Trail: Images which resist by Pelumi Odubanjo

Hi, I’m Pelumi Odubanjo, one of the Trainee Curators for Photo Fringe 2020. Here is my personal trail of exhibitions that resonate with my interest in images which resist conforming narratives, and in part explore the impactful relationship between fiction and power. How is photography used as a means to re-claim, re-imagine, and re-define narratives? What role does visual culture have in this? And with this, what could a full-sensory experience of viewing create as a response from the viewer? Particularly looking at images by artists of selected diasporas, how does the photographer reclaim the dispossessed history of certain subjects by examining the image on different frequencies, i.e through touch, sound, imagination and deconstruction?

By reconstructing one’s own narrative, a larger resistance is formed, and thus so is a power, and as the cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall once identified, visual culture reproduces power dynamics and thus has immense power in how we construct and inform our ideas of categorisation. I would like each space to allow visitors, particularly from ethnic minority backgrounds, to become attune to this. The power of self-identification. The power of imagining.

Fiction/Imagination As Resistance

Fiction generally is a narrative form, in any medium, consisting of people, events, or places that are imaginary—in other words, not based strictly on history or fact. Creation in the form of imagination. Do these artists cross over into the realm of utopia? What is the impact of this?