Petra Bauer: Sisters!

By Greg Thomas, 19.03.2025

Petra Bauer, Sisters!, 2011, digital film, 123mins, still. © Petra Bauer. Courtesy the artist.

How can a film be a political act? This is the question Swedish artist Petra Bauer poses in her 2016 book Sisters! Making Films and Doing Politics, part of the collection of reading materials left out to accompany her eponymous film, now showing in the Fruitmarket’s warehouse gallery. Namechecking a number of predecessors, including Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Steve McQueen, Bauer points out that what ties their work together is “that the political narrative ... is constituted in the interstices between the films’ contents and their aesthetic strategies, ...imagery and sound are meticulously constructed and composed in relation to the contents, and are hence impossible to separate from the whole.”

In the era of Asif Kapadia’s popular feature-length non-fiction films, such as ‘Senna’ (2010) and’ Amy’ (2015), it’s easy to forget that a stylish, narrator-less collage style has only recently gone mainstream in the documentary genre. The older format many of us recall – from social-interest TV shows of the 1990s-2000s and more – tended to combine sequences of talking heads with carefully introduced and organised archival footage, staged recreations, etcetera. A voiceover often imparted the ethical or sociological lesson of what we were watching. Remove the footage and the narrative remains. Remove the narrative and the footage remains. 

Bauer, whose work combines film-making with an interest in collectivist and feminist cultural organising, stands at the forefront of this breakthrough in experimental tropes, her practice recalling an older, artists’-moving-image tradition encompassing the figures named above as well as trailblazers such as Lis Rhodes and the London Film-maker’s Co-op. First shown in 2011, Sisters! is an assemblage of fly-on-the-wall footage that drops us into the interior spaces and working lives of the West London charity Southall Black Sisters. The camera is sometimes trained on static points on walls or surfaces, almost as if material were being gathered by chance. At other times, shots pan across table-top detritus, out-of-focus faces, or a hand rearranging the last bite of an egg salad sandwich, as the head to which it is attached calmly discusses domestic violence. The buzz of conversation and rustle of paper accompanies the informal patter of speech.

The centre itself has a story worth telling, a story Bauer’s film offers in snatches. Southall Black Sisters was founded in 1979 with a focus on fighting state racism against Black and Asian women. But the centre’s work soon expanded to take in cases of domestic abuse and forced marriage. The impression we get from the film is that the group’s campaigning has historically trodden a line between exposing institutional racism – as when it fought the use of ‘virginity tests’ for south Asian women travelling to the UK for marriage in the late 1970s – and tackling the intrafamilial misogyny and violence faced by Black and Asian British women. A great deal of the film’s footage shows staff members asking questions such as “how many times has he assaulted her?" in measured, reassuring tones, unobtrusively foregrounding their commitment and skill in their roles. 

Meanwhile, Bauer’s hyper-realism obliges us to engage with the ethical quandaries that the staff discuss as if we were there in the room with them. How can a charity whose activities primarily involve directing people towards state assistance survive in the austerity era, when legal aid is being slashed? How can the centre fight structural discrimination while simultaneously calling out a callow version of multiculturalism that has shied away from dealing with domestic abuse in migrant communities? There is no voice-over to explain: we have to construct our own position in response; take up our place in the discourse. Meanwhile, the camera’s insistent focus on close- up, interior spaces, from the administrative to the domestic, implies the growth of the Sisters activities out of the everyday, unseen emotional labour of women.

Curated in collaboration with students on the University of Edinburgh’s MScR in Collections and Curating, this presentation of Sisters! offers a sometimes harrowing but ultimately uplifting glimpse of feminist activism in the UK.

 

Petra Bauer: Sisters! Is exhibited at the Fruitmarket until 23rd March