Latitudes x Doyle Wham | Into the Fold

Doyle Wham and Latitudes Online proudly presents ‘Into The Fold’, an exhibition showcasing the innovative works of eight women photographers and creative practitioners spanning four decades. Featuring forty diverse pieces, the exhibition explores themes of identity, the body, self-knowledge, womanhood, colonialism, culture, and the land.

Curated by two dynamic women-led organisations, Doyle Wham (the UK’s sole contemporary African photography gallery) and Latitudes Online (a leading online platform for contemporary African art), the exhibition reflects a commitment to supporting and highlighting the voices of female artists.

Exploring Diverse Perspectives:

The earliest body of work is Angèle Etoundi Essamba's groundbreaking handcrafted series of intimate vintage black and white silver gelatin prints. Developed by the artist in her personal darkroom between 1986 and 2002, the 18 prints on show are among the last remaining in Essamba’s possession. Depicting the beauty of lustrous bare skin, or accessorising her subjects with swaths of fabric, traditional headwear, jewellery or body paint, Essamba's portraits challenge stereotypical presentations of Black women to foreground the female narrative, reflecting on the cultural identity of the modern African woman.

Like Essamba, Puleng Mongale's surreal digital collages confront stereotypical depictions of Black womanhood. The surreal digital images are constructed from multiple self-portraits collaged with familiar and distant worlds; African rural and urban landscapes, the sea or domestic interiors. Mongale’s work re-imagines her history, exploring her maternal heritage and ancestral relationships, as well as taking inspiration from the Black, working-class women she encounters in everyday life. Mongale’s creative practice is an act of personal and political reclamation, by inserting herself into scenarios that counter historically limited photographic portrayals of Black women.Deeply personal explorations of the artist’s relationship with spirituality emerge in Mongale’s Spirit series, begun during lockdown, and which pay tribute to the importance of acts of remembrance, both ancestral and godly.

One of the first collaborative projects of its kind on the African continent, Umseme Uyakhuluma: A Celestial Conversation draw on the representation of the Black woman and African storytelling across the continent and diaspora, anchored around myth, African spirituality and magic realism. The work is a collaborative experimental video, photography and sound work lead by creative director Zana Masombuka (aka Ndebele Superhero), with Lafalaise Dion, Tsholofelo Maseko, Mapula Lehong, Boiphelo Khunou, and Bontle Juku - five leading women creatives whose practices span photography, video, performance, design, editing, and production, based in South Africa and the Ivory Coast. Presented for the first time as a series of large format color ‘performance prints’, and a sound and image installation. Umseme Uyakhuluma follows two women artists as they go on a journey of creation, re-awakening and remembering in response to a calling that has been silenced for centuries. Directly translated ‘umseme uyakhuluma’ means ‘the straw mat speaks’, referencing one of Africa's most ancient ways of recording information using grass, an endlessly renewable material. The work utilises other references significant in African culture, such as the spiritual properties of cowrie shells, and Bantu, one of Africa’s most sacred languages. The Umseme Uyakhuluma collectives' elaborately constructed portraits created through lockdown by women from South Africa and the Ivory Cost.

Doyle Wham was created as a response to the lack of collaborative international infrastructure and exhibition opportunities for emerging and established African women photographers and artists.Into The Fold is committed to collaborative shows that enable Africa-based organisations with a focus on photography to gain a physical footprint in London, and to offer the artists broader international reach.