2008 - 2010 Jimini Hignett ~ Keywords: social injustice; inequalities; misogyny; prostitution; abolitionism; the assignment of power; class; race; gender; the personal as political; art as a tool for radical change; activist-artist; Occupy; aesthetic journalism; installations; lecture performances; publications; Amsterdam; Detroit; Buenos Aires; Senegal

Jimini Hignett (1960): ‘Belief in the personal as political underlies pretty much everything I do, and I use my installations, lecture performances and publications as a reflective tool for unravelling issues relating to social injustice, inequalities, and the underlying structures supporting the assignment of power in relation to class, race and gender, aiming to unveil something of the complicities and complexities that are housed beneath the surface of everyday power structures. Art as a tool for radical change for a better world. By juxtaposing often extremely disparate materials, events, ideas and images, I seek to create imaginative, non-linear spaces where new connections can evolve. I hope, in the words of the late John Berger, for my art to make “sense of what life’s brutalities cannot… a meeting place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour”.

In recent years, the issue of prostitution has formed a substantial part of Jimini Hignett's artistic research. Her approach to the subject centres on prostitution as an issue at the intersection of gender, race and class issues. It is an extremely complicated topic, but an oblique approach, via artistic means, has proven an ideal way to open up it to discourse.

Recent exhibitions include Nr. 1 Tourist Attraction, in the Amsterdam Museum, which centred on the Amsterdam Red Light District and the latent effects of Dutch prostitution policies; Handle With Care, on sex trafficking as contemporary slavery (in collaboration with Patricia Kaersenhout) editions in the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, plus Senegal, Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo; Free Radicals and AIR 2019 both at CBK Zuidoost; and the installation Up in Smoke which links contemporary misogynist ‘incel’ groups to historical practices of the persecution of women as witches, in Artphy.

Publications include A Small Collection of Innocuous Objects, on the imagery and realities of prostitution in the Amsterdam Red Light District; Mulier Sacer, on human trafficking in the Dutch sex industry; The Detroit Diary, on race and the prison system in the United States.’

Follow Jimini Hignett’s ‘Life after DAI’ through her website.

Learn more about Jimini Hignett's written MA thesis How to go on making art when everything is all fucked up

Learn more about Jimini Hignett 's publication The Detroit Diary, published by DAI in 2010.