Course Leader, Photography Arts MA, University of Westminster, UK

Panties and Beyond: Feminism and Photography Since the 1990s

In the 1990’s there was an explosion of staged photographic work created by women of women in their underpants. Which brings into questions whether this plays into the hands of a society that wants pictures of naked women. It also represented an interesting shift away from postmodernism. Artist such as Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Nikki S Lee and Collier Shorr exhibit a lack of distance in their work which had been typical of the postmodernist movement. However, as representatives of women shouldn’t they be free to occupy a position? Why can’t women occupy voyeurism and shove that back in the face of the establishment? Even still to this day we are seeing young artists making the same sorts of imagery of themselves in their underwear. However, when it comes to the money made from these images the sexier the picture the more it sells for. Does this then make the work a subversive affirmation or a fashionable flirtation with transgression? Does it matter which? Artist such as Juno Calypso, Amalia Ulman, Pixy Liao, and Zanele Muholi continue to use subversive affirmation as an artistic performance that deliberately overemphasizes prevailing ideologies or involves over identification with dominant ideological forms in order to call them into question. We are now in 2019 and these questions have not yet gone away.

Slide from Soutter’s presentation

Dr Lucy Soutter is an artist, critic and art historian. Lucy’s work focuses on questions of value and meaning in contemporary art and photography. She writes for publications including Aperture, Source, Unseen and 1000 Words and is the author of Why Art Photography? Lucy is currently exploring further research into “expanded photography,” contemporary photography’s overlap with other contemporary art forms and activities. Lucy has taught at The London College of Communication, Sotheby’s Institute and the Royal College of Art. She is the Course Leader of the Photography Arts MA at the University of Westminster.

Artist / Lecturer in Photography, University of Portsmouth, UK

To Cross the Border with a Pomegranate

In her works Dana Ariel weaves cultural and political narratives together with her own biography through visits to sites in the UK, Germany, Israel and Palestine, as well as through the material sites of making, such as the darkroom and print room. The encounters with these sites raise questions regarding methods of identification and how they manifest themselves in the landscape and in photography. These boundaries between the different categories of identification and identities then blur further through the collapse of dichotomies such as hospitality and hostility, poetics and politics, access and restrictions. Her practice uses analogue photographic printing processes, hybrid printmaking techniques, video, sound, text and abstract notions of drawing to deconstruct these dichotomies. Landscape and language form the basis of her search for moments of misidentification and misreading that could offer generative ways to challenge the single reading of images and words.

Images: Dana Ariel

Dana Ariel is an artist working with photography, printmaking, video and text who lives and works in London. She received her PhD, a research project entitled Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground, from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London with an awarded studentship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. She is the winner of the Barto Dos Santos Memorial Prize for her work in print and winner of the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival solo exhibition in 2016. Her work has been exhibited internationally in various venues and events including the solo exhibition To Cross the Border with a Pomegranate, Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv and Broken Ground, Neo Gallery 22, Bolton. Additional group exhibitions include: Home Sweet Home at the Institute for photography, Lille and Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles in 2019 (forthcoming), The International Print Biennial, Newcastle, 12 Star Gallery, Roaming Room and UCL art Museum in London, Florentin 45, Tel-Aviv and Gallery 61, Bielefeld, Germany.

Artist / Associate Lecturer of Photography, Camberwell College of Art, UAL, UK

Prominent within the field, her practice is interdisciplinary and spans across the history of science, medicine and botany, the Humanities, social sciences, politics and linguistics. Over the last 30 years Gregory has been a champion of Arts education both in and outside the institution working at all levels from primary to postgraduate as well as community focused activities.

Image: Joy Gregory

Born in England to Jamaican parents, Joy Gregory is an internationally recognised and award winning artist. The artist grew up in Buckinghamshire and is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She is an artist of ideas -constantly pushing the boundaries of the medium with a passionate curiosity for knowing and understanding the world outside.

Artist / Author / Professor, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Mirror/Mirror: Photographic self-portraits from the Victorians to the Present Day: Self-expression, self-promotion, self-preservation

Liz Rideal discussed her research into self-portraiture; both photographic artworks and published books, within the historical context of this genre.

Since 1985, Rideal has exhibited widely in both public and private art galleries across Europe and America, resulting in seven catalogue publications and twenty public commissions. Her artwork is held in Collections including Tate; Victoria & Albert Museum; British Museum; The National Portrait Gallery; The Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; The George Eastman Museum, Berkeley Art Museum & the Yale Centre for British Art, USA.

Rideal received a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2016-17, a British Academy grant for work in India in 2011, and the Rome Wingate Scholarship at the British School at Rome, in 2008/9. Author of Mirror/Mirror: Self-portraits by Women Artists, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Watson-Guptill, NY, 2001; Insights: Self-portraits, NPG, London, 2005; and How to Read Painting, Bloomsbury, London, and Rizzoli, NY, 2014 and 2015, translated into  six languages with a print run in excess of 55,000. Rideal contributed an essay to The Erotic Cloth; Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles, Bloomsbury Academic, was co-author with Kathleen Soriano of Madam and Eve: women portraying women, Laurence King and wrote the introduction to Phaidon’s 500 Self-portraits, all in 2018. Rideal appeared in the Netflix series Raiders of the Lost Art (2016) and writes about painting for the ART/UK website.

Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial, Archive and Research at Autograph ABP, UK

Renée Mussai is a London-based curator, writer and visual arts scholar. She is Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial, Archive and Research at Autograph, London – an arts charity that works internationally in photography and film, addressing themes of cultural identity, race, representation and human rights – where she manages a diverse collection of photographs and global program of exhibition, publishing and research initiatives. A scholar-curator with a special interest in African, Black European and diasporic lens-based practices, Mussai publishes and lectures internationally on photography, visual culture, curatorial activism and cultural politics. She has been a regular guest curator and former non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and is presently a Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg and part-time PhD candidate in Art History at University College London. Her writing has appeared in numerous artist monographs, anthologies and journals such as Aperture, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.  Her publications include James Barnor: Ever Young (2015), Glyphs: Acts of Inscription (2014; with Ruti Talmor); Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama (2017); and the forthcoming Black Chronicles (2019). Over the past decade, she has organized numerous exhibitions in Europe, Africa and the US, including the critically acclaimed and internationally touring gallery installations, ‘Black Chronicles’ (2014-2019), ‘Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness’ (2017-2021), and most recently, ‘Phoebe Boswell: The Space Between Things’ (2018/19). Mussai holds under- and postgraduate degrees from the University of the Arts, London, and previously studied at the University of Vienna, Austria.

PhD Candidate, Department of History of Art, UCL, UK

Photography &: Challenging the Homosocial in Baroda’s Faculty of Fine Arts

Photographs by Jyoti Bhatt from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda (the first art school established in independent India) constantly reveal the self-assured performances of homosocial camaraderie were at work in the early days of the art school, when young men dominated the student rolls. While documents and journals from Baroda—and indeed the broader photographic landscape at this time—mistakenly suggest a uniformly male enterprise, this paper will explore sites of collaboration with women (as active agents in the theorisation, performance, and exploration of photography) whose varied engagements with Baroda’s art scene complicate the seeming all-male nature of its photography production. 

Image: Diva Gujral

Diva Gujral (b. New Delhi) is a writer, curator and PhD scholar at the department of History of Art, University College London. Her research assesses photographic practices in India in relation to India’s Cold War-era political and cultural policy of non-alignment. She is one of two authors of the book Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present (2018), and writes for Frieze and Critical Collective. 

Fine Art Programme Leader, Middlesex University, UK

The Trouble with Captions: the censorship of Elizabeth McCausland’s texts that were originally intended to accompany Berenice Abbott’s photographs within their Changing New York, 1939, Dutton publication.

Changing New York, includes photographs by Berenice Abbott and captions accredited to Abbott’s life partner the socially engaged critic and writer Elizabeth McCausland. This presentation examined the censorship of Elizabeth McCausland’s originally intended texts into the terse and bland captions published by Dutton and reinstate her intended original, highly charged texts in direct relation to Abbott’s photographs.

Image: by Berenice Abbott, from Maude-Roxby’s presentation

Alice Maude-Roxby’s writing, curating, and photography develop out of “live” and “site-specific” investigations of questions inherent in photographic and art historical research that involves interviewing and excavating archives. She has developed bodies of work that take the form of books, installations, videos and exhibitions in response to questions about the ways in which live art or ephemeral works are recorded and understood through documentation, how artists’ practices inform teaching and workshops, and how artists collaborate. She has published with Artwords Press, Tate Liverpool, and Intellect Press, and has curated exhibitions for the University of Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery, including Live Art on Camera (2007) and Anti-Academy (2013). The book Censored Realities/Changing New York which is co-authored with Stefanie Seibold and was published by Camera Austria, 2018. The forthcoming exhibition Resist: be modern (again) is co-curated with Seibold and takes place at John Hansard Gallery in 2019.  Maude-Roxby was Head of Photography at Falmouth University until 2017 and is currently Programme Leader for Fine Art at Middlesex University.

Photographer, Hackney Flashers & Format, UK

The Trouble with Archives

Murray spoke briefly about how these two organisations produced and dealt with images; and what happened to the material once their initial life was over. All this was much more fun than it sounds.

Image: slide from Murray’s presentation

Maggie Murray was a documentary photographer for many years. In the 1970s she was a member of the Hackney Flashers – an agitprop collective that produced campaigning exhibitions; and in the 1980s a founder member of Format Photographers – an agency and library uniquely representing only women photographers.

PhD Candidate, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Gravid. The Pregnant Portico

How can photography make us connect past and present, individual memories and collective experiences? Memories of birth and architectural cupolas were the underlying ideas for ‘Gravid’, a site-specific work developed by Ioana Marinescu for the UCL Portico in Summer 2018. Two large photographs were placed inside the portico behind the monumental columns, simultaneously contradicting and enhancing their architectural setting.

Image: Ioana Marinescu, from her presentation

Ioana Marinescu is an artist working with photography. Trained as an architect in Bucharest and London, Ioana works with large-scale photographs in public spaces, with projections and live readings. Her PhD research examines the relationship between place and memory, using her hometown of Bucharest, erased by the regime of Ceausescu as a case example. 

PhD Candidate, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Breaching the Contract: Breaking Free from the Emotional and Ideological Prison of Renaissance Masterpieces

“In this short talk and through my work I asked; Is it possible to challenge classical representations of women that have been dictated by male artists and their patrons since the Renaissance era? And are we able to break the silent contract that was imposed on mothers first by the Church and later by the State out of the exclusive religious context?”

Leni Dothan is an artist and architect based in London, (B.Arch Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Jerusalem), graduated the Slade School of Fine Art MFA program with distinction. She is currently finalising her Practice-Led PhD also at the Slade, UCL. In her art Dothan strives to blend all her learned skills as an architect, artist and researcher. Her works use renaissance art references as a means of reflecting on present urgent issues and taboos both personal and universal.

