In conversation with artist Joy Labinjo

Joy Labinjo will be in conversation with Aïcha Mehrez, curator, writer and researcher. Formerly Assistant Curator of Contemporary British Art at Tate, Mehrez is currently undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD with Tate and the University of Leicester. Labinjo will discuss his artistic practice and her current exhibition A Place of Our Own.

About the speakers:

Regarded as one of the leading British figurative artists of her generation, Joy Labinjo (b. 1994) is known for her large-scale paintings that explore identity and power, Blackness, race and belonging, community and storytelling. Her style is instantly recognisable for its bold colour, flattened space and patchwork-like surfaces.

Born in Essex to Nigerian parents, Labinjo describes her work as ‘fundamentally about her British Nigerian heritage and what that experience means.’ This dual perspective informs her subjects and narratives, inviting viewers to see the world through her diasporic lens. Her practice follows a lineage of contemporary figurative art led by pioneering artists including Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson and Lubaina Himid. She lives and works in London.

Labinjo completed her BFA at Newcastle University 2017 and her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford 2022. She has exhibited widely since 2018 in national and international group and solo presentations including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Royal Academy, London; and the Lars Warner Gallery, Stockholm. Notable commissions include Birthday Party on the Green (2021) and 5 more minutes for Brixton Underground Station (2022). Labinjo’s work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Government Art Collection, UK; Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech; and Soho House, London. She lives and works in London.

Aïcha Mehrez is a curator, writer and researcher based in Folkestone. She graduated from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011 and from 2016 – 2021, was Assistant Curator of Contemporary British Art at Tate.

The most recent exhibition she curated was Sixty Years: The Unfinished Conversation which explored diasporic identity through works from the Tate collection from the past 60 years. Since 2021, Aïcha has been undertaking an AHRC funded PhD with Tate and the University of Leicester titled ‘How might curatorial methodologies centred in care and prevention of harm, help museums to ethically surface and address their colonial and imperial connections?’. Aïcha’s research considers how the work of writers and thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant might be applied to a radical reimagining of the ways in which we curate.

As part of her fieldwork, she has been holding a series of conversations with artists, curators and cultural workers exploring the ways in which we might be able to think about ecologies of knowledges as opposed to the accumulation of cultural property as well as how we might embed reflective practices and embrace pedagogies of listening rather than telling.

Aïcha is also a lecturer on the MA Curating Apprenticeship at University of Teesside/MIMA, an editor for the University of Leicester’s Museological Review and a freelance curator, writer and researcher. Her most recent published texts have been on Lewis Hammond for his exhibition This Glass House at Kunstpalais, Erlangen and Rene Matić for their exhibition Idols Lovers Mothers Friends at Arcadia Missa, London.