SCHEHERAZADE

Welcome to 1970s Soho. Welcome to the Scheherazade nightclub where everything is for sale. Step right up for an evening of debauchery, of beauty, of brutality and an introduction to a Maltese criminal underworld that makes bank from bodies. For her solo show at Valletta Contemporary, artist Charlie Cauchi drew from the histories of a violent episode in London’s club scene, where Maltese vice bosses laid on entertainment for partygoers that came at a high price for those entangled in its production. As a London-born woman of Maltese descent, Cauchi has woven stories of Maltese migration and the role of female protagonists in a male world of organised crime into a number of previous works, but Scheherazade represents the largest scale examination of this to date. Like much of Cauchi’s artistic practice, Scheherazade begins with historic fact. The Scheherazade nightclub was a real place. This Maltese-owned London venue, one of many that operated in the UK’s capital between the 1940s and the 1980s, was eventually raided by Scotland Yard and closed down. According to newspaper headlines at the time, every patron, bartender, stripper and band member was taken into custody, and the dramatic episode marked the beginning of the end for Maltese gangs in London. Abstracted and reimagined as a life-size maquette of power structures, Cauchi’s Scheherazade is a compilation of seedy nightclub tropes that weigh the balance of glamour and the ugly reality of mob-run nightlife. Here, the trappings of power and money are set beside stories of migration and inequality, criminal impunity and female vulnerability. Like its literary namesake, this Scheherazade is a fiction, but reframes a rich narrative of historic truth where women were expendable merchandise, while men sank to the depths of immorality as they climbed to the top. This vertical scale, present in Cauchi’s installation both architecturally and socially, incorporates sculptural work, video and photography as an immersive experience, and is spatially organised to draw the observer in from street level and down to the lowest gallery tier. Bathed in red light, its edges softened underfoot with scarlet carpet and horrors obscured by blood-red velvet drapes, the show is tactile, glossy, titillating and disconcerting. Altogether, ten individual works pull together as a whole scenography to describe and suggest real events and scenarios. Event poster design by Emma Fsadni