In the Dark Room

Artists Ajamu and Martin Seeds join Alexandra Diez de Rivera, Melanie Issaka, Gökhan Tanrıöver, Bing Ye and Myro Wulff to explore photographic practices that are rooted in the darkroom: a darkened space where images emerge, representation is challenged, and identities are dismantled and reconstructed.

Ajamu X is a photographic artist – scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist who has exhibited in museums, galleries and alternative spaces nationally and internationally. His philosophical - political-aesthetic incorporate portraiture/studio-based constructed imagery and early analogue printing processes which unapologetically celebrates black queer bodies, the erotic sense[s], pleasure as activism and difference. Work has appeared in a wide variety of publications and critical journals worldwide. He is the co-founder of the award-winning rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer + Archive and one of a few leading specialists on Black British LGBTQ+ history, heritage and cultural memory in the UK. He studied at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht and is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art.

Martin Seeds is an artist and educator originally from Northern Ireland. He is a trustee of Brighton Photo Fringe and co-founder of Niagara Falls Projects. In 2019 Seeds was nominated for the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for his solo exhibition Violence Religion Injustice Death at Seen Fifteen gallery London. In 2018 he was awarded the Danny Wilson Memorial Award – Professionals choice for the best solo exhibition at Brighton Photo Fringe. In 2017 he was awarded a Magnum Graduate award for the body of work titled Assembly. Seeds' artistic practice draws from his experience of growing up in Northern Ireland, which he left in the mid 1980s to work in England. Through an on-going reflection upon formative events and an engagement with current issues in the province, his work explores questions of identity, memory, conflict, and the symbolic landscape.​​​​​​​