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Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah will be in residence in Bristol’s Georgian House Museum, creating a new body of work in relation to the building’s colonial history. Built in the late 18th century, Georgian House is best known as the home of John Pinney (1740 – 1818), a wealthy sugar merchant and slave holder; yet was also home to Pero Jones (1753-1793) and Fanny Coker (1767-1820), both of whom were born into slavery and brought to Bristol by the Pinney family. Adu-Sanyah’s commission will respond to these histories. 

About Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah

Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah is a German-Ghanaian artist and photographer based in Zürich, Switzerland. Her work centres upon the colour darkroom, where she uses the materials of photography – paper, light and time – to investigate familial bonds, personal loss, identity and structures of institutional power. The work created emphasises the process of its making; particularly the journey from initial ideas and research research to the creation of a photographic object that is imbued with feeling and emotion.

She has held exhibitions across Europe, including: Centre Photographie Genéve (CH), Photoforum Pasquart (CH), Saarland Museum (DE) & Foam Museum (NL). Her work is held in the permanent collections of both the city and canton of Zurich, the Swiss Photography Foundation (Fotostiftung Schweiz), Fotomuseum Winterthur and the city of Saarbrücken. In 2024, she was the recipient of the Swiss Art Award. She is the author of one monograph, Rough Tide (edition fink, 2024).

The Georgian House Museum is a historic building and does not meet modern accessibility standards.

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In 2011, artist Nigel Poor started volunteering at San Quentin State Prison teaching a history of photography class through the Prison University Project. This led to a long-term collaboration, working with a group of men to explore and respond to San Quentin’s prison archive. Through her images and accompanying stories, viewers are led on a journey that unpacks both the long history of San Quentin Prison, as well as the challenges of representation in relation to incarcerated communities. 

Alongside this exhibition, Bristol Photo Festival has been developing a long-term collaborative project in prisons across the region. Some of the outcomes of this project will be on display as part of the exhibition. 

About Nigel Poor 

Nigel Poor is an artist living and working in the Bay Area, California. For many years her work has explored the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. Her work has been shown at many institutions including, The San Jose Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, Friends of Photography, SF Camerawork, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Since 2011 she has been working on creative projects with incarcerated collaborators at San Quentin Prison, including the internationally-acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle (now downloaded over 75 million times). Poor is also a Professor of Photography at California State University.

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The agro-industrial region of Almería (Andalusia, Spain) is known locally as ‘The Sea of Plastic’ due to the vast network of greenhouses that dominate the landscape. It is an area dedicated to the production of out-of-season vegetables, often exported to northern European countries, including the United Kingdom. Bandia Ribeira’s work focuses on the often-invisible communities of workers who find themselves caught in a system where lax labour and environmental regulations fuel cycles of exploitation and segregation. 

About Bandia Ribeira

Bandia Ribeira is a key emerging figure within Spanish photography, best known for her long-term, research-led approach. She has produced exhibitions at a number of festivals across Spain, including Ffoco (Festival de Fotografia da Coruña), Bienal de Lalín Pintor Laxeiro, Encuentro de Creación Fotográfica de Andalucía & Festival Internacional de Cine Curtocircuito. In 2023, Ribeira received a Fulbright fellowship to conduct research in the U.S.A, investigating the Farm Security Administration photographic collection at the Library of Congress. This period informed her long-term research of people and places shaped by agricultural industries. In 2024, Ribeira was selected by the British Journal of Photography for their influential ‘Ones to Watch’ list.

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The global surge in demand for avocados has driven drug cartels across Mexico to become heavily involved in the trade. In response, in 2011 a group of women from the community of Cherán (Michoacán state) took a stand against the local cartel and succeeded in establishing a new government based on long-standing Purépecha indigenous principles. For five years, the collective Ritual Inhabitual documented Cherán’s struggle through a blend of documentary and fictional photography, collaborating with local artists to create a polyphonic narrative. Their project, Oro Verde, represents a form of ‘mytho-documentary’ symbolising key events in Cherán’s reclamation of communal autonomy. This exhibition – their first in the UK – is co-curated by Rosi Huaroco and Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo.

About Ritual Inhabitual

Based in Paris, Tito Gonzalez Garcia (France, 1977) and Florencia Grisanti (Chile, 1983) founded the shared artistic practice Ritual Inhabitual in 2013. The collective is composed of artists, curators, publishers working together to develop long-term projects that explore the role of myth within contemporary political struggle, particularly in relation to land, ecology and indigenous rights across Latin America.

