Peckham 24: Marvel Harris / Fion Hung Ching-Yan

Peckham 24, the south east London festival of photography, returns to the South London Gallery’s Fire Station for a second year. Taking the protest slogan, “My body, my choice”, as the starting point, Peckham 24’s 2023 programme will explore a wide range of responses to the body as a personal and political canvas.  Two solo exhibitions will be presented at the SLG, one by Marvel Harris and the second Fion Hung Ching Yan reflecting on this theme of body language.

Marvel Harris uses the camera as a mirror and record keeper, making intimate and vulnerable self-portraits. As a person with autism, photography provided a way for Harris to analyse and manage emotions that he was not capable of adequately describing before, offering a visual language to connect to the world around him.

At the SLG, Harris presents Inner Journey, an ongoing series of photographs sharing his personal battles with mental illness, self-love, acceptance and gender identity.

Fion Hung Ching-Yan works with photography, collage and text, challenging ways of experiencing daily life through her surreal reflections on reality.

For Peckham 24, Ching-Yan brings The Skeletons in the Closet to the SLG. This series explores identity and the family while also looking at traditional Chinese stereotypes. The work also reflects on Ching-Yan’s ongoing family conflicts since 2016, the year of her grandmother’s departure. She uses Chinese folktales, visual metaphors and the female body to speak out about expectations, morals and the pain that she and her family have experienced and inflicted on each other.