Beacon Gallery has the unique opportunity to meet and work with a range of artists, partners and members of the wider art community. Beacon Gallery Connections allows us to take a closer look at their personal journey, and get a better understanding of their relationship to art.

Paul Shiakallis and ‘Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts’

Beacon Gallery is delighted to feature two of Paul Shiakallis’s photographs from ‘Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts’ in our current Photographing The Female exhibit.

To learn more about this series, check out the following article which goes into great detail about how Shiakallis first got introduced to this subculture.

Copy of Paul Shiakallis, MillieHans. From the series Leathered Skins, Unchained hearts, 2015.jpg
millie hans

It started at a rock concert in Botswana in 2010: South African photographer Paul Shiakallis noticed a group of black men wearing Mad Max-esque cowboy outfits. Heavy metal T-shirts, studded leather jackets and pants, boots with spurs, and cowboy hats. “I thought they were just dressing up for the hell of it,” Paul recalls. But, at a concert a few years later, he encountered them again—and this time, there were women. “I was instantly attracted to them,” he says. “They were menacing, raucous and very unladylike.” By now, the media had already latched onto the country’s metalheads, known as the “Marok” in the Tswana language, broadcasting bizarre images of African men dressed in post-apocalyptic Hells Angels attire. But, Paul wondered, where were the captivating women he had seen?

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