Staying Power – Photographs of Black British Experience (1950s-1990s)

 

Jennie Baptiste

Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s is a project to increase the number of black British photographers and images of black Britain in the V&A collection. It aims to raise awareness of the contribution of black Britons to British culture and society, as well as to the art of photography.

Nikki S. Lee

The Punk Project

The Punk Project is one of over a dozen series of photographs in which Korean-born New York photographer Nikki Lee pushes the boundaries of identity and place, of who we are and how others see us in proximity to the people we choose to surround ourselves with. She places herself within the frame of her images, transforming herself into the documented subject after constructing the context and setting the stage. She performs identity – reinventing herself with the stereotypes, media hype, codes, and clues that look into and out from a given community, infiltrates that community, and presents us with a new version of herself. She is a respectful tourist shopping for who she is within a subculture, stretching the very skin of her own identity to find a fit. Her images dig deep into the construction of community and ego, of social roles and what it means to be self-defined and/or categorized by someone else. She ultimately asks, are personal identity and communal identity fluid?

Guerrilla Girls

In 1985, a group of New York-based women artists banded together to protest the rampant discrimination in a male curated, male-centric MoMA show (where out of the 169 artists represented, only 13 were female). Out of that spirit, the highly vocal, social-crime-fighting, vigilante, primate-masked, anonymous, but ever watchful (and score-keeping) feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls was born.

ORLAN

 7th Surgery-Performance – Omnipresence, 1993

ORLAN was born in Saint-Etienne, France. She lives and works between Paris, Los Angeles and New York. ORLAN explores different techniques such as photography, video, sculpture (in resin, marble and inflatable), drawing, installation, performance, biotechnology, etc… She was the first artist to use surgery as an artistic medium.

Nomusa Makhubu

Self-Portrait series, 2007-2013

Makhubu has established herself as one of the new generation of lens based artists to explore issues of identity, culture, land, rights, economy and religion. Her acclaimed series, Self-Portrait Project alludes to the continued alienation and estrangement in an era where the focus is inclined toward self and individual identity as opposed to collective and communal life. One of the canonical meanings that Achille Mbembe (2002: 241) argues can be attributed to slavery and colonialism (as well as Apartheid) is dispossession, a process in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material expropriation. Makhubu’s latest series The Flood has received deserved critical acclaim. It marks a departure from her previous work, shifting from the personal to the public.