Sorcha Dallas

A lot of my seventies work was about looking at images of women in pornography, and in women’s magazines, cookery magazines, fashion. At the time I would take images of women from pornography and graft them on to a safe domestic setting. When I came here last October I was interested in certain themes, and I was talking to certain artists and writers here about images of women in this culture. Everyone said “We didn’t have any pornography, it didn’t exist under communism.’ Eventually, Veronika Bromova took me on a long, long drive to a desolate flea market somewhere outside Prague. Andree Cooke and I were delving through a very strange array of goods, and I found, in the darkest, grubbiest corner a box under a table, a tiny pocket calendar which contained the images of the women in the show. It was for the year 1970, 12 little cards of women with the calendar on the reverse. The most likely theory put to me was that it might have been produced in 1968 or 1969, probably for export – everything was in Czech, German and English. It’s a pretty rare artefact really.