Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop: Being There

January 20 – April 3, 2027 University Gallery Curator: Gaëlle Morel

Being There is a collaboration between British/French artist and photographer/filmmaker Lee Shulman—founder of The Anonymous Project, an expansive archive of mid-twentieth-century amateur colour photography—and Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop. Comprising more than fifty images, the series, orchestrated by Shulman, places Diop within original vernacular slides of ordinary occasions and celebrations from the 1950s and 1960s—made in a context defined by racial segregation and systemic discrimination against African Americans. The two artists seamlessly insert Diop into familiar scenes where white middle-class American families pose at a table to celebrate a birthday, at the beach, during a barbecue, or in front of a suburban pavilion. These perfectly designed and staged photomontages create imaginary yet utterly believable scenes that invite viewers to reconsider who is seen, who is remembered, who is included. In photography historian Taous Dahmani’s words, “The duo plays with this fluctuation between the trivial and the extraordinary that makes it possible to comment on and question history.”