Serendipity

Aiming to nurture and platform Black artists both in the UK and internationally the curation process began in Germany with the work of Patricia Vester. BHM Through Your Eyes forms part of a wider series called Skin and Colour.  It features photographs of the artist’s Black friends and colleagues as a way of honouring the spectrum of Black beauty.

Venturing across the North Sea to the United Kingdom Shangomola Edunjobi explores Zulu and Xhosa mythology in the manga comic and accompanying animated film Beware the Tokoloshe. 

Continuing in the examination of African culture is the Through Their Eyes collection by Tolu Coker. The drawings depict the artist’s study of neighbouring villages Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo centering on the daily lives of the women and children she encountered on her travels.

Irírí by Ade Coke explores Black Britishness from the lens of London’s West African community, inspired by his father’s life as a social activist and photojournalist.

Attempting to answer the question of which distressing experiences have been passed down from the generation that came before, Intergenerational Trauma by Isaac Ouro-Gnao and Ashley Karrell is a series of photographs that visual explore this very concept.

Fast forwarding to 2021 in the beach town of Margate Charlie Evaristo-Boyce’s Cabbage, part of Emergency? digital collages capture the uneasiness of navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and adjusting to much of the world being viewed through a screen.

(Running Series) brings together a selection of images and gifs featuring a roughly animated black male avatar. The avatar is seen running through several different terrains against the backdrop a black square - a symbol of the 2020 Black lives matter movement. The series leaves the audience questioning whether we can break the racial or political code of what is our current frame.