A massive portrait of Ashley Walters looms over Kingsland High Road. Plastered across the second storey of a retail block, it gazes serenely over chicken shops, artisanal coffee houses, strip-lit barbershops, sourdough pizza restaurants.
Representations of violence and torture used to be an integral part of enforcing the social order - but in a world of uncensored live streams and graphic media content, has our attitude to atrocity really progressed - or does it remain an unacknowledged dark obsession of mankind?
The narrative of resistance and domination in relationships has been the recourse of storytellers since pre-Christian times, with the same lurid, visceral quality evident in Greek myth as in the modern trend of disturbingly violent porn. Yet these primal, animalistic tropes of female subjugation now exist in a ‘civilised’ society, whose vernacular is one of #TimesUp, sex positivity and high-street feminism.
