Reading Time: 3 minutes “I wanted to direct my photography towards questioning, towards an alternative narrative to the one imposed by the state in the face of terror”
Tag: colonialism
Reading Time: 3 minutes The photographer’s new book, Good Hope, draws on archival imagery and text to build a layered and fragmented narrative
Reading Time: 2 minutes In her new book, titled White Shoes, Faustine photographs herself at New York locations tied to the history of the slave trade, including former African burial grounds
Reading Time: 2 minutes The group exhibition offers an alternative perspective on the climate crisis by emphasising the unheard voices of the southern hemisphere
Reading Time: 2 minutes “Our current notions of gender, language, spirituality, religion, time – all of it – is a white construction.”
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Brazilian photographer celebrates the expression of those who live in constant fear of their lives, in a country where their very being is rejected.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Reappropriating Catholic imagery, Mendez highlights the impact of the colonial history in the ongoing sidelining of indigenous women in her home country
Reading Time: 4 minutes Gianelli draws on her heritage and response to the Black Lives Matter protests to create a fictional world where modern women express and represent themselves as they are.
Reading Time: 8 minutes Adopting a variety of guises and costumes, Samuel Fosso has spent a lifetime subverting cultural stereotypes with his performative self-portraits
Reading Time: 3 minutes “South Africa is a deeply religious country,” says Giya Makondo-Wills, whose work-in-progress, They Came From the Water While the World Watched, maps out the interplay between Christianity and ancestral religion in the region. With four trips to the country under her belt so far, the 23-year old has travelled as much into the past as in the present, tracing the indelible repercussions of 19th-century European migration as they resonate through South African culture today.
Makondo-Wills, who is British-South African, became interested in her African grandmother’s faith while shooting another project. “She’s very Orthodox Christian but she also still practises ancestral religion, and that’s a core part of who she is. She prays to a God and the gods,” the photographer explains.
This duality got her thinking about the intersections of belief systems and how they were brought into contact. How did Christianity become so influential? How does it co-exist with indigenous religions? Building on her interests in race and identity, these questions soon elicited many others, spawning a long-term project that has carried her from a BA to an MA at the University of South Wales.