Armet Francis’ 1970s Brixton Market fashion photography are playful and rare frames of black joy. A Jamaican-British photographer with an acute understanding of black consciousness, his images are life-affirming moments that celebrate the resilience and survival of African diasporic cultures.

Join us for this talk with Dr Christine Checinska, taking place surrounded by and in the context of Francis’ exhibition, Beyond the Black Triangle. The presentation and Q&A will run until 7:30pm, after which there will be an opportunity to view the exhibition.

Checinska – who is the V&A’s Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora: Textiles and Fashion and originator of the Africa Fashion exhibition – will draw on her own practice and research, using Francis’ exhibition as a jumping-off point to delve into key moments from Global African perspectives that have shaped the relationship between fashion, photography, style and agency from the 1950s to now.

The ticket price for this event is £5. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. If this ticket price is unaffordable for you please get in touch with Harriet at harriet@autograph-abp.co.uk about free ticketing options.

About the speaker

Dr Christine Checinska is the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion. She is the originator and Lead Curator of the V&A international touring exhibition Africa Fashion, currently open at Portland Art Museum.

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 has exhibited work in the group show The Missing Thread, Somerset House, London, September 2023-January 2024, and Folded Life, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich, February 2021. She was a co-curator of Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, Crafts Council Gallery, London, July-October 2021. 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.