'Artist Talk: Joy Gregory in conversation with Christine Checinska'

The event is postponed due to illness and will be rescheduled ASAP

We are pleased to host the event in the SOAS/V&A Africa Fashion Expanded Series.

• Artist’s Talk: Joy Gregory 
• Discussant/moderator: Dr Christine Checinska (V&A curator)
• Chair: Dr Polly Savage (SOAS)
• Time: 5:30pm London/GMT - 7:00pm London/GMT
• Location: Khalili Lecture theatre, SOAS Main building

About the artist

Joy Gregory is an important and influential artist sometimes overlooked by the mainstream as her work does not easily fit into any framework. Her practise is concerned with social and political issues often making particular reference to histories and cultural differences, which characterise contemporary society. The work is highly intelligent, thoughtful and challenging, tending toward a seductive aesthetic which underlines it’s relevance and accessibility across class, race, cultural, and economic divides. As an artist, she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. She studied at Manchester Polytechnic (1984) and the Royal College of Art (1986) where she graduating in with an MA in Photography.

She has exhibited all over the world and shown in many biennales and festivals and is also the recipient of numerous awards. Her work included in many collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. She currently lives and works in London. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship to and is due to take up a Fellowship at Yale Centre of British Art in 2022 as an International Scholar researching. She has recently completed a commission for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and is artist in Residence at The Exchange, Newlyn in Penzance.

As well as being a highly respected artist, Gregory is a renown educator of 30 years with a wide range of experience from formal to community and elementary schools to Higher Education. She has been the Director of Higher Education programmes in the UK and overseas and was the external examiner for the MFA in Photography at the National Institute of Design, India and the BA Fine at Duncan & Jordanstown. Joy has also been involved in a variety of photography mentorship programmes including a project around climate change for the British Council in Nigeria and for the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg training marginalized communities in the Kalahari to take control and tell their own stories without an outside.

About the discussant

Christine Checinska is the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion and Lead Curator of the Africa Fashion exhibition, July 2022 – April 2023.

Prior to joining the V&A, Christine worked as a womenswear designer, academic, artist and curator. Her creative practice and research explore the relationship between fashion, culture and race. Christine’s recent exhibitions include an intervention for Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, July-October 2021, Crafts Council Gallery, and Folded Life February 2021, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich, Switzerland. Her recent publications include ‘Re-Fashioning African Diasporic Masculinities’ in Fashion and Postcolonial Critique, Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (eds.), 2019. In 2016 she delivered the TedxTalk Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism.

In industry for over thirty years, Christine has created womenswear collections for iconic British brands such as Margaret Howell, where she was a Senior Designer, during the late 1990s.

Registration to attend on campus, Khalili Lecture theatre

Please register via Microsoft Forms.