This is an online, digitised art exhibition in which three artists respond creatively to racist media reporting, using border abolitionist frameworks. We hope this exhibition, which includes photography, poetry and a comic book, is a small contribution to wider abolitionist and revolutionary narratives around racist media reporting and border abolition.
The physical exhibition ran from the 22 October to 12 November 2024 at the Workstation in Sheffield, UK.
Through its project Give Over, Opus Independents commissioned three artists – Sarah Lasoye, Nasha Cash and Wemmy Ogunyankin – to respond creatively to racist media reporting using border abolitionist frameworks.
Nasha Cash is a Sheffield-born, Manchester-based artist and illustrator whose work comprises a dichotomy of explosive and expressive use of colour and monochrome puddles of line and form. Taking much of her inspiration from dreams, meditative practices, folklore and psychedelic experiences, Nasha’s work is weird and a little silly. This project has challenged Nasha to move beyond art as escapism and plunge into the more vulnerable depths of overtly political art.
Wemmy Ogunyankin is a visual anthropologist and poet whose work explores questions of identity, belonging, love, social justice and Blackness. Through photography, poetry and film she asks questions of what it means to be in, and of, this world. She has a BA in Journalism Studies, an MA in Visual Anthropology and is currently doing a PhD in American Studies. She describes this endless education, and her art, as a lifelong chase for justice.
Sarah Lasoye is a poet and writer from London, based in Sheffield. She is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets, Octavia Poetry Collective, and Apples and Snakes’ Poetry in Performance programmes. She was longlisted for the Jerwood Poetry Fellowship 2021, and her work has been featured in Porridge Magazine, bath magg, The New Statesman, Poetry London, And Other Poems & Basket Magazine. Her debut chapbook, FOVEA / AGES AGO was published by Hajar Press in 2021. She is represented by Kat Aitken at Lexington Literary, and is currently working to complete an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.