In 2021 they were finalists for the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award for “Forêts Géométriques, luttes en territoire Mapuche,” published by Actes Sud. In 2022, they won the Musée du Quai Branly documentary photography prize for their work Oro Verde, due to also be published by Actes Sud in 2024. Their works have been acquired by multiple collections, including the Contemporary Art Fund of Seine-Saint-Denis, the Rothschild Foundation Switzerland, the Musée du Quai Branly and various private collections across South America. This exhibition will be their first in the UK. 

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In recent years, Sarker Protick has been studying the material fragments of empire found across modern-day Bangladesh – a region that was first known as East Bengal, then later East Pakistan, before gaining independence in 1971.

His images firstly draw attention to the British railway lines built in the 19th century to connect the rich agricultural lands of East Bengal to the British administrative capital of Calcutta (Kolkata). The trainlines became the lifeblood of the colonial project, allowing the British to effectively manage India as a singular body. Yet within this unifying railway system lay the seeds of colonial collapse. It was the very notion of a pan-Indian identity and political movement – made possible via these new connections – that led to the expulsion of the British in 1947. The ensuing partition saw communities flee, partly by train, as Bengal was carved in two, with Hindu communities moving west to join the newly independent India, while Muslim communities travelled east to join what became East Pakistan. Bodily metaphors are common when writing about infrastructure – for example, railways as the lifeblood of the nation’s body. Such language demonstrates how seemingly inert structures play an active role in shaping lives and histories. 

Elsewhere, Protick focuses upon abandoned Zamindar houses, once occupied by landlords – the middlemen of all empires – who were assigned the task of extracting rent from rural tenants. The system began in the 16th Century under the Mughal Empire which extorted rent from Hindu tenant farmers who grew early commodities including cotton, indigo, rice, wheat and tea. While much of this revenue was passed directly to the centralised government of the Mughal emperor, the Zamindars lived lives of relative luxury, similar to the landed aristocracy of other regions. Upon gaining control of Bengal in 1765, the East India Company quickly consolidated this system of land control, establishing a small but loyal class of Hindu landowners who now ruled over their rural, often muslim tenants. This came to an abrupt end during partition with landlords some of the first to flee. The abandoned Zamindar houses slowly fell into disrepute, to be overtaken by their surroundings. 

Spaces of Separation speaks to the history of Bengal and the ongoing dance of people, place and power. The project is also about the act of listening itself, understanding how the past is always present, both in the surrounding landscape as well as in the lives of all who are shaped by history. It is a meditation on collective memory and the role it might play in society today.

About Sarker Protick

Working with photography, video and sound, Sarker Protick’s works are built on long-term surveys of Bangladesh. He is drawn to themes such as time passing, the alteration of land and borders, as well as traces of both personal and political histories. Protick is a lecturer at the South Asian Media Institute Pathshala, and co-curator of Chobi Mela, the longest running international photography festival in Asia. As an artist he has received multiple awards and fellowships, including Joop Swart Masterclass, Foam Talent, Light Work Residency, Magnum Foundation Fund and the World Press Photo Award. He is represented by Shrine Empire, Delhi.

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In this new work premiering at the Festival, Bristol-based artist Amak Mahmoodian examines the experience of dreaming for individuals living in exile. Working with 16 collaborators, all of whom are exiled from their native countries, Mahmoodian uses photography, poetry, drawing and video to explore the new lives created through dreams, as well as the ways in which dreaming enables individuals to return to a past that cannot be reached while awake. The title, One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, refers to the average time a person spends dreaming each night. The project was supported and commissioned by Multistory and D6: Culture in Transit.

About Amak Mahmoodian

Working with photography, text, video, drawing and archives, Mahmoodian’s artistic practice explores the representation of gender, identity and displacement, weaving connections between the personal and the political. She has published two books: Shenasnameh (RRB & IC Visual Lab, 2016), which was shortlisted for the First Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles; and Zanjir (RRB, 2019), which was the winner of the Photo Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. Mahmoodian completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales (2015) and currently works as a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England. 

