ReFramed is a Midlands-based network for Black, Asian and other people of colour interested in producing photographic visual art.
ReFramed has been established by a team of award-winning photographers and curators who believe that visual arts can play a critical role in shaping civic and contemporary attitudes, initiating collaborative conversations, and changing prevailing thoughts about race, our local environment and our communities.
© Jagdish Patel
Schoolchildren leading a march to commemorate the death of Blair Peach and the events of April 1979 in Southall, west London.
What we do
Collaborate with individuals and community groups
Black, Asian and other people of colour have a shared experience and history in Britain. The Windrush scandal, Grenfell and the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed a confluence of concerns in our communities around institutional racism and indifference, entrenched racial inequality, and rising hate crime.
We will encourage individuals to use visual arts to express their lived experience, initiate discussion and showcase their work.
Visual arts has been shown to help build confidence, improve mental wellbeing, and, at this moment, it can play an important role to help us to bring people together. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important individual acts of kindness, and local initiatives of mutual support have been to keep our communities alive.
We will work with other community groups to improve people’s lives through research, creative collaborations, and creating visual material to enhance their work.
Karathi Ram Verma stands in the spot where he used to work at former Goodyear Tyres factory now a a new build housing estate. Wolverhampton Feb 2020.
From the series Punjabi Workers
© Anand Chhabra
Build a network with v
isual artists from Black, Asian and other communities of colour.
There are few people of colour who work full time in art institutions, and most are freelancers often set in competition with each other.
Alongside this, artists and photographers of colour have had to continue the debates within art institutions beyond simple notion of identity, but around issues such as decolonising the museum, the white gaze, the black death spectacle, the colonial gaze, and the history of black and asian photography within the photography canon.
These are complex issues which not just affect our work, but also will have wider implications on the representation of people of colour across society broadly. Despite the COVID-19 restrictions, during 2020 we will provide platforms for us to come together to inspire, learn, challenge and support each other.
Dancer #1, Kingston, Jamaica.
From the series From A Small Island
© Andrew Jackson