WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH EXHIBITION 2025

HEXES is a photography exhibition for Women’s History Month 2025 by second-year BA Photography students at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. Showcasing digital, analogue, and extended photographic practices that underpin the ethos of our course, the exhibition examines feminist resistance and a potency of mythologies by reclaiming and re-examining the idea of the “hex”, its deep historical roots in the demonisation of feminine power. 

For centuries, patriarchal and religious structures have painted women’s agency, wisdom, and connection to nature as dangerous, fuelling persecutions and cultural myths of the “witch”, reinforcing the beliefs that a “hex” is an evil spell to be feared.  HEXES turns this concept on its head, asking: What if the real “hex” is the oppression itself?  As Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch, the historical witch hunts were not merely acts of superstition but systematic efforts to eradicate female autonomy. Similarly, Carl Jung’s concept of the “Great Mother” archetype reveals how the repressed feminine power, both nurturing and formidable, continues to stir in the collective unconscious.  

The photographers in HEXES confront lingering forces of misogyny and offer a potent “anti-hex”: a collective, healing vision that reclaims the feminine divine, sexuality, and our intricate bond with the natural world. Embodying the folk spirit of the shapeshifter, their works also explore the fluidity and entanglement of identity, urging us to rethink how we own and understand our bodies in an era marked by both environmental crisis and debates over reproductive control, care and trans liberation. 

HEXES manifests as the “crossroads” of resistance and dialogue inserting its photographic narratives into the library, and our campus corridors, it affirms that our educational spaces can cradle and nurture transformative power. 

ARTISTS:  Erika Ailunno, Maria Ateva, Vincenzo De Falco, Jena Edgecombe, Alex Gurung, Zlati Kostov, Marek Poradowski, Linda Reyes, Nacho Rodriguez, Tara Ryan, Albany Suarez Coelho, Nathan Swift, Cezary Szczepaniak, Roxana Vadeanu, Rocio Vazquez, Tianna Ward     

Curated by Ania Dabrowska, Senior Lecturer in Photography and Critical & Contextual Studies.