Two women sit at adjacent sides of small square-shaped table. One of them starts to sew a very large circle very slowly with small, red, simple hand stitching onto a white cloth that covers the table. The cloth was in fact, a sheet that Danish photographer and journalist Simon Hoegsberg gave the performers to use on their last day of the week’s residency.

After a short while the second performing woman starts unpicking the work of the first, pulling her chair up closer, while the other pulls her chair away, to move on. When the first woman reaches the quarter-circle, the performers exchange the roles of sewer and unpicker. This continues until the circle is completed. Very few words are exchanged during the hour-long action.

The circle motif suggests cycles and phases of a clock, but also of the menstrual. Furthermore implied are the changes of generations, and “The Change” but also quite simply a sewing circle.

Wider allusions of the performance are to global sweatshops, where workers, mostly women, are treated as slaves and paid well below acceptable standards.

Walmart and Nike are two of the largest corporate sponsors of sweatshop labor, but claim that they have safeguards in place to avoid using the worst sweatshops. Disney has also employed sweatshops to produce much of their clothing and toys, but their use has not been as well publicized as the cases of Nike, Walmart, or Kathie Lee Gifford. In the book "Disney; the Mouse Betrayed"; a chapter shows dealings with China, Vietnam, Haiti, but especially targets Disney's relationship with the military junta of Burma, of which it works hard to keep quiet given Burma's huge unpopularity in the international community. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop

In Carpenter’s and Ury’s email exchange over several months before their meeting in Berlin, the two artists discovered that they had common themes - images of them both creating art works were taped to the New Life Shop Art Gallery walls: Laurel at the machine sewing her impossibly long red dress (combining many donated red dresses sewn together) for the performances Red Woman and Red Crest1 - Tanya likewise machine-sewing small plastic bags containing her hair for Whos Boss: Hair Shirt. The Danaids also conjures up Ury’s video/performance Röslein Sprach… in which she sews the word “BOSS” into the palm of her left hand, bringing to mind the 150 persons who were engaged in forced labour to produce Nazi uniforms, from 1940 onwards until the end of the war, by the original Hugo Boss company.

Tanya Ury