RPS Awards Talks... Silvia Rosi with Renée Mussai

Our Awards Talks Series - in partnership with Autograph - welcomes leading individuals to talk about how they use photography as artists, scientists, educators, publishers and curators. All our speakers are recent RPS Award recipients who have been recognised for their contribution to photography. 

Recordings from the series can be seen here: https://rps.org/awardstalks

Silvia Rosi is an artist who lives and works between London and Modena, engaging with photography, text and moving image to explore ideas of memory, migration and diaspora. Inspired by West African studio photography, Rosi’s artistic practice explores personal history through self-portraiture, drawing on her Togolese heritage, notions of origins, and family traditions, especially matrilineality, and the politics of women’s labour. Her work has been published by Foam and the British Journal of Photography, among others, and selected for international residencies such as YGBI Research Residency (Florence, 2021) and Thread Cultural Center and Residency (Sinthian, 2020). She was awarded the 2020 Jerwood/Photoworks Award, and in 2021 exhibited as part of the British Journal of Photography's digital billboard campaign Portrait of Britain and CIRCA’s ‘Past / Present / Future’ at Piccadilly Circus organised in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery, London.  Her work was shown at Getxo International Image Festival, Basque Country; Landskrona Foto; Athens Photo Festival; and the National Portrait Gallery, London, as part of the Taylor Wessing National Portrait Prize. Most recently, Rosi exhibited in Autograph’s group exhibition Care I Contagion I Community – Self & Other (2021-22). She was the recipient of the RPS Vic Odden Award in 2021.

Renée Mussai is Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial & Collection at Autograph, London where she has worked for almost decades, advocating for a diverse constituency of contemporary artists and co-commissioning a range of artistic programmes. A scholar-curator with a special interest in African, Black European and diasporic lens-based practices, Mussai lectures and publishes internationally on photography, visual activism, cultural politics and curatorial care. Her recently edited volumes include the award-winning ‘Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night – Dark Matter’ (2020); her writing has appeared in various books, journals and anthologies, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. She is Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London; and regular guest curator and former non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She currently serves on the Royal Photographic Society’s Awards, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion advisory committees, as well as Fast Forward: Women in Photography, amongst others.

Our first three conversations of 2022 will be held in partnership with Autograph, a London-based international, non-profit photographic arts charity with a remit in photography and film, critically engaging with issues of cultural identity, representation, human rights, and social justice.

The 'in conversation' will be followed by a public Q+A. Questions will be taken by Zoom chat or can be emailed in advance. Your Zoom link will be sent in PDF with your booking confirmation. 

Image © Silvia Rosi. Self-Portrait as my Mother in School Uniform, 2019 From the series Encounter.