Feminist Library: Guest speaker - Nelly Ating

Ffotogallery launched the Feminist Library last October 2024 during Ffoto Cymru, our International Photography Festival.

The Feminist Library is a space to listen, learn and discuss ideas.

We would like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre , whose generous funding has enabled us to continue these sessions.

These events are open to the public, free to attend and will be hosted monthly from July 2025 - January 2026

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About:

Dr Nelly Ating is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and academic who focuses on human rights and visual culture, conflict, and migration. She approaches research from an insider perspective. Her photographic work, documenting the rise of Boko Haram terrorism between 2014 and 2020 in northeastern Nigeria, sheds light on the intersections of radicalisation and the aftermath of conflict. She earned her doctorate from Cardiff University, researching the discourse of Amnesty’s visual culture campaigning for South African anti-apartheid activists. In 2023, she co-curated Chatham House's exhibition for Black History Month, and she has been keen on fostering more transnational cultural exchange between African archives and British art organisations.

Session details:

In this session, artist and researcher Nelly Ating will lead an exploration of performance and refusal within the Ffotogallery photographic archive, with a focus on Francesca Odell’s commissioned work from The Valleys Project collection. Nelly Ating will draw inspiration from the approach of American feminist scholar Tina Campt, which involves listening to images and embracing refusal. She will begin by placing Francesca Odell’s role as a photographer in conversation with Winnie Mandela as a sitter, who self-presented and managed her personality through working with local photographers in South Africa to document her activism. She aims to address the question of how we can examine the inner lives of women in the archive. What is placed in the frame, and what has been resisted? What perspective do women, both as photographers and as subjects in photographs, offer in visual culture?

Together, the participants will examine how gesture, staging, identity, and photographic context contribute to different notions of performance and refusal within archival images.

The session will combine conversational reflection with practical, hands-on engagement. Participants will analyse selected archival materials, experimenting with observational methods and interpretive strategies that frame performance as a lens for reading the archive.