxicating spoken language opens up a gulf in the solid massif of verbal meaning and forces the gaze into the depth of language. This stratifying device is active both in terms of both ‘End Matter’s’ formatting and its narrative strategy, producing a text as compressed and richly layered as the geological formation of Portland stone. It evokes a vertical temporality, a coexistence of all the different eras inhabited by this slim book, ranging from the Jurassic to the contemporary. This vertical sense of time lends itself to a belief in reincarnation and the Adjusters suspicion the Rogue Adjuster has evolved into an inextinguishable life force is an irrational possibility which seeps out to encompass all the characters.
In Craig Owens’ essay ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’, he states: Allegory is an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a procedure. It occurs whenever one text is doubled by another. One text is read through another. The paradigm for the allegorical work is the palimpsest. In ‘End Matter’ the allegorical attitude is so intensified, it conjures the supersensible as Palmer calls it. In Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime novel ‘The Heat of the Day‘ there’s a phrase which evokes the atmosphere of collective hallucination of London during the blitz, which allows for fleeting moments of intense, erotically charged, telepathic communication between the characters. She calls it: the thinning of the membrane between this and that. The thinning of the membrane between this and that, bringing lost layers of duration into stark relief, is the latent force at work in ‘End Matter’.
In other story threads produced by the writer-in-residence, the allegorical attitude is played out in a way which highlights the absurd, Kafkaesque quality of its endeavour. Most strikingly, in the case of the Rogue Adjuster where the logic of absence counterbalanced by presence is enacted in terms of the law of supply and demand. As well as stone, the island also boasts sheep which yield a particularly sweet mutton and which the Rogue exports for profit. As the Loss Adjusters summarise the situation: The Rogue realises that an overlooked consequence of quarrying is the removal of grazing land for Portland’s native sheep. In his degenerate mind, he understands that this delicacy will become rare, so he attempts to secure a supply of it for himself, to fulfill an improbable level of demand from some unspecified market. Paradoxically, the Rogue needs the land to continue to disappear in order for the sheep to become increasingly valuable. At one point the Rogue, in his greed, is compared to a pig–whose meat he himself disdains on the grounds it will happily eat human flesh. His own corpse ends up being fed to these very animals, so embodying the self-consuming cycle of supply and demand which drives market forces. This aspect of ‘End Matters’ is a cautionary tale that turns on the thinning of the membrane between human and animal, between stone and flesh. As if, beneath the skin of the landscape, there stirs an endless chain of being.
An earlier version of this review was previously published by 3:AM Magazine.
End Matter by Katrina Palmer was published by BookWorks in 2015.
Works consulted:
Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998).
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949).
Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism', October, 12 (1980), pp. 67–86.
Katrina Palmer, (London: BookWorks, 2015).
- Jul 25, 2025
by George Storm Fletcher
I met with the artist Hamza Ashraf, and he explained to me how he lost his residency status from his birth country – due to ‘online nudity', which also ‘outed’ him as gay. Ashraf processes his new reality of ‘statelessness’ in We Fear No God, But Ourselves – a monograph of poems, narrative scripts and photographs, which are predominantly taken with a polaroid camera.
Hamza tells me about the influence of the French writer, Annie Ernaux in his work. I have only read one of her novels, a novella of barely eighty pages, called The Young Man – which is about a break in the protagonist’s life, an intervention in the form of a love affair. Through the process of starting, and ending this brief relationship, Ernaux becomes motivated to write again, but ‘The Young Man’ is somewhat used up in the process. In his monograph, Hamza reestablishes who gets consumed by the writing process, allowing his work to sustain, rather than subsume or deplete him. The book is the first of four – it is the start of something, rather than a culmination of events. We talk about another of Ernaux’s books, The Use of Photography, which is about an affair that she has with the photographer, Marc Marie. Hamza says it is hard to know who was married, as the French call lots of things ‘affairs'. He explains how the book centres on photographs taken after the act of sex. ‘A Classic’, I say, we laugh, ‘A Classic’. Each party then writes about each photograph, but without discussing with the other person what they have written. I have not read this book, and so to some extent Ernaux’s book will always be what Hamza has told me of it. Similarly, we can take the images and personal reflections in Ashraf’s book and create a form of ‘truth’ based on what we have been shown by its author.
Hamza tells me that friends have referred to certain photographs in the book as ‘crime scene photos'. The images in question are in colour, but the objects strewn across the beds appear flat and lifeless. In INT HOTEL CORRIDOR – NIGHT, there is a canister of Kodak photographic film on the bed, it functions as a reminder that photography is not always documentary. Ashraf overlays prose directly on the outline of this photo. The influence of Ernaux’s photography book, of acts, and a sense of chronology is perceptible here. Ashraf’s composition tells us to directly contextualise the text to this given location, that this photograph either predates, or follows ‘an act’, perhaps of sex.