PhD Candidate at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Bonsai Tree, Waterfall and other things

“My practice-led research focusing on examine and analyzing different notions of emotion in the Chinese lyrical tradition over a historical time frame and comparing them with corresponding concepts in European and Japanese traditions. Using landscape as both method and subject matter, I attempt to explore the aesthetics experience within different cultures and traditions. I will be introducing my ongoing projects Under the Yuzu Tree and Wood, Water, Rock. I am working with mixed media, such as our family archive, photographs, paper ephemerals, texts, letters and video installation.”

Image: Feiyi Wen, from her presentation

Feiyi Wen is a visual artist and researcher, currently undergoing her Practice-led PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art (University College of London) on Eastern Asian aesthetics and photographic practice. She received her Master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from Royal College of Art, London. She works with different media such as photography, moving image, sound and installation. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and magazines internationally across North America, Europe and Asia. She was a finalist for the Leica Barnack Newcomer Award in 2015, one of the winners of the Magnum Graduate Photographers Award 2016, a finalist of Three Shadows Photography Award and Hariban Award in 2018. Most recently she was selected as a Juror pick for the LensCulture Black & White award in 2019.

Visiting PhD Candidate at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK /  PhD Candidate, the University of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland

You Are Only an Image to Me

“In my presentation, I introduced my PhD research in which I investigate an experience of a singular image in a post-photographic era. During my studies I became interested in abstract photography as a particular way of female expression and maybe even a resistance tool. One of the main research tools employed to structure my PhD study is a mistake or an error as a tool of breaking the ordinary way of thinking”.

Magdalena Zoledz is a post-photographer born in Poland (1989). Graduated MSc in Cultural Studies at the University in Wroclaw in Poland (2013) and Photography at the University of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland (2015). In 2017 started a PhD programme in photography at University of Arts in Poznan (Poland) and now she is a visiting research student at Slade School of Fine Art in London. An author of essays, books and works, which she calls conceptual objects. She exhibited in Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Netherlands and the UK. She is a member of 280A Artists Collective and a co-founder of ONE Project www.one-project.co.uk , www.magdalenazoledz.pl

Director and Curator, Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK

What a Woman Can Do with a Camera

Anne’s presentation highlighted some of the key exhibitions she has curated and the role these have played in bringing women’s photography to the forefront. Case studies included Seven Years (2004) Trish Morrissey’s seminal photo series; Makeshift Monuments (2011) a site-specific installation by Diane Bielik in the disused Hungarian social club in Bradford and Lost Languages and other voices (2010) the first major survey show of work by Joy Gregory. Underpinning this presentation will be the question “Do male photographers have more opportunities to exhibited their work than females, and if so why?”

Slide from McNeill’s presentation

Anne McNeill is the Director and Curator, Impressions Gallery, one of the UK’s leading exhibition venues for contemporary photography, and a national charity that helps people understand the world through photography. Anne has more than 25 years’ experience curating photography exhibitions, including Facing the Front (1998) previously unseen fashion photographs by Lee Miller, and retrospective exhibitions by major members of the British colour documentarists movement Anna Fox (2008), Paul Reas (2013) and Peter Mitchell (2016). Most recently she has worked with Helen Sear to present a new adaptation of Prospect Refuge Hazard exhibition which opened at Impressions, January 2019. She is currently researching the generation of immigrant punks and trendsetters for a major touring exhibition and publication in 2020. Previously, Anne was the Artistic Director of Photo 98, the UK Year of Photography, a year long photography festival staged throughout Yorkshire. In 1995 she was the founding Director of Photoworks, the national commissioning agency based in South East England. Anne began her career as a darkroom worker, in the radical gallery Camerawork, London in 1984, and was a freelance photographer throughout the 80s and early 90s.

Director, Photoworks, UK

Photoworks: Then and Now

Photoworks is a platform for contemporary photography. Shoair Mavlian discussed the presence of women photographers throughout Photoworks history from the early 1990s to today. As well as highlight the ongoing programme supporting contemporary artists.  photoworks.org.uk

Slide from Mavlian’s presentation

Shoair Mavlian is Director of Photoworks and curated the recent Brighton Photo Biennial ‘A New Europe’ (2018). She was formerly Assistant Curator, Photography and International Art at Tate Modern, London, where she curated the major exhibitions ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’ (2018), ‘The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection’ (2016), ‘Conflict, Time, Photography’ (2014), ‘Project Space: A Chronicle of Interventions’ (2014) and ‘Harry Callahan’ (2013). While at Tate Modern she also researched acquisitions and curated displays from the permanent collection including ‘Dayanita Singh’ (2017), ‘Lynn Cohen and Taryn Simon’ (2017), ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’ (2016), ‘Close Up: Identity and the Photographic Portrait’ (2015), ‘Charlotte Posenenske and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’ (2014), ‘Lewis Baltz and Minimalism’ (2012), and ‘New Documentary Forms’ (2011).  Recent independent curatorial projects include the exhibition ‘Don McCullin: Looking Beyond the Edge’ (Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2016) and ‘In Flux’ (Kanellopoulos Cultural Centre, Greece, 2015 and Getxo Photo 2017). Recent publications include ‘Catherine Wagner: Place, History and the Archive’ (Damiani 2018) and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg ‘The Land In Between’ (MACK 2018). 

