In this talk, photographers Alba Zari and Emi O’Connell will discuss how dark moments in their personal family histories have influenced and shaped their work. Zari will share insights into The Occult, a multilayered project that attempts to understand her mother’s experiences living in a Christian Fundamentalist sect called The Children of God. Pulling images from family albums, archival footage supplied by members of the cult and sexualized drawings from comics created by the sect’s founder, Zari shines a light not only on her mother’s life but also the insidious indoctrination and abuse at the core of the sect. 

In 1964, Emi O’Connell’s pregnant grandmother escaped from one of Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes. She will discuss her work and then I ran, which uses performative self-portraiture, landscape photography and still life to re-enact events that lead to her grandmother’s flight and her father’s adoption. Sat between image, text and documentary photography the work explores themes of purity and redemption while exposing the abuse and neglect many young women endured at the hands of the Catholic Church and Irish State.

Both artists will be joined by Dr Tamsin Silvey, who will moderate the talk. Silvey is Cultural Programme Curator at Historic England.

Both Alba Zari and Emi O’Connell’s works will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.

This panel brings together five contemporary Chinese diasporic artists whose works challenge China’s patriarchal, heteronormative and totalitarian frameworks. Each artist is adept at re-imagining historic narratives to liberate themselves from past silencing and ignite alternative futures. The speakers include: curator and artist Charlotte Yao; Yasmine Anlan Huang will discuss her 3 screen video Servitude: do not believe that Google Map – a speculative fiction challenging the trajectory of a cognitive capitalist future; Wing Ka Ho Jimmi will shed light on Last Summer 2019, a series of portraits of young asylum seekers which explores migration in the light of the student protests in Hong Kong; Willian Zhou looks at queer and diasporic identities in close relation to family. (Vice)Versa weaves performative portraits and still life photography to consider dilemmas of belonging and becoming. You Liang’s Pale Spring Age delves into her personal family history as a Chinese queer individual navigating the complexities of growing up in a conservative town.

The artists will be discussing their work with Denise Kwan, an artist, researcher and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer at Camberwell UAL and Bristol UWE.

Charlotte Yao is the winner of Peckham 24’s Curatorial Open Call 2024 with her exhibition ANTAGONISTIC SUPERPOSITIONS. The show will be on display at AMP Gallery, 1 Acorn Parade, London SE15 2TZ from 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.

This talk invites artists Jermaine Francis and Sunil Shah to explore the role archives play in considering the presence and the absence of the black figure in history. Francis will discuss Once Upon A Time, a series of photographic montages the artist created in response to the Anglican Church’s archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. His research focussed on the Anglican Church’s missionary program, material that sheds light on the church’s perceived relationship to the colonial project and to Black and Brown people. A paradoxical relationship that involved the dissemination of purportedly progressive religious instruction, vested interests and complicity in the mechanisms of colonial power. Sunil Shah’s practice looks to his extensive archive of family photographs depicting life amongst Asian diaspora communities in Uganda before their expulsion in 1972. His project 1969 seeks to radically destabilise the function of the archive by subverting the visual registers within the photographs as objects of commemoration, material progress, socio-political and cultural import. Intervening on the surface of his images, Shah creates fragmentary worlds to reveal blind spots of subjectivities, absent personhoods and socio-political conditions inherent in family photographs of diaspora communities living under the legacy of colonialism. 

The artists will be joined by Pelumi Odubanjo who will moderate the conversation. Odubanjo is a curator, writer and PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. 

Both Jermaine Francis and Sunil Shah will be exhibiting their work in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.

This panel brings together two mixed-media artists whose practices play with photography’s ambivalent status between fact and fiction to speculate on imagined events from the past. As a child, Laura Chen was always fascinated with investigating and solving crimes. This passion finds full expression in Being Framed, a multi-layered project that plays within a narrative of imagined crimes investigated by a protagonist police detective in the 1970’s. Interweaving staged photography, collage, ransom letters, newspaper clippings and faked archival documents, the artists explores themes of speculative documentary, criminology, psychology, parafiction and the medium of photography itself. Chen will be joined by Duncan Poulton, whose immersive installation Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow takes viewers back to the year 2000 and invites them to image an alternative scenario in which the Millennium Bug did cause global digital meltdown. Made exclusively with found materials, his work addresses a visual culture of overabundance and ambivalence, exploring the compression of histories and meaning engendered by the internet. 

