Viral artwork … Emma Sulkowicz carries a mattress at Columbia University, as part of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), 2014 Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Viral artwork … Emma Sulkowicz carries a mattress at Columbia University, as part of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), 2014 Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images Art The woman with the mattress: the radical, rage-fuelled history of anti-rape art A performance piece from 2014 has gone viral in response to an allegation of rape at Cornell University. But with such defiant pieces stretching back hundreds of years, will things ever change?
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Thu 8 Oct 2026 16.19 CEST Last modified on Thu 8 Oct 2026 16.26 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I n September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began to carry a blue mattress weighing 23kg around her university campus. The mattress was similar to the ones New York’s Columbia University used in its dorm rooms, where Sulkowicz said she had been raped by a fellow student two years earlier. Her performance/endurance artwork constituted her visual art senior thesis, drawing attention to the lack of criminal charges brought against her alleged attacker and his continued presence at the university. As she hauled it across campus, others could choose to assist her with her burden. Many did. She recorded responses to the piece in a diary.
“I could have taken my pillow,” she told the writer Jessica Valenti at the time. “But I want people to see how it weighs down a person to be ignored by the school administration and harassed by police.” Sulkowicz would carry the mattress , she said, for as long as her alleged attacker remained at Columbia. And so she ended up carrying it all the way to graduation where, helped by other women, she took it on stage. The university president refused to shake her hand, turning away from her instead.
Footage of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) went viral in 2014, just as the momentum for #MeToo was building. Now the performance piece has gone viral again, in response to public fury at another allegation of campus rape . Jane Doe (the female pseudonym used in the US for the purposes of anonymity) is suing Cornell University in New York, and seven men, claiming they drugged her and gang-raped her when she was studying there in 2024.
View image in fullscreen 'An imposing force’ … In Mourning and In Rage (1977) by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz Photograph: Maria Karras/Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz Through her performance work, Sulkowicz joined a long line of women who have made art in response to rape, sexual assault and domestic violence. It forms a radical, if rarely explored, canon that encompasses a huge range of responses. Paula Rego’s 2008-9 work Oratorio was an altarpiece-like triptych featuring scenes of sexual assault. Yoko Ono, in 1964’s Cut Piece , invited members of an audience to remove her clothing with scissors as she knelt unmoving. Jenny Holzer used human bones in 1994’s Lustmord Table , her installation about rape as a weapon of war in the former Yugoslavia. Nan Goldin documented a violent relationship in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. And Kara Walker made cut-paper silhouettes that explored the brutal legacy of white male power in the American south.
In fact, it’s a canon that stretches back at least as far as the 17th century, when Artemisia Gentileschi , whose rape and subsequent torture as part of her rapist’s trial no doubt i…