Creative Director and Curator, African Artists’ Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria

Women through the Lens. Challenges of Actualising a Mentorship Programme for Female Photographers in Nigeria

In 2018 the African Artists’ Foundation dedicated the LagosPhoto Festival to predominantly female photographers and curators from different continents and demographics. Visual storytelling and women empowerment have always been a focus of the foundation, but this year the organisation strives to expand the scope of Fine Art Photography with the project Women through the Lens. Ten Nigerian mentees from across the country will be part of a programme, that offers theory sessions, workshops, field trips and a residency.  In an environment in which photography, and art in general, is dominated by men and not seen as a serious creative industry, the project seeks to engage women to acquire a variety of qualifications and establish new career paths while strengthening their individual agency. The presentation briefly illustrated AAF’s history of shifting visual female narratives in Nigeria and questions the strategy and methods of the current project in the framework of the workshop.

Slide from Langhorst’s presentation

Charlotte Langhorst is the Creative Director of the African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos/Nigeria, a non-profit organisation that promotes contemporary artists in Africa and also serves as an academic hub within the region. Whilst being based in Africa for more than seven years, she held the position of a research assistant at the University of Ghana, worked as a visiting lecturer at the Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development in Cairo, Egypt and as an affiliated researcher at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

Artist / Founder Work-Show-Grow / Senior Lecturer of Photography, London College of Communication, UAL, UK

Organisation Work-Show-Grow

Since 2016 Caruana has run the NC mentorship scheme, an annual mentorship aimed at women under-represented within the arts. The self-funded scheme supports creative development, confidence, and provides valuable practical knowledge on how to maintain a creative work. In 2018 Natasha Caruana set up the organisation Work-Show-Grow, which hosts supportive and collaborative workshops throughout the year. At the heart of the W-S-G ethos is the belief that progressing a creative work doesn’t need to be lonely and competitive. It can be fun and supportive. 

Slide from Caruana’s presentation

Natasha Caruana is a London-based artist and educator. She works across photography, moving image and installation. Her work begins autobiographically, exploring narratives of love, betrayal and fantasy, underpinned by a performative and playful approach. Her work is created drawing from archives, the Internet and personal accounts. The series Married Man breaks with traditional portrayals of infidelity, whilst later works grapple with the institution of marriage – its promise and defeat. Caruana has an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London. She is a Senior Lecturer of Photography at the University of the Arts London, and the founder of Work-Show-Grow. Since 2016 Caruana has run the self-funded NC mentorship scheme.

Professor, Head of the Slade PhD Programme, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Landscape of the macaronic: poem and photograph

Taking the macaronic as a frame for combining different verbal languages, my current work brings together photographs and poetry within the same frame as cultural inscriptions of landscape. This work is set in west Wales and aims to reveal the inscribed legacies of successive immigration from the Palaeolithic period onwards.

Slide from Morris’s presentation

Sharon Morris is an artist, poet, and theorist, whose research centres on the relation between words and images and the semiotics of C.S. Peirce.  Her artworks include photography, installation, film, and live reading; recent exhibitions include Film in Space, Camden Arts Centre, 2013, and The Moon and a Smile, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, 2017. Her poetry collections, False Spring, 2007, and Gospel Oak, 2013, and artist book, The Moon is Shining on My Mother, 2017, were published by Enitharmon Editions, London.

Senior Gallery Relations Manager, Artsy, USA

Fine Art Photography in Our Digitized World

“Having worked at a photography based gallery, and now at Artsy, I have come to see the benefits, risks and limitations of having photography online and particularly in the online marketplace. Through the lens of my experience, I want to discuss what these are as well as other trends I see in the online marketplace for photography”. 

Slide from Kim’s presentation

Eunice currently works at Artsy, the leading online platform for discovering and buying art, as a Gallery Relations Liaison. She works with galleries to maximize their presence on the platform and advises on overall their digital strategy. Before joining Artsy, she has over five years of experience of working at New York galleries, most notably at Andrea Rosen Gallery and Hasted Kraeutler Gallery. Originally from California, Eunice holds a B.A in the History of Art from UC Berkeley.

Senior Curator, The Photographers’ Gallery, UK

Female driven programming at The Photographers’ Gallery

Karen will discuss female driven programming, feminist curation and women artists from the exhibition history at The Photographers’ Gallery.

Slide from McQuaid’s presentation

Karen McQuaid is Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery. She has curated exhibitions including Jim Goldberg, Open See (2009); Fiona Tan, Vox Populi, London (2012); Andy Warhol, Photographs: 1976 – 1987 (2014); Lorenzo Vitturi, Dalston Anatomy (2014) and Rosângela Rennó, Río-Montevideo (2016). She has co-curated Geraldo De Barros, What Remains (2013) with Isobel Whitelegg and Made You Look, Dandyism and Black Masculinity (2016) with Ekow Eshun. She has co-edited and produced The New Colonists (2018) by Monica Alcazar-Duarte, published with Bemojake. Karen has curated external exhibitions at The Moscow House of Photography and The National Gallery of Kosovo. She regularly edits artists books and guest lectures across the UK.

Art Historian, MAC USP Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo, Brazil

The 1978-81 strikes in Brazil through the lenses of Nair Benedicto and Rosa Gauditano.

During the final years of Brazilian military dictatorship the automotive industry workers in the outskirts of São Paulo began to organize, leading to three massive strikes in 1978, 1980 and 1981. This worker movement helped to bring an end to the dictatorship and also laid the basis for the construction of the largest left wing party in the country, PT or Workers Party.This presentation focuses on the work of two photographers who covered those strikes for the independent press, Nair Benedicto and Rosa Gauditano.

