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'Shoot' visual and Vasilisa Forbes bus stop Shoreditch High StreetVasilisa Forbes

The story behind London's eye-popping new BDSM billboards

Wondering what's up with the influx of women in latex? Artist Vasilisa Forbes wants to make a statement about female objectification

If you’ve walked down Shoreditch High Street lately, you may have seen the giant billboard of a blond woman dressed in red latex posing as a table. No, it's not an advert for a BDSM sex shop or a fetishwear brand – welcome to Waxchick, the colourful world of Vasilisa Forbes.

The Russian-born artist wants to spark a dialogue about the representation of women in the media and the art world – all by splashing hyper-sexualised Pop Art imagery across public billboards. Public art provocateurs Annin Arts commissioned Forbes last year, and her latest posters have just gone across London this week.

Her first billboard was inspired by Allen Jones’ table sculptures, with Forbes shooting herself in the role of the titular table. “Wax Woman as Table” was released on a digital billboard in Shoreditch just in time for Jones’ exhibition at the Royal Academy last year.

“Initially I was really interested in his work because I thought it had a feminist angle to it,” Forbes told Dazed. “I thought it was pro-women. When speaking to him he was just saying that there isn’t any meaning at all, it’s whatever you want to read into it.”

As a female artist, she wanted to comment on Jones’ work by placing herself as the table to see if people would respond to it differently. “If I objectify myself in an image,” she theorised, “will people react to it differently or will they react to it the same way and still find it sexist?”

Her new picture “Here For Your Every Need” appears on bus stops in Dalston and mocks the way women are represented in the fashion industry. “There’s a lot of passive looking female characters in fashion imagery and I feel that that’s really tiring,” Forbes says. She hopes to find out how people react to the daily objectification of females through provocative, even controversial, images. “For me it’s almost like a survey, I want to see if people are bother about it or if they’re to used to that kind of imagery that they’re not.”

Forbes has received mixed feedback since the project launched: some people have thanked her for showing the everyday objectification of women, while other people found the pictures straight-up vulgar – someone even scribbled "SEXIST" all over one poster. Outdoor advertising regulators Clear Channel even wanted to censor an image, although it didn’t include any nudity.

For Forbes, the pictures are her ideas of feminism. “I think every woman has her own idea of feminism, I don’t think you need to narrow it down,” she said. “I just want to see more powerful female characters in everything, really!”