Wedding Bellas

Wedding Bellas is a photographic project about female desire for roots and stability. It explores a wish to belong. It acts as a comment on aging, migration and marriage, but can be a record of an individual’s urge to hide personal problems, as a human need for dressing up etc... The project presents brides passionately attached to the objects of their marriage. Wedding dresses are surrounded by other wedding iconography, but the image is not a joke – it is a serious matter - an event of desperation and illusion shot as on a true wedding ceremony. The photographs are stories of twelve women who refused to leave. Many have been rejected by their partners, by their landlords, by their employers, but majority have been refused to stay in the country by the state. The women showed an extraordinary resilience and resourcefulness in the face of sometimes all of these rejections happening at once and the burden of so many problems caused them to escape into fantasy by opting for equally stable, rooted and good looking ‘Queen’s subjects’ – a lamp post, a tree, a traffic sign – London landmarks... With the mix of the text and image we disturb the perception of migrants and refugees in the UK today.

The project is funded by European Cultural Foundation with women from Migrants Resource Centre and females who wanted to join them.