Beyond the Frame: Heather Agyepong | Jessa Fairbrother | Lua Ribeira

Opening 18 May – 10 October 2021 | Tue-Sun 10.00-17.00

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery | Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1RL

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Artists Heather Agyepong, Jessa Fairbrother, and Lua Ribeira have collaborated with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. In a series of separate interventions, the  artists’ own work will be displayed alongside and interspersed with the Museum’s collections to encourage new dialogues around the works.

Too Many Blackamoors, 2015 © Heather Agyepong
Commissioned by Autograph ABP
(Courtesy of the artist/The Hyman Collection)

Memorialization in the Age of Forgetting | Heather Agyepong

Heather Agyepong utilises her own image in her photography, performing a catalogue of identities that have paraded through colonial discourse on African peoples. ‘Too many blackamoors’ quotes a letter from Queen Elizabeth I and Agyepong performs cartes de visites (visiting cards) by Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the West African god daughter of Queen Victoria. Her work will be shown among the Grand Tour paintings from the 18th century offering a postcolonial perspective on the gallery. 

‘Study I’ from The Rehearsal (dedicated to Augustine), 2011
© Jessa Fairbrother

In Conversation, and In Character | Jessa Fairbrother

Jessa Fairbrother explores images of femininity through the lens of psychoanalysis, the relationship between mother and daughter, motherhood and loss. She often (but not always) uses her own body, along with personal photographs which she embellishes with stitch, or punctures. Her work will be shown among the museum’s renowned Pre-Raphaelite paintings and modern French art, presenting self-authored contemporary narratives alongside the historic images of women by men. 

Click on the images to see the virtual tours.

With communion dress, Galicia, Spain, 2018 © Lua Ribeira / Magnum Photos

Craving Gaps | Lua Ribeira

Lua Ribeira brings a vivid intensity to her photographs which aim to question the role images play in the social construction of groups. She collaborates with her subjects and there is a spiritual dimension to the images that has affinities with Renaissance art on the one hand and formal aspects of abstract painting on the other. Ribeira is interested in the idea of being transported – by synthetic, aesthetic or religious means – and alludes to angels and demons in her work. Her photographs, belonging to various series, will be shown amongst the angels and demons of Solario and Bellini.

Click on the images to see the virtual tours.