Liz Johnson Artur

After joining the Black Lives Matter protests in London in Spring 2020, photographer Liz Johnson Artur was motivated to show solidarity with and photograph protestors in Vauxhall, Westminster and Trafalgar Square. Artur decided to print the work on pages from braille editions of two novels she collected: Iris Murdoch’s The Red and The Green (1965) and John Harris’s Ride out the Storm: A Novel of Dunkirk (1975), both of which contain references to difference, conflict and resistance.

‘It was crucial for me to give those people their reference in time in a physical way, this is why I printed the photographs. I hope they can see themselves as part of this important moment in British history.’

Time don’t run here forms part of what Artur calls her Black Balloon Archive. She has been making this vast ongoing body of work since the 1990s, depicting people in Africa, and of the African and Caribbean diasporas. Examples from the Archive are displayed around this room.

‘In my work, I like to talk to people, not about them. When people look at my work, they are actually looking at my audience. It’s them I would like to reach, but everyone else is invited too.’