Kosisochukwu Nnebe. Photography, © Kosisochukwu Nnebe. Courtesy of the artist.

Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), in partnership with Green Space Miami, presents an exhibition featuring the 2024 WOPHA Artist-in-Residence, expanding on their residency in Miami at El Espacio 23 in March 2024. This exhibition showcases the works of Keisha Scarville and Kosisochukwu Nnebe who are each exploring personal projects that use photography as a way to investigate the relationships of person and landscape. 

Keisha Scarville uses photography and performance to explore the nocturnal landscape as a transformative space that addresses questions of place, power, and self-formation. Inspired by the late Guyanese author, Wilson Harris’ first novel, “Palace of the Peacock,” Scarville proposes a new topographic understanding of place, which blurs the space that exists between the body and the terrain. Kosisochukwu Nnebe’s work explores the relationship people of African descent have with nature through a focus on maroon histories and the migration of plantlife. Using the banana leaf as both a geographic material and the temporary repository of archival images created through the process of chlorophyll printing, Nnebe’s work engages with cycles of nature including the decay of the leaves themselves, in a way that re-imagines history and hierarchy between humans and nature. Both artists are contemplating the relationship of people to place, not only in ways that reference the physicality behind that dynamic, but more so the unseen histories, stories and possibilities that linger in the gap. 

This collaboration between WOPHA and Green Space Miami, serves as an extension of the annual WOPHA Artist-in-Residence Program and its commitment to offering, long term and multifaceted levels of support to women working in photography.

2024 – 2025 WOPHA Artists in Residence program is supported by the Pérez CreArte grant program by The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation. Cultural partners are El Espacio 23  and the Green Space Miami.

This event is part of the 2024 WOPHA Congress “How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now.” This four-day creative convening is co-presented by Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) and Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The Congress will take place at PAMM and various other locations across South Florida from October 23-26, 2024.

About the Artists

Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with transformation, place, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Lightwork Syracuse, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Higher Pictures Gallery, and Baxter Street CCNY. She has participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Stoneleaf, Baxter Street CCNY, BRIC Workspace, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Transition, Nueva Luz, Small Axe, Oxford American, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is the recipient of 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at the International Center of Photography and Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was recently published by MACK and was shortlisted in the 2023 Aperture/Paris Photo Book Awards.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, curator and writer whose practice draws inspiration from postcolonial and Black feminist thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, bell hooks, and Sylvia Wynter. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics that range from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. At its core, Nnebe’s practice is interested in anti-colonial and -imperial world-building through acts of solidarity (human and otherwise), the troubling of colonial logics, and speculative (re)imaginings of otherwise pasts, presents and futures. Nnebe’s work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada and internationally, including the Montreal Museum of Arts, Plug In ICA, the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre, Optica Gallery, the Hausen Gallery in NYC, and Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam, with forthcoming exhibitions at the Art Museum of Toronto, SAW Centre, and the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery in Ohio. She is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria, was one of two inaugural artists for NLS Kingston’s Sustainable Sculpture Residency in Maroon Town, Jamaica, and has been commissioned by Plug In ICA and the Mozilla Foundation.

About the Curator

Amanda Bradley is WOPHA Associate Curator of Programming. She is a Belizean American artist, curator and arts professional. She received a BFA in Photography from New World School of the Arts. Her work has been included in both solo and group exhibitions internationally. Bradley is a recipient of the 2024 Catalyst Award from DVCAI and a two time Suncoast Regional Emmy award winning producer. She has worked in several arts institutions like Forgotten Lands, Oolite Arts, Bakehouse Art Complex, and Peréz Art Museum Miami (PAMM), amongst others.

About the Congress

The WOPHA Congress is a groundbreaking photography conference, exhibition series, and creative convening held at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and virtually, with parallel activations taking place across South Florida. It aims to establish a critical space for photography by bringing together worldwide organizations of women photographers, art historians, theorists, and curators with a goal to enrich and more accurately represent the dynamic history of women photographers from the nineteenth century to the present day. This event showcases both seminal and emerging research and discourse in the field, encompassing national and international discussions on women and feminisms in the history of photography. Additionally, it serves as a platform to celebrate women and foster an unparalleled network for the international community of women in the photographic arts.

About WOPHA

Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded to research, promote, support, and educate on the contributions of women and non-binary photographers to modern and contemporary art in order to rewrite the artistic canon and provoke social change. WOPHA fosters a more diverse and equitable world by providing a permanent archive for future generations that preserves, documents, and promotes women photographers’ work while being a driving force for innovative thinking and discussion about the role of women in photographic arts.

About the Gallery

Green Space Miami is the Green Family Foundation’s new art space. Guided by the Foundation’s principles of inclusion, community empowerment and education. Green Space Miami centers marginalized stories at the intersections of lived experience, hosted in a space for dialogue. Green Space Miami’s mission is to be a catalyst for action around critical social issues, collaborating with community partners and educational institutions.

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