Each year around the world, International Women's Day is celebrated on
March the 8th. While not so much acknowledged in the UK, for many 
countries it is an official holiday, an occasion to honour and praise 
women for their accomplishments. Thousands of events occur to mark the
 economic, political and social achievements of women. Organisations, 
governments and charities choose different themes each
 year that reflect global and local gender issues. The UN theme for
International Women’s Day this year is Empower Women – End Hunger and
 Poverty.

SHOWstudio’s upcoming exhibition 'SELLING SEX', set to open on March 
22, 2012 at SHOWstudio Shop, 1-9 Bruton Place, London, W1J 6LT will showcase work by an all female cast of artists.

The concept for the show began when we set out to create an exhibition 
that looked at the fetishization of objects in Fine Art and Fashion, 
but as our research progressed an enduring imbalance was brought to 
the fore. While times have progressed, the Louvre today still has no female artists in their collection of over 35,000 artworks, the Museum of Modern Art has only 8% of work
 exhibited by women and shockingly The Tate holds only 15% of work by 
female artists. This imbalance is not just apparent in fine art. The 
majority of fashion photographers are men. In film, women hold 
only 33% of all speaking roles and 7% of all Directors in Hollywood
 are women.

However, this is not to say that we are lacking in talented female
 artists, photographers or directors, on the contrary the reality is 
far from it. And so, we changed tact. Rather than look at how objects
 become fetishized, we decided to look more fundamentally at how sex, 
or rather gender operates in Fine Art, Fashion, and Film and curate an 
exhibition of works about sex, all created by women. SELLING SEX
 looks exclusively at what a woman's version of a woman looks like.
 From Sarah Lucas’s signature bunny pieces, Malerie Marder‘s striking
 photographs of call girls to Kim McCarty’s mesmerizing painted 
figures; the exhibition will show a range of extraordinary work. It will also feature work by; Cortney Andrews, Una Burke, Liz Cohen, Charlotte Kingsnorth, Atsuko Kudo, Marianne Maric, Lisa Z. Morgan, Ione Rucquoi, Suzannah Sinclair, Christiana Soulou, 
Vahge, Shiri Zinn and others. And as always, the exhibition will be
accompanied by a series of live streams, projects and performances.

The exhibition opens 22nd March 2012.
To preview 'SELLING SEX' as we prepare for its opening, visit 
http://showstudio.com/shop/exhibition/selling_sex.