Cultivating Diasporic Presence: Uprooting Hate
Cultivating Diasporic Presence – Uprooting Hate is a six-month pilot mentorship programme supporting five under-31 BIPOC diasporic intersectional photographers to express and envision transformative presence. Working alongside established artist-mentors, the mentee practitioners develop new visual projects that work towards uprooting structures of hate and cultivating new possibilities for liberation, resilience and joy.
This mentorship programme explores uprooting “hate” in multiple, complex, and layered forms: race-related hate, misogyny, afroqueerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, disablism, classism, extractivist and exploitative hate, and structural or institutional violence. As well as centring practices of care, justice, reparative action, resistance, and world-building, Youth X’s projects document collective action, celebrate community resilience, trace intimate stories of care, and/or imagine new ways of being and seeing. Our projects are rooted in memory work and/or speculation on radical ways of being, belonging, and living otherwise. Youth X supports bold, subversive, transformative, and imaginative lens-based work that refuses to let hate have the final word while engaging photography as a tool for witnessing, for world-building and for envisioning liberatory, diasporic presence.
For this year's Pilot project, “diasporic" refers to individuals and communities shaped by historical or ongoing displacement from their ancestral homelands or places of origin – including but not limited to African/Caribbean diaspora, Palestinian/Middle Eastern, South Asian, and other diasporas. This includes those who have experienced displacement, or forced/voluntary movement from ancestral homelands (recent or generations ago) who navigate relationships with multiple geographies, states of belonging and histories.
This diasporic iteration culminates in a one-month group exhibition (October 21 – November 14 2026) and two programmed public events, one at Four Corners Gallery and the other at Close-Up Cinema. The exhibition will be accompanied by a small publication booklet showcasing the work created and amplifying the artists’ voices in print.