Yevonde, Dorothy Gisbourne (Pratt) as Psyche, 1935, photograph, tri-colour separation negative, © National Portrait Gallery, London, purchased with support from the Portrait Fund, 2021
As part of the exhibition Yevonde: Life and Colour, the round table discussion at the National Portrait Gallery in London will look at the importance of the construction of female roles in the work of the British photographer Madame Yevonde, examining how artists have experimented with role-play from both a historical and contemporary perspective.
The event will be moderated by Flavia Frigeri, curator of the Chanel collection at the NPG. It will include contributions from photographer Juno Calypso, artist and curator Ajamu X and researcher Marika Takanishi Knowles. Together, the speakers will analyse the cultural history of role-play games, exploring ideas of otherness, gender and performance, and look at how role-play games can be a form of activism today, inspiring the creation of idealised or dystopian alter egos.
This programme is part of a collaboration between AWARE and the National Portrait Gallery.
15th September 2023, from 7:00 to 8:00 pm
The Ondaatje Wing Theatre
National Portrait Gallery, London
Eléonore Besse is a Researcher at AWARE : Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions. Between 2021 and March 2023 she was Research Programmes Assistant at AWARE. She also works on curatorial and research projects on a freelance basis. In October 2022, she was co-curator of the Spotlight section of Frieze Masters in London, curated by AWARE. She is a co-curator of Modern Women, a new section which will debut at Frieze Masters in October 2023.
Dr Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, lecturer, and Chanel Curator for the Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Previously she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. She is the author of Pop Art and Women Artists both in Thames & Hudson’s Art Essentials series and the co-editor of a volume of collected essays, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021). She is currently curating exhibitions for Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy.
Juno Calypso is a contemporary photographer. The lone figure in all of Juno Calypso’s images is her: she photographs herself in honeymoon hotels, abandoned underground bunkers and heart-shaped hot tubs. Across film, photography and installation, Calypso builds a soft pink universe of femininity, solitude, desire and despair, all with an ultra-critical edge. Calypso’s art is deeply sinister, hyper-feminine and filled with humour. This is cinematic, introspective art for the age of the self and the selfie.
Ajamu X [Hon FRPS] is a photographic artist and scholar who works in studio and darkroom. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and alternative spaces around the world. In 2022 Ajamu was canonised by the Trans Pennine Travelling Sisters as the patron saint of darkrooms and was awarded an honorary fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society. His work can be found in private and public collections around the world.
Marika Takanishi Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She studies French art of the early modern and modern period and is particularly interested in the relationship between theatre, social life, and representations of the human figure. Her first book, Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain (2020), explores the way that theatrical and fictional representations of human character influenced visual art in early seventeenth-century France.