Slide from Zerwes’s presentation

Erika Zerwes holds a PhD in History (UNICAMP, Brazil), with FAPESP funding and CAPES grant for a séjour doctorale at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris (EHESS, France). She did a Post Doc at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP, Brazil) funded by FAPESP. She is the author of the books Tempo de Guerra (Intermeios) and Cultura Visual: Imagens na modernidade (Cortez).

Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, UK

Sarah Allen is Assistant Curator at Tate Modern where she curates exhibitions and displays as well as researching acquisitions for the international collection. She recently co-curated Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art (2018). She has also curated Martin Parr (2018), Mark Ruwedel (2018), Workers: Paris, Killip, Chernysheva (2018), Daido Moriyama (2017), Kaveh Golestan (2017) and Gyorgy Kepes (2017) as well as thematic displays Diaristic Photography and The Photobook (2019) and Iranian photobooks (2017 ). She is curator of the Martin Parr photobook collection.

Artist / Curator of FIF / Professor in the Visual Arts, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil

Patricia Azevedo, is a visual artist, graduated in Philosophy from the Université Paris VIII, France, with a Master’s degree in Political Philosophy (“Art and Action in Leon Battista Alberti”) and PhD in Visual Arts (“Games of Distance and Proximity: the construction of dialogic space in performative art” with CAPES Award for research at The Warburg Institute-Archive and LADA-Live Art Development Agency, London, under the co-orientation of Dr. Kiff Bamford, UK) both at the University Federal of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, where she teaches Photography and Performance in the Visual Arts Course. She develops collaborative projects in different media, investigating relations of language, territory and power, working in the public space of the city or the media itself, a work marked by the relationships that are established between people and the communicative act. She participated in several exhibitions and residences in Brazil and abroad. She composes the curatorship team of the exhibitions of FIF BH – International Photography Festival of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She is from Recife, lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

MFA student, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Working across performance, text, film, photography and installation, Rhona’s practice considers human-nature relations with reference to eco-feminisms, sci-fi, shamanism, phenomenology, autobiography-as-archive and innovations within contemporary spirituality. Rhona has performed for Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, North Carolina, and Creative Time, New York, and completed art residencies in Australia and USA. Exhibitions include East Wing Biennial, The Courtauld Institute of Art; New Approaches to Photography, Four Corners Film; Photofusion, London; Fotofilmic, Canada and Auckland Festival of Photography, New Zealand. With a Bachelor in Psychology, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Photography from University of the Arts.

Artist / Professor, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Susan Collins works across public, gallery and online spaces employing transmission, networking and time as primary materials. Most of her work is made in response to specific sites and situations. Key works include the BAFTA nominated Tate in Space, commissioned for Tate Online (2002); Fenlandia (2004) and Glenlandia (2005), live year long pixel by pixel internet transmissions from remote landscapes, and Seascape (2009) a solo show for the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. Public commissions include Underglow (2005-6), a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London and Brighter Later (2013), a site specific light installation for the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford driven by live weather data.

Exhibiting widely nationally and internationally, recent works include Wembury & Woolacombe (2015), commissioned by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter (RAMM) in association with the National Trust, and LAND (2017), a live transmission from Jerusalem looking across the West Bank towards the Jordanian mountains. Collins is a Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL where she established the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art (SCEMFA) in 1995, and was the Slade Professor and Director from 2010-18. http://www.susan-collins.net

Curator, Public Engagement and Research, UK Government Art Collection (GAC), UK

Chantal Condron is the Government Art Collection’s curator dedicated to audience engagement and public access – in 2019 the GAC moves to a new location in Whitehall with its first public access space. Previously, as curator of modern and contemporary art, she developed close knowledge of post-1900 works of art and delivered public programmes in Hull, Birmingham, Belfast and abroad. She has worked widely in the arts sector for over 20 years including Tate, Sotheby’s, Visiting Arts, Arts and Business and University of London Library. She studied 20th century and non-western art at the University of East Anglia; and holds an MA in Asian art from SOAS. She has authored the first monograph on the Danish artist, Peter Hedegaard, which is published this spring by the Rocket Gallery, London.

Artist / Professor of Photography, The University for the Creative Arts, UK

Anna Fox is an acclaimed British photographer and Professor of Photography at University for the Creative Arts. Working in colour, Fox first gained attention for Work Stations(1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain. She is best known for Zwarte Piet (1993-8), a series of portraits exploring Dutch black-face’ folk traditions. Other projects The Village (1992), a multi-media installation examines the experiences of rural women, and Friendly Fire, records paint-balling in war reportage style. Her publications includeCockroach Diary and My Mother’s Cupboards (2000), Anna Fox Photographs 1983 – 2007, published by Photoworks. Fox’s solo shows include Photographer’s Gallery, London, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago amongst others. Her work has been in international group shows including Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant Garde at Tate Liverpool and How We Are: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Borse Prize. Fox has been awarded grants from UKIERI and PMI2 for collaborative work in India and in 2015 was lead organizer for the Fast Forward conference at Tate Modern. In  2016 she was awarded an International Network grant from the Leverhulme Foundation for the Fast Forward 2 project concerned with raising the profile of women in photography.  www.annafox.co.uk

Professor, Video and Television Production at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, India

Sabeena Gadihoke is Professor, Video and Television Production at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. She is also a photo historian and has curated several shows on Indian photography the most recent of which is Lightworks: A Jitendra Arya Retrospective that opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai this month. She was a Fulbright Fellow at Syracuse University during 1995-6 and has received grants from India Foundation for the Arts, the Charles Wallace Trust and the Majlis Foundation for her research on photography. Her book on India’s first woman photo-journalist, Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla (Mapin/ Parzor Foundation) was published in 2006. Gadihoke has several years of experience as a documentary filmmaker and cameraperson. Her film Three Women and a Camera won awards at the Film South Asia at Kathmandu (1999) and at the Mumbai International Film Festival (2000). Her current research interests focus on the intersection of the moving and still image.

