Artist talk: Ingrid Pollard in conversation with artist Salad Hilowle

Ingrid Pollard is a leading British contemporary photographer and artist. She was born in 1953 in Georgetown, Guyana and grew up in London. She currently lives and works in Northumberland, Northeast England. 

Salad Hilowle (born 1986, Somalia) is an artist and film director. His expression moves between artistic design and documentary storytelling. Hilowle holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. 

About Ingrid Pollard

Pollard’s work interrogates and explores aspects of race and colonialism, often based on her experiences and research. She is particularly interested in how these issues are manifested in both urban spaces and landscapes. Central to her work is a fundamental interest in photography, its technical aspects, materiality, and potentials, as well as its historical use in the exercise of control and power.

The Hasselblad Foundation’s citation regarding the Hasselblad Award laureate 2024, Ingrid Pollard:

In her four decades of practice Ingrid Pollard uses photography to question deeply engrained social and cultural constructs behind race, identity, community, and gender. Her work reveals subtle and starkly evident injustices through her engagement with the British landscape, iconography, and identity, as well as challenging the medium of photography and its history. Formally her work combines portraiture, found archival material, objects and text to produce complex installations. Born in Guyana and raised in Britain, she has consistently engaged with colonial history and how it continues to impact society, both in her artistic practice and as an educator in photography. Ingrid Pollard has a profound impact on younger generations of artists and thinkers.