Solo exhibition

The Showroom, London

26.02 - 07.06.2026

The Showroom presents Slits are Girls, a new commission by artist, Ângela Ferreira (born Mozambique, based in Lisbon).

Ferreira’s sculptural practice addresses sites and moments of revolution, exploring how culture moves, adapts and transforms across geographies and histories. At The Showroom the artist brings together two narratives, two versions of punk – from the UK and from South Africa. Both histories read their respective revolutionary moment in different but related ways.

Slits Are Girls originates from a series of photographs taken at the very earliest moments of punk. Captured only yards from The Showroom, the images testify to how punk’s formative energies emerged in this part of West London. In turn, Ferreira connects this local history to her own experiences of punk as a teenager in South Africa, through the band, National Wake. Just as The Slits pioneered a feminist rebellion at the heart of UK punk, National Wake modelled cultural resistance in apartheid-era South Africa. Formed in 1978, in the aftermath of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the band comprised two white and two Black members at a time when living, playing, let alone performing together, was proscribed.

More information

Photo: Ângela Ferreira: Drawing of The Slits, 2025

Based on a photograph by Julian Yewdall, 1977 in Daventry Street London, NW1, where the band rehearsed in a squat. Left to right: singer Ari Up, drummer Palmolive and guitarist Kate Korus. [Missing from original photo: Tessa Pollitt, bass and Viv Albertine, who would replace Kate Korus on guitar]