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Banning Bourgeois? Instagram censors photos of artist's 'sexual' fabric works

According to reports, visitors to The Woven Child exhibtion at London’s Hayward Gallery have had their posts mysteriously deleted

The Art Newspaper
18 May 2022
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Tongue-tied: a work by Bourgeois in the Hayward Gallery show The Woven Child

© The Easton Foundation/DACS; Installation view of Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at Hayward Gallery; London and VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS); New York. Photo: Mark Blower/© The Hayward Gallery

Tongue-tied: a work by Bourgeois in the Hayward Gallery show The Woven Child

© The Easton Foundation/DACS; Installation view of Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child at Hayward Gallery; London and VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS); New York. Photo: Mark Blower/© The Hayward Gallery

UPDATE (20 May): A spokeswoman for Hayward Gallery says: The tagging issue has now been resolved and images are no longer being automatically deleted by Instagram. Our team identified it as a technical problem.

There are genitals a go-go in the work of Louise Bourgeois to the extent that the critic Adrian Searle once wrote in the Guardian: “Her art is about jealousy and sex and the things that make life worth living and, at times, make it unbearable.” Devotees of the late sculptor flocked to The Woven Child at London’s Hayward Gallery (which closed on 15 May) to savour her fabric works that “mine the themes of identity and sexuality, trauma and memory, guilt and reparation”.

But posting images of these challenging works online is proving difficult. “When some Instagram users tag @hayward.gallery within the body or the caption of a post, it is deleted before posting,” a gallery spokeswoman says. “This is a regularly reported issue but it is not affecting all users using the @hayward.gallery tag. We have explored all in-platform solutions, and we’ve reported the issue to Instagram, but we have yet to find a way to resolve the issue.” Who is trying to ban Bourgeois?

CensorshipDiaryLouise BourgeoisHayward GalleryInstagramSocial media
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