In Conversation with Grace Ndiritu

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).

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.

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’.