Sex Worker Truth & Archetype 2014

Sex Worker, Truth & Archetype, is a documentary-based art installation that explores the personal lives of sex workers through film and photography. The exhibit challenges society’s perception of a sex worker by documenting a worker’s reality through intimate video interviews and photographs that depict each sex worker’s archetype, how sex workers see themselves through basically any personification of culture, morals, values and mythology. To empower witnesses, and ensure the exhibition accurately expresses each sex worker’s truth, the documentary used an open-consent form that allowed each witness to vet the audio-visual content that represents them. 

Esther Bukareff and Barbara Greczny have teamed up to produce a non-traditional documentary, close to two years in the making. As Canada enters an historic era of legalized sex work, this timely exhibit explores the archetype and reality, by facilitating a platform for sex workers to speak for themselves. The documentary tradition, in the past, focused on the photography and the film-based media. Today documentary has spilled over into the Internet and, in this case, into an art gallery. It is no longer just about sound, film or photography and their division. It is a discourse about the interaction between these media and others, as well as about other multi-media approaches like installation art.

A sound scape created by Michelle Breslin for the installation explores the inner complexities of the body and mind. By examining stereotype and myth against each worker’s truth and archetype, the exhibit challenges the public to redefine who or what is a sex worker.