Photographer /  Artist, UK and India

Sunil Gupta (b. New Delhi) is a photographer, artist, educator and curator currently enrolled in a doctoral programme at the University of Westminster. Educated at the Royal College of Art he has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. His latest show (with Charan Singh), “Delhi: Communities of Belonging” is at Sepia Eye, New York 2017 and his last book, of the same name was published by The New Press, New York 2016. His work has been seen in many important group shows including “Paris, Bombay, Delhi…” at the Pompidou Centre, Paris 2011 and at the Tate, Liverpool 2014. He is Visiting Professor at UCA, Farnham, and Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. He is Lead Curator for the Houston Fotofest 2018. His work is many private and public collections including; George Eastman House (Rochester, USA), Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate Britain, Harvard University and the Museum of Modern Art. www.sunilgupta.net

Writer / Curator / Editor / Course Leader of MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, LCC, UAL, UK

Max Houghton is a writer, curator, editor and course leader in MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. Her writing appears regularly in the international arts press – Foam, 1000 Words, Photoworks and Granta — and she is co-author, with Fiona Rogers, of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (Thames and Hudson 2017). Max is a laws faculty scholarship PhD candidate at UCL.

Director of The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland

Elina Heikka is Museum Director at The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki since 2007. The Museum, founded in 1969, is the national special museum for photography and puts on exhibitions of Finnish and foreign contemporary photography, and presents the diverse history of photography. www.valokuvataiteenmuseo.fi

Elina Heikka holds MA in art history. She was editor and editor-in-chief  in Valokuva – Finnish Photography magazine from 1994 to1998. After that she worked as a researcher at the Finnish Museum of Photography and as a special researcher at the National Gallery / Central Art Archives from 2001 to 2007.  She has published widely on contemporary photography, history of Finnish photography, contemporary art and visual culture. Since 1994 she has lectured extensively, for example as a guest lecturer at the University of Art and Design  (Aalto University since 2010), at Turku Art Academy and abroad. She has curatorial experience from photo gallery Workshop (Helsinki, Finland 1996-1998) and several museums in Helsinki.

Film producer / Former Head of School for Film, Media and Performing Arts, UCA, UK

Professor Sarah Jeans was formally the Head of the School for Film, Media and Performing Arts at the University for the Creative Arts. Sarah led the development the school’s portfolio and introduced new subject areas, such as Acting and Performance and Music Composition and Technology to the university.

Since she joined UCA in 2000 Sarah as worked extensively with Professor Anna Fox developing educational and research partnerships in India. This work has in turn informed the development of FastForward; Woman in Photography. A graduate of the National Film and Television School, Sarah worked professionally producing and directing documentaries for BBC and CH4, including a series of award-winning documentaries with fellow NFTS graduate Molly Dineen. Jeans is actively pursuing her research interests in the areas of, Crime Fiction, Documentaries, Film Noir and Women in Photography and the Media

Artist / Lecturer and Network Facilitator for Fast Forward, UCA Farnham, UK

Maria Kapajeva is an Estonian artist who is based in London. Let year Kapajeva won the Runner-Up Award at FOKUS Video Art Festival, Denmark and her first artist book was shortlisted for Aperture Photobook Award. In 2016 she got a Gasworks & Triangle Network Fellowship to work at Kooshk Residency in Tehran. Her work was internationally exhibited including the most recent: RIBOCA Biennial (Latvia, 2018), Kaunas Photography Gallery (Lithuania, 2018), Narva Art Residency (Estonia, 2017), WOAK Gallery (Poland, 2017), Detroit Oloman Gallery (USA, 2017). Her video works participated at Luminocity Festival (Canada, 2018), NexT Film Festival (Romania, 2017) and Berlin Feminist Film Week (2016). Kapajeva teaches at the University for the Creative Arts (UK).  Kapajeva is a co-organiser of Fast Forward: Women in Photography and works as the Network Facilitator for The Fast Forward 2 project, supported by The Leverhulme Trust. www.mariakapajeva.com

Artist, Greece

Evangelia Katsaiti holds a BA in Photographic Studies from Derby University in the U.K. and an MA in Visual Arts from Sydney college of the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia. She is a practising artist that lives in Athens, Greece and currently works as an art photography lecturer in the University of Western Attica in Greece and has worked for academic institutions such as Oslo Fotokunst Skolen , Sydney College of the Arts, Lapland University, Jyvaskyla University,University of the Aegean, Kapodistrian University. She has exhibited in 3 solo shows and 30 group shows in Athens, Thessalonica, Skopelos, Kalamata in Greece, Derby, Manchester in the UK, and Sydney in Australia, Rovaniemi Finland. Her work is concerned with how photography can produce memory and thus identity and she works with the themes of renegotiating displacement, longing and belonging. 

