Ant Queen/Cleopatra on view at Frieze London, October 11-15, Hales Gallery, Booth A5

Ant Queen/Cleopatra, 2012. Compressed charcoal and charcoal dust on paper, 30 x 30.5 in

For the 2023 edition of Frieze London, Hales is delighted to present a selection of works by artists  Andrew Bick, Tessa Boffin, Martyn Cross,  Chitra Ganesh,  Haroun Hayward,  John Hoyland,  Hew Locke,  Tuli Mekondjo,  Lucy Stein,  Kay WalkingStick, Gray Wielebinski  and  Laetitia Yhap. The presentation features a selection of historic and contemporary works, reflecting the programming and vision of the gallery. 

Writes Ganesh: Theda Bara  was one of the first and most popular actresses of the silent era. Her acting and the roles she played had enormous impact on giving rise to the trope of the vamp , one of the first roles women were able to occupy as highly sexual/sexualised subjects, and one of the only roles for women at that time.  Most of her films were destroyed in the Fox Studio vault fire of 1937 . In fact most silent films in general, including Indian silent films, have been lost or destroyed. This is one of the reasons I love working with the material - its array of fragments are provide fertile grounds for imagination, reconstruction, and speculation. Bara's extraordinary ouevre (40+ films between 1914 and 1926!!!) was confined to the silent era/ and then in practical terms she disappeared - she retired by the time sound came to film, so never appeared in a sound film.

This drawing is based on a still from the 1917 film Cleopatra, enormously popular and seen by over 5 million people. It epitomizes the convergence of fantasy, orientalism and science fiction that were at the heart of early silent cinema, and key to shaping the limits and possiblities of the medium. Bara had many costumes for cleopatra, but this one in particular struck me as uncannily futuristic - somehow both historical and forward looking. 

About her gesture: before the advent of sound, silent film's primary referent was theater, pantomime and performance. In this process, eyes and hands became very important to communicating complex emotion. As many of these films were lost, gesture becomes a key component of the archive with which we are left- this same logic of gesture as archive is there with Aelita: Queen of Mars and Anna May Wong in Piccadilly. 

Ant Queen/Cleopatra, 2012 (detail). Compressed charcoal and charcoal dust on paper, 30 x 30.5 in

Installation at Frieze London next to painting by Martyn Cross.