Watch Now: Joy Labinjo and Christine Checinska In Conversation

Curated by Dr. Nicholas Cullinan (Director, National Portrait Gallery), Frieze Masters Talks provides a platform for leading artists, museum curators, writers and critics to discuss the history of art and its continuing significance in contemporary practice.

Joy Labinjo (b.1994, Dagenham) lives and works in London. Labinjo’s large-scale figurative paintings often depict intimate scenes of historical and contemporary life, both real and imagined and often based on figures appearing in personal and archival imagery that include family photographs, found images and historical material. In the past, she has explored themes including but not limited to identity, political voice, power, Blackness, race, history, community and family and their role in contemporary experience. She holds a BFA from the University of Newcastle. She was awarded the Woon Art Prize in 2017. She’s currently studying for an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. Recent exhibitions include: Royal Academy (group - 2020), Tiwani Contemporary (solo - 2020), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (solo - 2019). She is represented by Tiwani Contemporary in London.

Dr. Christine Checinska is the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion and Lead Curator of the forthcoming 'Africa Fashion' exhibition, due to open 11 June 2022. Prior to joining the V&A, Christine worked as a womenswear designer, academic, artist and curator. Her creative practice and research explores the relationship between fashion, culture and race. Christine’s recent exhibitions include an intervention for 'Makers Eye: Stories of Craft', July-October 2021, Crafts Council Gallery, and Folded Life February 2021, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich, Switzerland. Her recent publications include ‘Re-Fashioning African Diasporic Masculinities’ in Fashion and Postcolonial Critique, Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (eds.), 2019. In 2016 she delivered the Tedx Talk 'Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism'. In industry for over thirty years, Christine has created womenswear collections for iconic British brands such as Margaret Howell, where she was a Senior Designer, during the late 1990s.