Who gets to define a region, and what happens when photography becomes trapped inside the language of crisis?
For too long, images from across Africa and SWANA have been flattened by repetition, shaped through war, catastrophe and spectacle, while other realities, histories and forms of presence are pushed aside. Photography has often helped build these narrow narratives, fixing places and people inside frames that are partial, extractive and politically loaded.
This conversation asks what it means to move beyond that. How might we begin to reframe the image of a region through practices rooted in complexity, lived experience and visual languages that resist reduction and return us to a fuller sense of human presence?
Artist Hrair Sarkissian, whose work moves through photography, moving image, sculpture, sound and installation, creates meditative and haunted spaces where absence, memory and the unsaid are given room to breathe. He is joined by London-based curator, writer and scholar Renée Mussai, whose work is deeply engaged with Black feminist and queer Afrodiasporic visual practices, and by contributing photographer to the VII Foundation Ali Arkady, whose life and work have been shaped by exile after documenting war crimes in Iraq. Together, they reflect on image-making, power and the urgent need to unsettle the visual habits through which whole regions have been seen.
This event is held in collaboration with Laura El-Tantawy of PLATFORM2020, an online hub for documentary photography, rooted in Africa & SWANA and open to the world.
