62 Gladstone Street presents Slidefest: a workshop featuring four photographers whose powerful visual storytelling explores first-generation migration.
Artists: Hicham Gardaf, Kalpesh Lathigra, Amak Mahmoodian, Chris Neophytou
Curated by Aisha Zia & Mohamed Somji
Co-commissioned and presented as part of the Platforma Festival (October 2025), produced by Counterpoints Arts.
Slidefest spotlights the work of four photographers whose powerful visual storytelling explores first-generation migration—both economic and conflict-related.
Through image-led presentations, each photographer will share stories of migration that begin with departure: Why do people leave? What do they encounter along the way? And how do they build lives in unfamiliar places?
This intimate event will trace personal and collective journeys from displacement to arrival, offering a deeper look into the lived experiences of those who have shaped diverse communities. Through photography and conversation, Slidefest invites audiences to reflect on the stories behind the images—and the people behind the stories.
F(I/U)GUE by Hicham Gardaf
A fig plant’s perspective. Uprooted from its homeland, offered by the family, we follow it crossing borders, adapting and becoming, in a new environment. What is it like to be foreign? To live in a state of constant waiting and delay, in a perpetual quest of home? Hicham Gardaf (b. in Tangier, Morocco) works across photography and moving image, often engaging with ideas of time, place and transformation. He is drawn to sites that carry social or spatial tension, such as landscapes shaped by displacement, urbanisation or quiet forms of resistance. Through slow, observational processes, he explores how environments reflect broader political and temporal conditions. Gardaf approaches these mediums not only as tools for documentation but as spaces for speculation, perception and re-interpretation. His practice is concerned with what images hold and what they fail to reveal, how they shape memory, suggest presence or absence, and shift meaning over time. Recent screenings and exhibitions include the 74th Berlinale in Berlin, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Frac MÉCA in Bordeaux, MACAAL in Marrakech, and Fondazione MAST in Bologna.
One Hundred and Twenty Minutes (2019-2023) by Amak Mahmoodian
In One Hundred and Twenty Minutes (the amount of time we dedicate to dream every night), I have worked with 16 individuals who are exiled from their native countries. Through photography, poetry, drawing and video, I examine the emotional and psychological landscapes of dreams in exile, the new lives we create with these dreams, and the ways in which they keep returning us to our past. “Amak Mahmoodian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. She began her career as a research-based photographer in Iran in 2003. Since 2010, she has been living in the UK, unable to return to Iran. She practices as a visual artist at the intersection of conceptual image-making and documentary photography, working with photographs, text, video, drawing, archives and sound. Her practice explores the presentation of gender, identity and displacement, bridging a space between personal and political across platforms and formats including installation, books and films. Mahmoodian’s work has been shown internationally, including the Carnegie Museum of Art. Pittsburgh; Fototeca Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires; the Benaki Museum, Athens; Arnolfini, Bristol; Rencontres d’Arles, Arles; and Peckham 24, London. Her works are held in collections such as the Tate, and the British Library in London. She has published two books, Shenasnameh (RRB- ICV Lab, 2016), and Zanjir (RRB, 2019) which was the winner of The Best Photo Text Book award at Rencontres Arles, 2020. Her work appears in key titles on photography such as Photography – A Feminist History (Tate Publishing, 2021), Photography Now: Fifty Pioneers Defining Photography for the Twenty-First Century (Octopus Publishing, 2021), and How We See: Photobooks by Women (10×10 Photobooks, 2019).
The Planting of a Fig Tree by Chris Neophytou
“I don’t know whether there are an infinite number of reasons why people leave home or whether they are all just many different versions of the same thing. Whatever the impulse or circumstance might be that propels us to travel in one way or another it is inevitably linked to our notion of home, and what home should be. There always seems, at least to me, to be this undulating degree of tension between the place we have set out from and the place we arrive at; always this balance between expectation and doubt, the unknown and the familiar, the memory and the moment. The people and places captured in these images form a record of a particularly itinerant period in my life. Made in a number of different towns, cities and countries, the images that now congregate here suggest a narrative where disparate experiences and observations are unified by a persisting sentiment. My practice focuses on themes of place and is rooted in a documentary approach to photography. Growing up in rural England as a second-generation Cypriot, navigating between two cultures, helped inform my interest in place and connected themes surrounding history and identity. My process, almost archaeological in nature, involves collecting and recording material fragments and interrogating them for meaning about the past, in the hope of better understanding the present.”
Discarded Fruit by Kalpesh Lathigra
Kalpesh Lathigra is a British Indian artist born in 1971 in Forest Gate, a suburb of East London. He is a documentary photographer, concerned with the democratisation of both the real and the ‘staged’ image. In 2000 he received the 1st prize of the “World Press Photo”, a prestigious award for photojournalism, and in 2003 he undertook a project documenting the lives of widows in India, receiving the “W.Eugene Smith Fellowship” and the “Churchill Fellowship”. In 2014 he was awarded a ‘Lightwork Residency’ by the Brighton Photo Biennial to produce, in collaboration with South African artist Thabiso Sekgala, a cycle of photographs entitled A Return to Elsewhere. A project aimed at investigating Indian communities in Marabastad and Laudium in South Africa and Brighton in the UK, studying their history, memory and loss of civilisation. His first book ‘Lost in the Wilderness’, published in 2015, contains a corpus of photographs dedicated to the Oglala Sioux and Pine Ridge Indian reservations, and has been defined by critic Sean O’Hagan as ‘one of the photographic books of the year’.
Image: Chris Neophytou
About Platforma in Peterborough
Platforma 2025 in Peterborough is produced by 62 Gladstone Street, a community-rooted arts space in the heart of Peterborough with a particular focus on supporting South Asian and MENA artists. Through exhibitions, residencies, and public programmes, it provides a vital platform for underrepresented voices and fosters meaningful dialogue between artists and the wider community.
Partners: Counterpoints Arts, Landmark Theatres, Peterborough Cultural Alliance, Metal Peterborough, Peterborough Presents, Peterborough Museum, HELP Charity & the Aziz Foundation
Dedication: “Our programme is dedicated to the innocent men, women, and children who have lost their lives, those who have been displaced by war, and all those seeking a safe place to call home.”
62 Gladstone Street’s Platforma programme is supported by Arts Council England as and presented as part of the wider Platforma Festival across the East of England, produced by Counterpoints Arts.
