Home Events

In Conversation with Grace Ndiritu

,
Past
  • Free
  • Discussion
  • Speech-to-text
Two black and white photographs, a headshot of Melanie Keen on the left and on the right Grace Ndiritu
Image left: Portrait of Melanie Keen. Image Right: Portrait of Grace Ndiritu. Photographer: Steve Smith.

What you’ll do

Join a conversation between artist Grace Ndiritu and Wellcome Collection Director Melanie Keen as 'The Healing Pavilion' opens. The event will be facilitated by journalist Charlotte Jansen.  

They will talk about power dynamics in collections, archives and photography, and reflect on the violent colonial histories of European museums. The event will also discuss the future of museums, and how institutions, artists and audiences can create spaces for healing, repair and restitution. 

There will be chance a chance to ask questions, and to visit the exhibition before and after the discussion. 

Dates

,
Past

Need to know

Location

We’ll be in the Forum. To get there, take the lift or stairs up to level 1 and then follow the signs through the ‘Being Human’ gallery.

Place not guaranteed

Booking a ticket for a free event does not guarantee you a place. You should aim to arrive 15 minutes before the event is scheduled to start to claim your place. If you do not arrive on time, your place may be given to someone on the waiting list.

Waiting list

If this event is fully booked, you may still be able to attend. We will operate a waiting list, which opens 30 minutes before this event starts. Arrive early, and we’ll give you a numbered ticket. If there are any unfilled places just before the start time, we will invite you to enter in order of ticket number.

Speech-to-text

This event will be live-transcribed, with text displayed on a large screen.

For more information, please visit our Accessibility page. If you have any queries about accessibility, please email us at access@wellcomecollection.org or call 0 2 0. 7 6 1 1. 2 2 2 2

Our event terms and conditions

About your contributors

Grace Ndiritu

Speaker

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. She believes that most modern art institutions are out of sync with their audiences’ everyday experiences, and the widespread socioeconomic and political changes that have taken place globally in the recent decades have further eroded the relationship between museums and their audiences. Ndiritu has been featured in the Guardian, Artforum, Art Review, TIME and Phaidon’s ‘The 21st-Century Art Book’. Her work is housed in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the British Council (London), LACMA (Los Angeles) and the Modern Art Museum (Warsaw). She is also the winner of The Jarman Award in association with Film London (2022).

Black and white photograph of Wellcome Collection director Melanie Keen

Melanie Keen

Speaker

Melanie Keen is Director of Wellcome Collection, London, which aims to challenge the way we think and feel about health. Her intention is to give voice to radical imagination on what health is and what it could be. She is committed to reshaping our cultural assumptions around race, disability and gender, and the human relationship to planetary health. A graduate of the RCA, Melanie has worked as a curator, and in arts policy and funding at Arts Council England. Prior to joining Wellcome Collection, she was Director and Chief Curator at pioneering arts organisation Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), where she was instrumental in the revitalisation of Iniva’s mission and vision by making the Stuart Hall Library its creative hub.

Black and white photograph of the journalist Charlotte Jansen

Charlotte Jansen

Facilitator

Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan arts journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, British Vogue, ELLE, Frieze, the Art Newspaper and Wallpaper* magazine, among others. She is the author of two books on photography: ‘Girl on Girl’ (LKP, 2017) and ‘Photography Now’ (Tate/ilex, 2021), and is the host of the Dior Talks podcast series ‘The Female Gaze’.