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Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Shergold operated a commercial photography studio in Bristol, using glass plate negatives – an unusually antiquated technique popular in the 1910s – to create highly stylised portraits of actors as well as of his local community. In Shergold’s studio, Bristol’s working class residents were styled to appear as Hollywood film stars. Yet little is known of Shergold. After his death, his images largely disappeared from view, falling into the possession of private collectors in the U.S., The Netherlands, as well as Bristol. From the latter collection, curator and photo historian Hedy van Erp has curated the first known exhibition of Shergold’s work. This exhibition takes place close to the site of his original studio and is supported by Marcel Brent (Vintage Photographs) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

About Hedy Van Erp

Hedy van Erp is a Dutch photo historian, author and curator of photography and video art. She develops exhibitions and concepts for museums, galleries and photo festivals. She has curated exhibitions for, among others, the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; Photo Museum The Hague, the English National Media Museum; the Science Museum, London; the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Museum Kranenburgh, the National Maritime Museum and the Hermitage in Amsterdam. Supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Van Erp researched Dutch photo archives in private collections in 2023.

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Since 2008, Andrew Jackson has been developing an ongoing trilogy of projects exploring the intergenerational experience of Britain’s Caribbean diaspora. Divided into three chapters with questions of family, community and inheritance at its core, it begins with Jackson’s own reflection on his parents’ story, who arrived in England as part of the Windrush generation. Next, it follows a group of young men from Handsworth, Birmingham, from the 2008 financial crash to the hostile environment of post-Brexit Britain. The final chapter will see Jackson return to Jamaica, exploring the psychological impact of migration, home and belonging. 

About Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is a British/Canadian photographer and artist based between Montréal, Canada and the UK. His practice focuses on notions of family, transnational migration, displacement, trauma, war, and collective memory. He is an Associate Lecturer at the London College of Communication and has previously served on the board of the Photo Ethics Centre. In 2018, he was selected to be the Light Work / Autograph ABP artist-in-residence in Syracuse, New York. His works are held in multiple permanent collections, including: the United Kingdom Government Art Collection, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, New Walsall Art Gallery, Rugby Museum & Art Gallery, Cadbury Trust, Autograph ABP, and Light Work Collection, New York.

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In 2009, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay visited the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to view archival photographs of Palestine, taken between 1947 and 1950. The images document the forced displacement of the Palestinian population – an event commonly known as the ‘Nakba’. Azoulay was instructed that the archival images could not be reproduced or exhibited unless strict conditions were met, limiting the free interpretation of the material and ultimately of history itself. In response, Azoulay decided to draw the photographs, creating a record that exists beyond the control of official narratives and archives.

About Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay holds a dual appointment in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is a film essayist and independent curator of archives and exhibitions. Her research and recent book, Potential History (Verso, 2019), concern key political concepts/institutions: archive, sovereignty, plunder, art, human rights, return and repair. Potential history, a concept and an approach she has developed over the last decade, has far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, archival formations, and photography studies as well as for the reversal of imperial violence. 

Azoulay studied at the Université Paris VIII and received her DEA from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and PhD from Tel Aviv University’s Cohn Institute. Her books include Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and (with Adi Ophir) The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford, 2012). Among her films are Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012). Her exhibitions include Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016), and Act of State 1967-2007, (Centre Pompidou, 2016; Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa Fotográfico, 2020).

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For his first solo exhibition in the UK, Inuuteq Storch will present two bodies of work. Firstly, Porcelain Souls, a collection of photographs and letters created by his parents during a period of geographic separation; his father in Sisimiut, Greenland, and mother in Aarhus, Denmark. And secondly, Keepers of the Ocean, a delicate and diaristic portrait of Sisimiut, Storch’s hometown. Through his work, Storch aims to present a living, breathing history of Greenland, as told through the eyes of Greenland’s people, rather than defined by others.

About Inuuteq Storch

Inuuteq Storch is a photographic artist living and working in Sisimiut, Greenland. While diverse in approach, his work draws connections between past and present, personal and national identity.

Storch studied photography at the International Center of Photography, New York, and at Fatamorgana School of Photography, Copenhagen. He is the author of multiple books, including: Keepers of the Ocean (2022, Disko Bay), John Møller – Mirrored, Portraits of Good Hope (2021, Roulette Russe), Flesh (2019, Disko Bay) and Porcelain Souls (2018, Konnotation). His work has been exhibited across Scandinavia, the U.S.A and Canada. In 2024 he became the first artist from Greenland to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale.

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