Please join us for a panel discussion for the opening of the ‘Who Took These?’ exhibition, followed by drinks. The photographer Jacqueline Otagburuagu and curator Athinangamso Esther Nkopo, will be in dialogue about the intellectual contributions of artists to political movements. Nkopo is a co-editor of the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford anthology and has been deeply invested in how Black transnational movements are remembered. Her work curating the exhibition seeks to engage and expand the anthology by foregrounding the centrality of the visual narrative to social movements.

In 2015, when a group of Black students founded Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, they catalysed a process of change that has challenged not only the university but the media and political establishment of the UK to reckon with racism and Britain’s empire. Even as Oriel College still refuses to take down the statue of Cecil Rhodes, RMF has led the move to overhaul curricula in several departments, documented systemic racism at Oxford, and built intersectional solidarities with feminist, trans, and indigenous movements. Through an exhibition of Jacqueline Otagburuagu’s photographs, accompanied by Tadiwa Madenga’s writing and co-curated with Athinangamso Esther Nkopo, we seek to highlight the passion and care through which RMF’s activists constructed spaces of dissent, protest, and solidarity. Otagburuagu’s photographs may be familiar to viewers from social media, where they circulated widely, typically without credit. Madenga’s narrative contextualises the photos, drawing the viewer’s eye to the relations of care and friendship, visceral feelings of passion and hope, and everyday emotional labour that undergirded what became a nationally significant social movement.

This event is also the launch of our school’s photography exhibition, where we are inviting students in Years 11 and 12 at local schools to contribute photography for a competition on the theme of ‘Photography as Participatory Politics’.