under this Enactment

MJ Mac

Saturday 7th Nov 2026 - Sunday 10th January 2027

Preview: Saturday 7th November, 5pm - 8pm

under this Enactment draws from an archive spanning more than fifteen years of the artist’s work in the sex industry.

She photographed people with whom she had longstanding relationships in hotels, brothels, strip clubs, at protests and on porn sets. The images record moments of intimacy and performance alongside the ordinary routines in which both take place.

The title is lifted from the Contagious Diseases Act 1866, a law that made women’s bodies subject to extraordinary and invasive scrutiny. Some of these pictures ask what such scrutiny can actually establish.

Across the exhibition, distinctions between work and reward, spontaneity and contrivance, lawful and criminal acts become increasingly difficult to sustain.

How much of an act’s meaning, or its legality, can be established by looking?

These photographs complicate the authority traditionally afforded to documentary evidence. Appearances can mislead, context is often elusive, and even the artist cannot always account for what she thought she saw. The viewer is implicated in the uncertainty: what can a photograph testify to, and how much of its meaning do we supply ourselves?

With thanks to the team at Quench Gallery.

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M.J. Mac | Artist Biography

M.J. Mac is a London-based artist and writer whose work draws on more than fifteen years of experience in the sex industry and longstanding involvement in sex worker organising with SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement).

Her photography is rooted in the relationships formed through this work. In her images, the sex industry provides a backdrop to ordinary life, with all its intimacies, indignities and occasional revelations. Her wider practice considers the spiritual uncertainties of human experience and the raw sincerity found in even the most absurd or morally complex moments.

Writing as Juno Mac, she co-authored Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (Verso, 2018) with Molly Smith. The book was shortlisted for the 2019 Bread and Roses Award, and its Italian edition was a finalist for the 2023 Premio Inge Feltrinelli, winning the public vote.

Her photographs have appeared in Working Girls! (2024), curated by Mathilde Friis at Gallery 46, Whitechapel, and Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights (2024–25) at Wellcome Collection, London.

under this Enactment is her first solo exhibition.