The woman with the mattress: the radical, rage-fuelled history of anti-rape art

A performance piece from 2014 has gone viral in response to an allegation of rape at Cornell University. But with such defiant pieces stretching back hundreds of years, will things ever change?

I n September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began to carry a blue mattress weighing 23kg around her university campus. The mattress was similar to the ones New York’s Columbia University used in its dorm rooms, where Sulkowicz said she had been raped by a fellow student two years earlier. Her performance/endurance artwork constituted her visual art senior thesis, drawing attention to the lack of criminal charges brought against her alleged attacker and his continued presence at the university. As she hauled it across campus, others could choose to assist her with her burden. Many did. She recorded responses to the piece in a diary.

“I could have taken my pillow,” she told the writer Jessica Valenti at the time. “But I want people to see how it weighs down a person to be ignored by the school administration and harassed by police.” Sulkowicz would carry the mattress , she said, for as long as her alleged attacker remained at Columbia. And so she ended up carrying it all the way to graduation where, helped by other women, she took it on stage. The university president refused to shake her hand, turning away from her instead.

Footage of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) went viral in 2014, just as the momentum for #MeToo was building. Now the performance piece has gone viral again, in response to public fury at another allegation of campus rape . Jane Doe (the female pseudonym used in the US for the purposes of anonymity) is suing Cornell University in New York, and seven men, claiming they drugged her and gang-raped her when she was studying there in 2024.

Through her performance work, Sulkowicz joined a long line of women who have made art in response to rape, sexual assault and domestic violence. It forms a radical, if rarely explored, canon that encompasses a huge range of responses. Paula Rego’s 2008-9 work Oratorio was an altarpiece-like triptych featuring scenes of sexual assault. Yoko Ono, in 1964’s Cut Piece , invited members of an audience to remove her clothing with scissors as she knelt unmoving. Jenny Holzer used human bones in 1994’s Lustmord Table , her installation about rape as a weapon of war in the former Yugoslavia. Nan Goldin documented a violent relationship in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. And Kara Walker made cut-paper silhouettes that explored the brutal legacy of white male power in the American south.

In fact, it’s a canon that stretches back at least as far as the 17th century, when Artemisia Gentileschi , whose rape and subsequent torture as part of her rapist’s trial no doubt informed the rage at the heart of her Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-13). Her earliest known work, Susanna and the Elders, painted in 1610 when she was 17, viscerally conveys an intimate knowledge of how it feels to be a young woman vulnerable to sexual abuse and harassment.

That knowledge is something many of us carry around, so it’s no surprise that sexual and gender-based violence is a subject that female artists return to again and again. The current Tate Modern show examining the cult and commercialisation of Frida Kahlo provides an apposite moment to reflect that Kahlo’s most groundbreaking works are never going to make it on to coasters and tote bags. A Few Small Nips , from 1935, shows a woman’s stabbed, naked body on a bed smeared with blood. The work was inspired by a story Kahlo read in a newspaper in which a man who murdered his wife dismissed his actions with the words: “But I only gave her a few small nips.”

No less bloody is Ana Mendieta’s response to the rape and murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, a female student at the University of Iowa. Rape Scene (1973) was a private performance piece that the artist staged in her apartment for fellow students. Recreating a sexual assault, she posed semi-nude, bloodied and bent over a table. She stayed in that position for over an hour, forcing her audience to confront the brutal, traumatic reality of male violence against women.

It does not feature in the current Tate Modern exhibition of her work, but her film Moffitt Building Piece, made in the same year in response to the same crime, does. In it, passersby are filmed without their knowledge as they encounter a bloodstain left by Mendieta on the pavement outside her building. Their responses, to ignore, to sidestep, serve as a metaphor for how violence against women is occluded by society.

This feels all the more relevant in light of the gap at the heart of the Tate show: the violent manner of Mendieta’s own death and how her fate has for many come to represent misogyny in the art world. Many believe her fall from a 34th-floor window was not suicide, but rather a murder committed by Carl Andre, her husband, who was tried and acquitted (exhibitions of his work have attracted feminist protests due to what they say is his lack of accountability and her erasure as an artist ). The decision to sideline this element of an artist’s biography , perhaps in a well-meaning attempt to prevent her being part of a “victim” narrative, ended up muffling the pain and the outrage that gives her works their power, robbing them of crucial context.

That pain was manifest in another feminist performance piece: Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s In Mourning and In Rage from 1977. At the time, a serial killer sensationalised by the media as “the hillside strangler” was murdering women in Los Angeles. In response, the two artists, along with feminist activists and some family members of the victims, staged a funeral motorcade to city hall. Over 60 women followed behind a hearse from which, on arrival, 10 others emerged, 7ft tall and clad in black mourning robes.

These were not passive, grieving victims but an imposing, rageful force, delivering statements and a chorus of: “In memory of our sisters, we fight back!” It followed Lacy’s work Three Weeks in May , which saw her daily updating a “rape map” of the city, based on statistics given to her by police. These interventions arguably had an impact on how the police and media in the city approached sexual assault at the time.

Given that one in four women have been raped or sexually assaulted, according to Rape Crisis (England and Wales ), such artworks will naturally often feel emotionally heavy for the viewer. Yet at a time when equality and justice can still feel so far away, when so many women are carrying around their own proverbial mattresses, it is crucial to continue to give voice to these experiences.

I know I am not the only woman who found herself in tears during A Second Life, Tracey Emin’s retrospective at Tate Modern earlier this year. This happened while I watched her 1995 short film Why I Never Became a Dancer , about her teenage experiences of sexual exploitation and the shaming she was subjected to during a dance competition. “Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard … this one’s for you,” she says, before breaking into a smiling dance to You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).

As a work of art, it is defiance, strength and survival. What made me cry was Emin’s determination to be joyful despite the abuse she suffered. What’s a crying shame is that it still feels so painfully relevant.