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Visitor Information: The RPS Gallery and coffee shop will be closed on Saturday 7 December

ETWP Awet
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri

Aida Silvestri

RPS Award for Social Impact 2024 in recognition of sustained excellence or a notable use of imaging that highlights or contributes to demonstrable improvement in public awareness of social issues.

Aida Silvestri is an interdisciplinary artist and educator of Eritrean descent based in the UK. She is known for her multifaceted mixed-media artworks and her work examines themes of displacement, race, class, identity, and health, challenging the status quo of stigma, prejudice, and social injustice. She amplifies marginalised voices and her work is a powerful tool in raising awareness of human rights issues and representational politics in the arts and social impact/change.

Her socially engaged activist practice is multi-layered that will often combine text from lived experiences, images, and experimental techniques to manipulate the photographic surface, creating diverse and intriguing work. She researches and works on her new bodies of work, often addressing critical moments that profoundly impacted her life and the objectification of the female body and experience.

She volunteers and works with different grassroots organisations, facilitating photography workshops.

Silvestri's work has been exhibited widely in significant group exhibitions in London, UK, at Somerset House, South London Gallery, Autograph, The Photographer's Gallery, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, and FotoFest Biennale 2020, Houston, USA. It is also held in numerous international private and public collections, most recently joining the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and the Walther Collection. 

UC Type I B
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri
CCOTFL Cacao
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri
ETWP Awet
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri
ETWP Samrawit
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri
Inlimbo Hiba
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri
Mutilation
CREDIT: Aida Silvestri