Living Archives Podcast Episode 4: Ajamu and Bernice Mulenga
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In episode 4 of Living Archives, Ajamu and Bernice Mulenga bend time reflecting on their respective approaches to photography, intimacy and working with large institutions.
Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.
Living Archives is an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, what Stuart Hall calls, a “living archive of the diaspora” which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain.
Hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor, practitioners reflected on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other.
Hosted by Jessica Taylor
Edited by Chris Browne
Designs by Yolande Mutale
Music by LOX
Bios
Ajamu [Hon FRPS] is a fine art studio based / darkroom led photographic artist, archival curator and scholar. His work has been shown in Museums, galleries and alternative spaces worldwide. In 2022, Ajamu was canonised by The Trans Pennine Travelling Sisters as the Patron Saint of Darkrooms and received and honorary fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. Work appears in private and public collections worldwide.
Bernice Mulenga is a British-Congolese photographer with a distinct aptitude for archiving, documenting and interrogating the world around them. Mulenga’s work centres on their community and the experiences within it—most notably in their ongoing photo series #friendsonfilm. Their work also explores reoccurring themes surrounding identity, sexuality, grief, darkness and family.
Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.