The talk will be chaired by Ravi Ghosh, Deputy Editor of the British Journal of Photography.

Laura Chen’s Being Framed will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May

Duncan Poulton’s Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow will be exhibited in Unit 8, Copeland Park between 17th-19th May.

Book your ticket here.

DUCK is a daring deepfake short that follows Sean Connery’s unravelling after he witnesses Marilyn Monroe’s return from the dead. Set within the recognisable world of a British spy thriller, DUCK’s main protagonist, a deepfake Connery, plays out the role he knows all too well: collecting clues, wrong-footing assailants, and eliminating the femme fatale, only to find that not all is what it seems. Monroe is the glamourous siren and a thorn in Connery’s side; unlike him, she understands the power that comes with being just an image—an appropriation of femininity and sexuality largely defined by men—and she uses her endlessly mutable image to her own manipulative gain.

DUCK is unique in entirely using deepfake video and audio to resurrect actors through machine-learning. Visually captivating, funny, and technically innovative, DUCK takes elements from classic Hollywood, video games, film noir, and sci-fi to raise compelling questions about truth and power.

Run time: 16 minutes, 26 seconds

DUCK will screen on a loop on Friday 24th May in Screen 6 at Peckhamplex.

Free drop in screening.  No need to book.

In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Eleonora Agostini about her project A Study on Waitressing. As a child, Eleonora Agostini would sit in her family’s restaurant and observe her mother working front of house. Over lunch, she would study her mother’s movements as she circulated the restaurant, hearing her repeat the same phrases and entertaining the clients. Occasionally, she would witness her mother slip behind the curtain that led to the kitchen to complain about a customer, before smiling and returning to the restaurant floor as if nothing had happened.It is this shifting of personas, the performativity of social roles and its relationship with images that underpins A Study on Waitressing. The work assembles and re-presents photographs, archival imagery and footage, collage and text as a research method to analyse the theatricality of the everyday and the function of the body as a conduit between observer and observed.

Eleonora Agostini's work will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May during Peckham 24.

Gem Fletcher is a writer and host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.

In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Bindi Vora who utilses collage, mark making and the appropriative use of image and text to question how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. The conversation will focus on two projects Vora is presenting at Peckham 24, Mountain of Salt and Unravelling.

Mountain of Salt is an expansive series of 371 works composed of found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages, initially conceptualised as a human response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As the country was plunged into lockdown, Vora began to collect fragments of text and spoken word from politicians, journalists or members of the public accrued across a range of sources; government briefings, Twitter commentary and even placards from the Black Lives Matter protests. The resulting juxtapositions feel uncanny—familiar yet elusive—like a half-remembered dream. 

In an evolving new series Unravelling, Vora attempts to locate herself in a culture where colonial systems have sought to flatten and simplify her heritage. The work gently unravels Vora’s family history of migration traversing three continents, over the course of a century to explore the interplay of archive and myth, unveiling the complexities and tensions inherent in diasporic experiences.

Bindi Vora is an interdisciplinary artist of Kenyan-Indian heritage, associate lecturer at LCC and senior curator at Autograph, London. She is interested in how ideas of resistance and resilience are shaped by our surroundings, histories and lived experiences. Her practice often combines linguistics and an archive of personal and found photographs procured over the last decade to draw on the intersections between language, culture and their inherent power dynamics.

Gem Fletcher is a writer and host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.

In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Alexander Coggin to discuss ‘Mike,’ a fifteen year photographic archive of his spouse Micheal. United by a spontaneity and informed by Coggin’s background in theatre, Mike is a deeply intimate, yet playful exploration of Queer love told through hundreds of photographs. “I carry an embodied memory with every single one of these images,” explains Coggin. “I can tell you where we were, why, and roughly when. I can tell you how I was feeling at the time of the image-taking. I can tell you what happened before and what happened after. Michael, however, doesn’t remember the making of these images, as he stopped noticing being photographed a long time ago.” Through ‘Mike,’ Coggin offers a cross section of lived history that encompasses the theatricality of the everyday to life's most vulnerable moments. 

Alexander Coggin is an American queer photographer and filmmaker living in London who penetrates trends of visual homogeneity with idiosyncratic and uncanny imagery. Raised in the theatre, he is dedicated to bringing the same theatrical and artificial frameworks learned on the stage to the visible everyday. 

