BLACK VENUS: Delphine Diallo & Maxine Walker in conversation with Aindrea Emelife

Delphine Diallo is a Brooklyn-based French and Senegalese visual artist and photographer. An observer of photography’s traditional gaze on women’s bodies, Diallo made it her mission to become a key actor in the deconstruction of its sexist and racist legacy. Since 2014, Diallo has been creating a visual language that would empower herself and the women who would become her protagonists and heroines. Aware of the responsibility that comes with representing others, Diallo centres ethics in her practice, creating long-term relationships and collaborations with her sitters. Throughout the years, Diallo developed a photographic expression that plays with spiritual symbols evoking mythology and giving black women their rightful place in the pantheon. Her work aspires to elevate her subjects by creating new legends. In that respect, Diallo challenges and redefines the historical genre of portraiture.

Working mainly in digital and analogue photography, Diallo explores the ways she can make images through an expansion of her tools such as AI, drawings, and found imagery. Through her work, she has created her own way of “gazing back”, celebrating black women. Beyond assumptions, she aims at inclusive and transnational representations — dreaming of a future matriarchal society. Diallo proposes provocative visuals and crafts innovative iconographies to trigger the viewer’s politics and imagination.

Aindrea Emelife is a Nigerian-British curator and art historian specialising in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on questions around colonial and decolonial histories in Africa, transnationalism and the politics of representation. Emelife is currently the Curator, Modern and Contemporary at EMOWAA (Edo Museum of West African Art), a new David Adjaye designed museum complex and cultural district in Benin City, Nigeria due to open in stages from 2024. 

Born in London, United Kingdom, Emelife studied at The Courtauld Institute of Art before embarking on a multifaceted career as a curator and art historian, producing highly acclaimed exhibitions for museum, galleries and private collections internationally and quickly becoming a groundbreaking new voice. In addition to the Fotografiska, New York, and Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco runs of BLACK VENUS, recent exhibitions include Bold Black British at Christies, London (October 2021) and Citizens of Memory, The Perimeter, London (May 2021). Emelife’s first book, A Brief History of Protest Art was released by Tate in March 2022, Emelife has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications, most recently including Revising Modern British Art (Lund Humphries, 2022) In 2021, Emelife was appointed to the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm.