CONSENT NOT CONTENT
Consent Not Content is an interdisciplinary artwork and research-led inquiry into the appropriation of bodies in contemporary media culture — specifically where non-consensual footage is used as a form of entertainment, and where the digital economy thrives on the circulation of unsolicited reactions, particularly from women.
Conceptual artwork and research-led inquiry into the appropriation of bodies in contemporary media culture — specifically where non-consensual footage is used as a form of entertainment, and where the digital economy thrives on the circulation of unsolicited reactions, particularly from women.
This body of work begins with a new performance-based piece titled Artist as Canvas. In this collaboration, the artist’s body becomes a deliberate, living site of creation — marked, filmed, and witnessed under conditions of trust, authorship, and consent. It is not about being captured — it is about being present. Street art, hip-hop, photography, and performance converge in this offering, which is intentionally co-authored and documented.
The broader conceptual inquiry arises in stark contrast to the increasing normalisation of content capture without permission — where individuals are turned into entertainment assets through ambush tactics, hidden cameras, and the monetisation of unsolicited footage. A critical incident catalysing this work involved a prank-based content creator, Nickxar, who filmed the artist without consent, ignored her refusal, and uploaded the footage to platforms where it garnered millions of views. Such practices not only bypass informed consent but also erase the subject’s autonomy, replacing it with the logic of virality and the metrics of likes, views, and shares.
This is not collaboration. It is coercion through content.
Consent Not Content reflects on how this experience has opened a broader inquiry into:
the erosion of GDPR protections in practice;
the failure of entertainment platforms and content creators to uphold basic ethical standards;
the inability to access a direct point of human contact in digital rights processes;
and the legal and emotional exhaustion incurred when trying to remove unauthorised content.
Despite multiple professional engagements and requests, the artist was met with anonymised, template-based responses from those responsible for distributing the footage — responses that provided no contact with a named individual, no formal recognition of responsibility, and no clear GDPR representative or accountability structure. This reveals a broader systemic failure of digital governance and a refusal to respect the subject as a person, rather than a data point or piece of content.
The viral spread of such material — with millions of views on platforms like TikTok — implies a potentially vast proliferation of downloads and screen-recordings, many of which are likely now in circulation beyond retrieval. The non-consensual transformation of a person into a meme, a spectacle, or a joke leaves no room for nuance, protection, or redress — especially for women, artists, and professionals whose bodies and expressions are used without context or care.
This work therefore situates itself at the convergence of:
Art and Autonomy: exploring the boundaries of consent in performance and image-making.
Law and Lived Experience: revealing the gap between GDPR theory and the lived impossibility of reclaiming one’s image online.
Entertainment and Exploitation: highlighting how low-brow prank culture often operates on the humiliation of women, public ambush, and non-collaborative framing.
Resistance and Response: proposing art not only as critique but as reclamation — a retaliatory act against dispossession.
Consent Not Content does not aim to return to privacy, but to redefine what visibility looks like when it is earned, mutual, and intentional. It begins with Artist as Canvas and will continue as an evolving dialogue between performance, image, legislation, and artistic sovereignty.
1. Artist as Canvas
Artist as Canvas is a performance-based, multimedia artwork exploring the boundaries of authorship, consent, and corporeal vulnerability. By inviting a male graffiti artist—traditionally a writer of walls—to mark her body, the artist offers her flesh as both collaborative surface and living resistance. This act, recorded through video and stills by a third artist (photographer), forms a trialogue across media: body, text, and lens.
What begins as a consensual and creative exchange unfolds as a meditation on the impermanence of mark-making. Like graffiti—often removed, painted over, or erased—the artwork challenges ideas of legacy, visibility, and permanence. The painted body becomes a temporary archive, a site of intimacy and exposure, yet also of impermanence and agency. The artist can wash the marks away. She can choose when to reveal, retain, or release the image.
Against this controlled, mutual encounter lies the shadow of previous, non-consensual experiences: incidents of public harassment, digital hijacking, and loss of control over one's image and space—specifically referencing the Nicksar prankster and the Bushman Guy episodes. In contrast to those moments of coercion and theft, Artist as Canvas reclaims autonomy through a deliberate act of embodiment. It insists on the difference between being looked at and being seen, between exposure and expression.
The piece engages with:
Graffiti culture: re-siting the “tag” as an act of mutual authorship.
Feminist and body art traditions: where the body becomes medium, site, and message.
Hip hop aesthetics: blurring the boundaries between voice, body, and mark-making across genres and identities.
The traces left by the graffiti become more than decoration—they become evidence of consent, trust, and transience. But just as importantly, they become choices, not consequences. This work stands as a soft but unshakable counter-narrative to the violent permanence of involuntary virality. It is a reassertion of self through the most vulnerable and visceral means: skin, performance, and memory.
2. View Image
View Image is a multimedia work that confronts the violent intimacy of digital spectatorship. It brings together performance, video, still imagery, and the language of internet browsing to reflect on the circulation of traumatic, abject, or violated bodies online. Drawing from personal experience and wider collective memory, the work considers how images of suffering are consumed under the guise of information, curiosity, or desire—particularly by those shaped by the early internet, where boundaries between exposure, exploitation, and education were porous.
This work is situated within the critical legacy of Abject Art, Fluxus, and Viennese Actionism—three movements that challenged the aesthetic, ethical, and political limits of art through confrontation, bodily presence, and audience complicity. Like the abject artists of the 1980s and ’90s, View Image foregrounds what society prefers to repress: shame, violation, bodily memory, and disgust. But whereas those earlier works existed within galleries and print culture, View Image is shaped by a digital environment where such images are ubiquitous, uninvited, and unforgotten. Its focus is not on spectacle, but on the afterimage—on what lingers behind the retina and beneath the skin.
The work also draws from the participatory ethos of Fluxus, reinterpreting it not as play, but as the entanglement of the viewer within systems of harm. Rather than asking the audience to act, it implicates them through recognition—asking not “Will you participate?” but “Have you already?” The answer, for many, is yes.
Influences from Viennese Actionism are present in the work’s relationship to taboo, but inverted: instead of live bodily confrontation, View Image presents its performances through mediation—recorded, repeated, framed—reflecting how digital viewers encounter violence not as an interruption but as part of the everyday scroll. The performance is not about shocking presence, but haunted absence. There is a refusal of catharsis.
As a Christian woman artist and educator, the artist brings a layered ethical and spiritual lens to the work. View Image is not merely a critique, but a reckoning. It asks what it means to look, what it means to be seen, and what responsibility we bear for what we witness. It poses the question: Can we unlearn the gaze that turns harm into habit?
The work will involve moving image, live or documented performance, and curated visual material. A raw format suggests a certain level of restraint is deliberate—presentimg parameters within space for viewers to confront not only what they see, but how they have learned to see.