Gem Fletcher is a writer and host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.

Please join Anne McNeill, Director of Impressions Gallery for an open, relaxed and informal round table chat on how galleries and artists can rethink sustainable exhibition production, and how photographers and artists can work in more eco-friendly and sustainable ways. This chat is for everyone who shares an interest in photography, art, eco issues, sustainability and helping the environment.

The discussion will broach important questions as to how we can make photographs with neutral or positive environmental impact? What are the photographic approaches that are more sustainable and better for the environment? The gallery is passionate about helping people to respond to the current environmental crisis in a more positive way through creative expressions. However, we know we still have more questions on how to get better at what we do, and we are always on the lookout for new solutions and suggestions. We have the best intentions and we wish to share our learnings with peers and colleagues in the photography world, and to learn from what others are doing.

Impressions Gallery is a charity that helps people understand the world through photography and acts as an agent for change. In 2015 Impressions Gallery pledged its commitment to the UN’s sustainable goal of a call to action “to protect the planet”. Caring for the environment has increasingly been at the heart of what Impressions does.

Anne McNeill is the director of Impressions Gallery, Bradford. She is the co-curator, with Lisa Holmes Photo Hub North, of the first edition of Creative Earth Eco Fest: Making change through photography and art, takingplace outside in the grounds of Cliffe Castle, Keighley on Saturday 3 August.

Book your ticket here.

In this live podcast recording, Gem Fletcher speaks with Lina Geoushy to discuss her work Trailblazers, an inquiry into Egypt’s feminist history using self-portraiture, performance, and archival artefacts to reclaim and inscribe a counter-history. Geoushy, who was born in Cairo in 1990, was deeply influenced by Egyptian cinema made between the 1940s and 1960s, a period known as the Golden Age of cinema in Egypt in which women played powerful roles. These portrayals were in stark contrast to the conservative reality Geoushy witnessed the women around her navigate from the 1990s onwards. Responding to this dissonance, Geoushy has built an archive informed by a feminist impulse, amassing popular cultural material depicting and describing acts of female achievement and struggle. 

Lina Geoushy is an Egyptian social documentary photographer living and working between London and Cairo whose work explores gender, female empowerment and sociopolitical issues. 

Gem Fletcher is a writer and the host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.

To celebrate her new book Queer Methodology for Photography, artist and educator Asa Johannesson sits down with Gem Fletcher to discuss new approaches to making, thinking, and writing about queer photography informed by a rich history of Queer image makers. Through the book, Johannesson proposes a new concept of the photographic image that addresses its materiality, in the form of the poetic and the political, in relationship to a generative principle that is named as a queer quality: the photograph’s ability to voice queer concerns beyond its role as representation.

Åsa Johannesson is an artist working across photography, installation, and writing. Her practice concerns the relationship between queerness, representation, and material knowledge production.

Gem Fletcher is a writer and the host of The Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the ways in which images shape our world and what it means to be a photographer today. 

The Messy Truth X Peckham 24 is a series of live podcast recordings hosted at this year's festival engaging some of photography’s most dynamic talent in candid conversations about their recent work and wider practice.

Book your ticket here.

Image © Åsa Johannesson - Turn from The Queering of Photography, Polaroid, 2021

Artists Mia Weiner and Salma Ahmad Caller both share a concern to shift the narrative regarding representation of the female body in art and colonial history. Mobilising uniquely different visual languages, the aim of their work is transformative: to activate and liberate the female body from its historic role as passive object of the male gaze. 

In this talk, Mia Weiner will discuss Sirens, a series of headless textile portraits she made of herself and other female, non-binary and intersex models that recall Classical Greek sculpture. Her tapestries beckon the viewer into a realm where mythology mingles with contemporary discourse on gender and femininity inviting us to question and re-imagine the world in which we live. Salma Ahmad Caller mines her collection of 19th Century colonial postcards of women labelled as being from ‘Egypt’ that in reality depict a wide range of women from Egypt, Sudan and sub Saharan Africa, to create a series of photographs and hybrid digital/analogue collages, that offer the subjects new emergent possibilities of representation. She will discuss Atlas Series, Emergent Dreams and the foundation of Postcard Women’s Imaginarium.