Artist / Reader in Photography, UCA Rochester, UK

Steffi Klenz’ work has been shown in group and solo  exhibitions  both  nationally  and  internationally at the FotoMuseum Antwerp, Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts, The Phoenix Art Museum, The Fine Art Museum Luleå (Sweden), The Finish Museum of Photography, The SeaCity Museum in Southampton, The New Art Museum Walsall, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and Museum Künstlerkolonie in Darmstadt (Germany) to name a few. She participated in the British Council exhibition “Gestures of Resistance” as part of the fringe program of Documenta Athens in April 2017 and the recent international group-exhibition “Powerful Tides: 400 years of Chatham and the Sea” at the Historic Dockyard Museum in Chatham, UK in 2018. Her work has been discussed in numerous magazines such as Art Monthly, Art Review, Art World China, Elephant Magazine, The Architectural Review, Photographies, History of Photography Journal, Portfolio Magazine and HotShow to name a few. She was commissioned to undertake the BBC East Tower Commission (2016-2017) in London,  the Rights Of Passage Commission for the 2015 Venice Biennale, Strange Cargo Commission for the Cheriton Light Festival 2018 and recently completed the Tunbridge Wells Art Museum and Cultural Quarter Commission.

Klenz is Reader in Photography at the School of Fine Art and Photography at the University for the Creative Arts in the UK and has a guest mentor role for the School of Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria in 2018/2019.

MFA student, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Nancy Krakaur, a former private investigator, uses photography, installation, cinema and sculpture, to explore  fictive realities in the age of climate catastrophe.  Her research-led practice embraces exploratory behavior and failure.  Nancy spent three years reviewing Paul Klee’s pedagogic notes to the Bauhaus, and responded to his assignments photographically, using a 4×5 field camera.  She recently returned from  a residency at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern Switzerland. She is currently reconceiving Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator, within a weed tent.  Nancy read English Literature at the University of Rochester (1985) and is currently studying toward her MFA in Fine Art Media, at the Slade School of Art.

Artist, UK

A practising photographer, artist and tutor, Grace Lau was born in London of Chinese parentage. She holds an MA in Photography & Culture from UAL, and has exhibited widely including at the National Portrait Gallery, Tat Britain,  Photofusion, London, Turner Contemporary in Margate. Her publications include “Adults In Wonderland”(Serpents Tail, UK, 1997);  “Picturing The Chinese” (Joint Publishing, Hong Kong, 2008); and “Portraits In A Chinese Studio” (Parakeet Books, UK, 2019, edited by Val Williams). Lau’s work is in the collections of the NPG, Michael Wilson’s Photographic Collection and the Museum Of Diaspora Art in South Korea. 

Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, London, UK

Emma Lewis is Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where she curates exhibitions and displays and researches photography acquisitions for the international collection. She was assistant curator for the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 and Modigliani; contributed catalogue essays for Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art and The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, and is curator of the upcoming exhibition Dora Maar. Emma’s book ‘Understanding Photography’ – a look at image-making from the first photographic processes to the post-internet age – was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Artist, London, UK

Effie Paleologou is a London-based visual artist , whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.

Head of UCL Art Collections at University College London, UK

Nina Pearlman, Head of UCL Art Collections at University College London, is a contemporary art curator, writer and lecturer and veteran museum manager. She gained her PhD from the London Consortium, University of London. Her undergraduate and graduate studies were in fine art, with BA and MA gained from University of Haifa and UCL Slade School of Fine art respectively. Her research interests include women artists, sculpture, public art and photography and is committed to creating opportunities for emerging artists. She is a nominator for the Prix Pictet global prize in photography and sustainability and a member of the steering committee of the UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

Artist / Senior Teaching Fellow, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Sarah Pickering is an artist interested in fakes, tests, class, sci-fi, explosions, photography and gunfire. Sarah has extensively exhibited in the UK and internationally, recently as part of Manifesta 11, Zurich 2016, and Something Fierce at the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, 2017.  Solo exhibitions include Incident Control at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago 2010 and Celestial Objects at Durham Art Gallery, 2013. Her monograph, Explosions, Fires and Public Order is published by Aperture. Sarah currently holds the post of Senior Teaching Fellow in Photography at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

Artist / Lecturer in Photography, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham UK

Minna Pöllänen is a Finnish visual artist living and working in London. Pöllänen’s installation-based practice weaves together various media including sculpture, textile, photography and drawing. In her recent works she has explored body positions and movement in relation to feminism, consumerism, information overload and closeness. Pöllänen’s works often carry interactive and/or site-specific elements. She is interested in the touch of the viewer on the object and what a feminist installation might be. Pöllänen holds an MA with distinction (2011) in Fine Art Photography from London College of Communication and she is a Lecturer in Photography at UCA Farnham. Her works have recently been shown in Gallery  Forum Box in Helsinki (2017), Queens Museum in New York (2016), Galerie Projet Pangéee in Montreal (2016), Shonibare Guest Projects in London (2014). Pöllänen is the recipient of multiple residency fellowships including: Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2017), Triangle Arts Association in New York (2015), HIAP in Helsinki (2015-2016), Skaftfell Center for Art in Iceland (2014) and Kone Foundation Saari Residence in Mietoinen (2013).

Artist / Visiting Professor, Royal Academy Schools, UK

Helen Sear’s practice can be characterised by her exploration of the crossover between photography and fine art, and her focus on the co-existence of the human, animal, and natural worlds. She studied Fine Art at Reading University and University College London, Slade School, her practice coming to prominence in the late 1980s, when she worked primarily with installation, performance and video. Helen was the first female artist selected to represent Cymru yn Fenis/Wales in Venice with a solo exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015.

