With a distinguished list of contributing authors, Black Chronicles brings together an extraordinary collection of studio portraits that attest to the black presence in Victorian Britain. The result of ten years of curatorial research led by author/editor Renée Mussai during her tenure as senior curator at Autograph and beyond, this book significantly expands and reframes the archive of photography in Britain, offering new perspectives on the visual politics of race, representation and difference in nineteenth-century Britain. Following an illustrated lecture, Mussai is joined by artist Phoebe Boswell for a wider discussion of the book, its curatorial-editorial temperatures, and the important issues that it raises.
Published by Thames & Hudson in association with Autograph, London.
Additional guest speakers to be announced.
This event is organised by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld.
With contributions from:
Renée Mussai is an independent curator, writer and scholar of visual culture with a special interest in Black feminist & intersectional practices. For more than two decades, she was senior curator and head of collection & curatorial at arts charity Autograph where she organised numerous critically acclaimed public programmes of exhibitions, commissions and publications. Between 2022 – 23 she acted as artistic director of The Walther Collection, supporting the foundation’s publication, acquisition and exhibition programmes. She is currently senior research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, SA; guest curator at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, USA; lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London; doctoral candidate at University College London, and serves as chair of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation’s advisory council, amongst other academic and institutional affiliations. Her most recent publications include ‘Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain’ (2025) and the forthcoming sole-authored ‘Eyes That Commit – A Visual Gathering’ (2026), alongside several award-winning artist monographs. Mussai curates, lectures and publishes internationally on visual and curatorial activism, with a focus on contemporary artists whose work addresses decolonial, archival and remedial politics. In 2025 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts in recognition of her sustained curator – and scholarship in photography and lens-based media.
Phoebe Boswell is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, moving intuitively across media from drawing and painting to film, video, sound, and writing, to create immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the layering of sound, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Born in Kenya, of British and Kenyan heritage, brought up in the Arabian Gulf and currently living and working in UK, Boswell’s practice uses auto/biographical stories as catalysts to contest histories, traverse geographies and ecologies, and imagine futurity.