Black Women's Influence on Hip Hop, Fashion, Art Showcased at London Exhibition

Three days of fashion, photography, film, music, art and performance celebrating Black women who have shaped culture and visual identity.

Fashioning Identities in the Age of Representation: Black Women, Hip Hop and Cultural Production Symposium and Exhibition brings together artists, photographers, filmmakers, cultural figures and researchers at London'sIndra Gallery for an exhibition and programme of conversations and live events exploring Black female creativity, identity and cultural influence.

Co-curated by University of East London academics Dr Sharon Hughes-Okoh and Catherine Hudson and running from 2 to 4 October, the programme looks beyond representation to the people behind the images, styles and aesthetics that have travelled from Black communities into global popular culture - asking who creates culture, who shapes its visual language and whose contribution gets remembered.

At the heart of the programme is an exhibition spanning fashion, photography, film, beauty, music, art and performance. UEL BA Fashion Marketing and Communication alum Sia Axtner's short fashion film Hairdoo takes audiences into the beauty supply shop, African food market and Black hair salon, exploring these familiar spaces as places of ritual, storytelling, solidarity and belonging.

Multidisciplinary artist Lauraine Bailey explores hair, beauty and identity through work spanning fashion, music, editorial, film and television, while Bardot - House of Nyabinghi transforms silk headwraps into a monumental installation celebrating fashion, cultural memory and diasporic heritage.

Photography captures another side of the story. Eddie Cheba presents images of women in hip hop that explore the photographer's role in constructing and preserving its visual history, while Nathaniel Akinpelu Williams brings performance, fashion and Black female cultural authorship into focus.

Conversations and Live Events

The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of talks and performance.

Jacqueline Springer, curator of V&A East's Music is Black, joins a curator's conversation on Black women in hip hop as cultural producers and brand architects.

An evening launch will bring together a DJ, artist voices, and live performance, turning the gallery into a space not only to look at hip hop culture, but to hear and experience it.

Fashioning Identities brings academic research into conversation with creative practice and lived experience - creating a space to celebrate Black women not simply as faces within popular culture, but as the people who have helped create it.

When: 2 to 4 October 2026
Where: Indra Gallery, 20 East Road, London N1 6AT