Ties That Bind

Gaby Sahhar

Inspired by adverts for officewear and gendered imagery advertising luxury properties, Sahhar's drawings tell the story of a straight couple working in the corporate world, set between their home in London and their second home by the sea.

The artist shows gender to be the key to social mobility, as the couple move freely between the coast and gentrified areas of the city. Drawings of beaches and cliffs - Britain's borders - represent the limits of the couple's traditional gender roles, customs and laws. Yet as the couple seek new experiences, they fall into a queer subculture that complicates their straight identity. Sahhar subverts the imagery associated with consumer culture which reinforces the gender binary and suggests that LGBTQ+ cultures cannot be eradicated by gentrification or other means.

Image: from Ties That Bind series. Gaby Sahhar, 2020.

About the contributor(s)

Gaby Sahhar's art-making, research and work is centred around the intersection between gentrification and gender. Gaby often uses the term 'Genderfication' (which they coined in 2016) in their work to describe this process. Gaby is interested in how ideas about gentrification can be internalised into identity, and how in time this forms power imbalances around gender that come with changes to a city. They use queer ways of thinking to try to take down ideas around gender imbalance and raise peoples' consciousness to the different types of city spaces that form in doing so.