Join us for a panel discussion between artists Ingrid Pollard and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski to discuss the documentation, preservation and representation of Black women’s and QTIPOC creativity with curator and writer Taylor Le Melle drawing from London’s recent history.

Artists Ingrid Pollard and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski discuss the documentation, preservation and representation of Black women’s and QTIPOC creativity with curator and writer Taylor Le Melle. Drawing from London’s recent history of Club Sauda, Lenthall Road Workshop, Lambeth Women’s Project, and X Marks the Spot, this event considers those collective endeavors for today’s new audiences. Varied approaches to community archiving, and the network of relationships that formulate communities around those events, will be starting points for talking about the representation of those histories now.

Ingrid Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. She was one of twenty founding members of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, Pollard was the Inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow in the same year. She has worked as an artist-in-residence at a number of organisations, including Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, London, 1994; Cumbria National Park, 1998; Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas, US, 2004; Croydon College of Art, 2011; and Glasgow Women’s Library, 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum, Photographers Gallery, London; NGBK, Berlin; the Caribbean Cultural Centre, New York; the National Art Gallery of Barbados; and Camerawork, San Francisco. In 2019, she received the BALTIC Artist Award and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.

Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski is based between London and Minneapolis and is a mixed-media artist/designer, archivist and organiser. Ahaiwe Sowinski investigates archives in relation to Black and minority ethnic histories and experiences in Britain and throughout the Diaspora, theorising and sharing her ideas on archives as spaces of therapy. Her current research focuses on the synergies between feminist, queer and (self-)archiving as curatorial and artistic practice.

Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer. They co-direct not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative with Imran Perretta, Rhea Storr and Jennifer Martin. They also publish books for PSS. Taylor’s most recent project Technical-Adjacent with Ima-Abasi Okon, was on display at Turf Projects in Croydon.