In his polaroids, Hamza spends time in the spaces, and choses a moment to set the camera on a timer. Whilst photography is a series of decisions, the use of a timer is not sharp, it blunts the gesture, softening it across time. The polaroids in the monograph are therefore an elapsed moment, in direct contrast with the precision shutter of the ‘crime scene photos'. In the hotel room act we are made aware of the presence of a voyeur, a television showing an ‘An ad for knives, cutting nothing’. Is declining the mechanical exactness of the posed portrait, and using a timer in the polaroids that follow this story, a reaction to possible violence – a refusal to cut the bodies being depicted?
Hamza and I talk about Margaret Atwood, and how she writes that we are all ‘our own voyeurs'. But there is no sense of the photographer versus the photographed in Ashraf’s work: as viewers we witness, yes, but the hand is imperceptible. Because of this, his monograph does not sexualise pain, despite repeated images of weaponry. This point is reiterated later in the script with the phrase ‘The TV keeps selling knives to no one’. If the narrative given by the metaphorical voyeur (in this case the television) is to buy knives (self-harm), then it is something that we (the protagonist) are not buying. The hand that would cut the body is not present or felt.
Hamza draws my attention to the presence of the red stitch that binds the book together. The thread is a subtle suggestion of the realities of harm in these stories. In a later image: a hand lays upon a bed, with a presence of blood on white bedsheets, creased by the body. The image is black and white, and the rhythm of the red stitch, travelling vertically on the page, in five even drops, is the only colour present to indulge in a bloody, bodily gesture. Here we are informed of possible harm, but it is an editorial decision that seeps in, and stains – like the blood on the sheet – rather than cutting us like the knives on the television.
In the proceeding script we are met with a narrative of ‘cleanliness’, the characters ‘HIM’ and ‘YOU’, converse:
HIM
You clean?
YOU
Yeah.
HIM
Good.
‘Clean’ in this context refers to the presence of STDs, particularly HIV. It is a slang commonly adopted in the queer community, but one that clearly lends itself to a metaphor surrounding shame, and particularly in this monograph, Godliness. This narrative is interrupted by the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, an audio-based alert that the narrative is about to change.
Whilst I am talking to Hamza, a fellow patron knocks over a glass, and we both turn to look, exemplifying the device at work. The familiarity of what the Adhan sounds like, is not needed to understand the drama of this event. We all know what it is for a phone to ring, or to jump at a sudden knock at the front door. The effect, of being taken out of the moment, and back to ‘reality', is universal. The specificity, however, is the intrusion of faith into a deed that contests HIS religion and causes the sex act to cease. Praying, and the sex act described involve bended knees, a form of deference – both are therefore forms of submission.
Ashraf’s use of nude photography, the same act that caused his ‘ban’, is understandable. Ashraf’s monograph examines choice, the decision of when to release the shutter on a camera, how and when to talk to God, when to submit oneself to kneel. Where he has previously been subjected to a loss of agency, the reclamation of these positions is a powerful gesture.
In a later section Ashraf asks, "I do not pray, Mamo, but I think about it every day. Is that not a kind of worship?" Hamza says that your Mamo is the uncle from your mother’s side. The descriptors available to explain relationships are far more accurate in Urdu. Here we meet a binary opposition – a specificity of culture, of traceable lineage; and the ‘statelessness’ that Ashraf now finds himself in.
There is an atmosphere change in the monograph. On the left page, a polaroid which depicts a man, his right eye looking towards us, the right page shows a journal entry from July 2024 that begins, "I am back to being an anxious ..... after last night honestly." The second half of the writing is redacted. An unintentional mystification occurs in the form of Ashraf’s complex handwriting. His cursive is particularly beautiful – so beautiful that it makes one question whether the point of writing is to communicate, or to express what the hand wants to say. With these illegibilities, Ashraf’s enacts what he writes in his text: "I never wanted to be whole, just the parts I could handle." As we turn the page there is a clear image, a soft green polaroid of a tree.
There is a clarity of breath in the following piece, weight of the world. Hamza tells me he allows memories in, allows himself to feel them, and then sees what ‘comes up'. But we are forced out of this space, and Ashraf writes: "The light has changed. What was once warm now cuts through the room like a blade." In the next black and white polaroid, the sitter at first appears headless, but they are not decapitated – the head is in recession as a double exposure, in a state of flux. Ashraf’s monograph communicates, through the book form, what ‘has happened’ to him – it speaks more clearly than ‘factual’ written statement could.
When we recall a memory, we are not finding an intact object, rather we recreate memories each time we remember them. Psychologist Ed Yong describes that, "Memories aren’t just written once, but every time we remember them", and in this process there is a window for ‘reconsolidation'. I am struck but how this is akin to making and editing book works. Until a work goes to print, it is subject to a series of edits, manipulations and erasures. Our readers will never see these changes, and this is exactly how our memories can work – old versions are over written, changes are lost, and revisions are made. Ashraf manipulates this process to reimagine the narrative that has been forced upon him – it is a powerful reclamation of story.
We Fear No God, But Ourselves by Hamza Ashraf
1st Edition published May 2025
Sources referenced in this review:
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (New York: Doubleday, 1993), pp. 721-22.
Annie Ernaux, Marc Marie, The Use of Photography (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024).
Annie Ernaux, The Young Man (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023).
Ed Yong, on rewriting memories: