Photograph: Tom Saater
Rwanda has more female members of parliament than any other country worldwide. But when it comes to photography women are still under-represented. This panel looks at the challenges and opportunities faced by women photographers across the world alongside the specific barriers here in Rwanda.
How can photography and writing explore rights that are important to Rwandans today? What are the creative ways in which artists can engage with everyday issues relating to human rights through their work? And how can we imagine rights that are specifically Rwandan: that extend and complicate international structures?
Screening of The Faces We Lost, a film exploring the importance of family photographs for survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Today, 25 years after genocide, many Rwandans remember their loved ones through images of life, not death: a passport or ID card photograph, a snap taken in the garden, a group portrait from a wedding of baptism.
Nigerian Curator Olabisi Silva, who died in February this year, had a huge effect on the Arts in Rwanda and every other country she visited. This is a session talking about her legacy, how to keep her work alive and the importance of African curators.
What does it mean to be located in a particular place as an artist? How does your own identity and past connections with different places layer over your positioning at the precise moment when you take a photograph, write a line or stand on stage? When you figure the lives and positioning of the other people you represent? Is there within an artwork always a sense of home, either of being at home or of longing for displaced home?
Gael Ruboneka Vande Weghe is Rwanda’s best-known nature photographer and acclaimed author of Papillons du Gabon (2010), Birds in Rwanda (2011), This is Rwanda (2018 with Philippe Nyirimihigo) and Salonga, au coeur de la grande forêt congolaise (2018).
Join the festival organisers for the opening of Kigali Photo Fest exhibitions at Kandt House. Work includes winners of the Uganda Press Photo Awards and alongside work by photographers from Rwanda and beyond. Festival Curator Robinah Nansubuga will walk visitors around the exhibition commenting on the work, how it is displayed and the connections with the festival theme “In Search of Relevance: Locality and Remediation”?
Carol Allen-Storey is an award-winning photojournalist specialised in chronicling complex humanitarian and social issues. A New Yorker based in London, she has been working for NGOs and international media in Rwanda for the past decade on projects including The Amahoro Generation (International Alert) and Out of the Shadows (Hope for Rwanda).
Join Kigali Photo Fest founders Jacques Nkinzingabo and Kibuuka Mukisa Oscar, plus the festival curator Robinah Nansubugah to open the festival at the Kigali Center for Photography. All are welcome. Doors open from 19.00, Speeches from 21.00.