Her photographic works became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe. Photography remains a central subject and medium in her work, which often challenges the dominance of the eye and the fixed-point perspective associated with the camera lens. Her current work includes photography sound and video within a sculptural context, exploring the potential of the artwork to activate and elicit feeling. She is currently visiting professor at the Royal Academy Schools and external examiner for Graduate Media at the Slade School of Fine Art. www.helensear.com

Reader in Photography, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Karen Shepherdson is a photographer, curator and writer. She is reader in Photography at Canterbury Christ Church University, co-editor for the Journal of Photography and Culture and the founder director of the UK’s South East Archive of Seaside (SEAS) Photography. Shepherdson has received a number of funding awards and regularly creates national and international partnerships for practice and exhibition. Shepherdson’s research and practice focuses on coastal communities that have endured chronic cultural and social underinvestment and considers how common ground can be used as sites for potential wellbeing and community repair. Shepherdson was director of the Old Lookout Gallery in Broadstairs (2010–15), curated several festivals including Folkestone’s Salt: Festival of the Sea and Environment and also curated ‘Beyond the View: New Perspectives on Seaside Photography’. In 2019 she co-curates with Val Williams the Turner Contemporary exhibition Seaside Photographed (which is on national tour throughout 2020) and again with Val, has co-written a book of the same title. Karen’s own photographic work has been exhibited in the UK, Scandinavia and the USA.

Artist, UK

Recent solo exhibitions include Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA, 2019; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, 2016 and Maureen Paley, London, UK, 2015, as well as previous solo exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA, 2013, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, UK, 2011, Church of Light, a commission by the German Protestant Church, Frankfurt, 2010, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Castello di Rivoli, Turin both in 2000 and Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK in 1999. Hannah Starkey was invited to curate a room inHistory Is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and in 2014 she selected works for Magnum: One Archive, Three Views | BPB14, Part of Brighton Photo Biennale 2014, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, UK. Her work was recently included in 209 Women, Port Cullis House, London, UK, 2018, A Place in the World, East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, Norfolk, 2018;Transparency, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK, Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2015,Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography, Belfast Exposed and The MAC, Belfast, UK and Out Of Focus: Photography, Saatchi Gallery, London in 2012. Hannah Starkey’s photographs are represented in the collections of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, Seattle Art Museum, Tate in London and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In 2018, MACK published Photographs: 1997-2017. Starkey was born in Belfast in 1971 and she lives and works in London.

Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern, UK

Sandra Sykorova is visual anthropologist and curator based in London. Her practice spans across film, photography, performance, research and curatorial projects.  She holds BA in Social Anthropology (LSE), MA in Visual Anthropology (Goldsmiths College) and completed two-year Chinese studies at Peking University in Beijing in 2004. In 2007 she joined Tate Modern where she now works as Curator of Public Programmes.

MFA student, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK

Elena-Andreea Teleaga is a lens based media artist who uses different forms of visual art, especially analog photography, photo-montages and collages in installations to explore the relationship between experience, space and existence. Being born in a former communist country, Romania, her background is inevitably visible in the body of work which questions the historical past and the present socio-political context. She delves into the experimental side of photography, the one that does not follow any precise rules. The unexpected outcome gives birth to new approaches of this medium. Currently she is enrolled in the MFA Fine Art Media Course at the Slade School of Fine Art, 2nd year.

Artist / Curatorial Project Manager, Autograph ABP, UK

Bindi Vora is the Curatorial Project Manager at Autograph, London, an artist and a Visiting Lecturer at University of Westminster. Prior to Autograph she was at the Hayward Gallery working on their exhibitions and displays which included the Lee Bul: Crashing and the inaugural Hayward Gallery Billboard project featuring Njideka Akunyili Crosby; and The Photographers’ Gallery, London which included their offsite exhibitions programme In Fine Feather, Selfridges, London; In Your Face, Liberty London; and touring survey exhibition featuring 38 artists Work, Rest Play: British Photography from 1954 – 2017. In January she curated Let’s Go Through This Again at Sheffield’s iconic Portland Works.

As a contemporary photographic artist, her practice utilises various analogue processes. She has participated in a number of exhibition across Europe; most recently presenting an installation of her series white in the sea, 2011-2017 as part of A Shade of Pale at 180 The Strand. In 2014 she published her first photographic book In the Blue Light we Failed, which was acquired by The Women’s Art Library, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art and others. She is currently working on a site specific commission for The Hospital Rooms. www.bindivora.co.uk

Professor of Contemporary Art and Photography, University for the Creative Arts, UK

Jean Wainwright is Professor of Contemporary Art and Photography at School of Film and Media, University for the Creative Arts.She is an art historian, critic and curator living in London. Her areas of expertise are in contemporary art and photography, with particular reference to Andy Warhol, on whose life and works she is an internationally recognised expert. As a writer and academic she has published extensively in the contemporary arts field, contributing to numerous catalogues and books.  She also regularly appears on television and radio, most notably on Channel 4, the BBC, The Open University, Resonance FM and BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at London College of Communication and Director of the UAL Photography & the Archive Research Centre, UAL, UK

Val Williams is a writer and curator based in London. She is UAL Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at London College of Communication and Director of the UAL Photography & the Archive Research Centre and of the Moose on the Loose Biennale of Research . She is an Editor of the Journal of Photography & Culture and  has curated numerous exhibitions in  UK and internationally, at venues including Tate Britain, the V&A, the National Media Museum and for the British Council. She has worked on histories of women photographers since the 1980s and is the author of numerous books on the history of photography  and contemporary work.