Weiner and Caller will be joined by Raquel Villar-Pérez who will moderate the talk. Villar-Pérez is Curator at Impressions Gallery, Bradford and a writer. 

Mia Weiner is a winner of the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Her work will be on display in Copeland Gallery between 17th–26th May.

Book your ticket here.

This panel invites three artists to discuss how their practices mobilize their diasporic identities to counter colonialism’s drive to disrupt and disparage their ancestral past. Silvia Rosi’s Teacher Don’t Teach me Nonsense is a series of self-portraits, which explore the artist’s connection to her (sadly forgotten) mother tongue Mina, a language largely spoken in Togo. Her project explores self-narrative and the histories of language loss through the diaspora and Togo’s colonial history. In Orí Inú, taken from Yorùbá Spiritual Tradition’s meaning of Orí as ‘inner-consciousness’, London-based artist Aisha Seriki looks to her Nigerian heritage for spiritual sustenance. Her performative black and white portraits work in conversation with photographic bronze combs that act as symbols of African diaspora histories, empowerment, ritual and self-care. New York-based Samantha Box will discuss Caribbean Dreams - Constructions, a multi-layered body of work that explores exodus, the transformations that happen therein, and the language of diaspora. Studio tableaux and still-lifes of familial and regionally referent objects, fruits, vegetables and plants draw our attention to the Caribbean’s colonial history, while self-portraits and images from her family albums lay claim to a different autonomous history. 

The speakers will be joined by Dr Taous R. Dahmani, who will moderate the talk. Dr Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator.

Silvia Rosi and Aisha Seriki are winners of the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Their work will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Samantha Box’s Caribbean Dreams: Constructions will also be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.

Terminating Martin Parr documents Tom Pope’s performance of the same name where the artist destroyed 17 photographs created by Martin Parr. The 7-hour 47-minute performance took place on 19th May 2022 at ArtHouse Jersey.

The publication brings together the destroyed images and records of the performance. There is an in-conversation with Alice Maude-Roxby that expands on the notions of performance, destruction, and the value systems of the art world. Alongside a creative text contribution by Becky Tanner-Rolf. Designed by Johanne Lian Olsen and published by Folium.

This performative book launch will feature Tom Pope and Folium simultaneously finishing and semi-destroying the book cover with a cyanotype soaked tennis ball and a drill.

This discussion brings together two accomplished female practitioners, photographer Nancy Floyd and writer / curator Sara Knelman, who share an interest in creating women-centred archives. Weathering Time is Floyd’s monumental on-going project of daily self-documentation. Begun in 1982 as a way to document herself age, the project has evolved into an extensive ‘visual almanac’ of the artist with family, friends, pets, evolving technologies and changing fashions and cultures of the last 42 years. 

Lady Readers is collection of photographs of women reading that Knelman has been accumulating over the last decade and highlights her interest in photography and text. Her archive comprises found vintage photographs from every era of photographic history and offers the viewer a window into the possibilities of the private and emancipatory spaces of reading, especially important to women.

Accompanying them in this discussion is Iris Sikking who will moderate the talk. Sikking is Curator of Photography at Fotomuseum Den Haag and co-editor of the volume Why Exhibit?

Nancy Floyd is a winner of the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. Her Work will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May.

Sara Knelman’s Lady Readers can be seen in Unit 8, Copeland Park between 17th-19th May.

Book your ticket here.

In this talk, artists Odette England and Amin Yousefi will explore the role their archives play in questioning the photographic gaze. England will discuss Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash, a collection of found vernacular photographs the artist has been acquiring of men taking pictures of women without their permission, women shielding their faces and men posing with guns. Viewed as a body of work, her archive proposes that within our culture lies a complex and sinister relationship between the camera, guns and violence against women.

Amin Yousefi will share insights into Eyes Dazzle as they Search for The Truth, a photographic journey to the Islamic Revolution (1978-1979). Re-photographing existing archival portraits of crowd protestors, the artist invites the viewer to reconsider the dynamics between the photographer and the photographed. Both artists will be discussing these projects as well as sharing broader aspects of their practice.

The talk will be chaired by David Campany: a writer, curator, editor and educator. 

Odette England and Amin Yousefi’s works will be on view at Copeland Gallery from 17th-26th May.

Book your ticket here.