Luna: Care & Defiance
The world as seen by women, women-identifying and non binary photographers
1-27 May 2026, Centrala gallery, Birmingham
Launch 5pm onwards, Friday 1 May with artist talk tour 6-7pm
Workshop 1-2pm and panel event 2-3pm, Saturday 2 May
Luna presents Care & Defiance, a group exhibition that explores the female gaze in all its multiplicity. The show features work by 11 contemporary photographers selected via an open call, two national photo collectives, POST Photo Collective and UK Black Female Photographers, a Lisel Haas Archive curation, Rhonda Wilson MBE’s Worth Paying For campaign and a salon showcase of images entered into the open call.
Care & Defiance takes inspiration from bell hooks in viewing love as an act of resistance. Across staged portraiture and documentary image-making, collage, performance and analogue processes, the richly varied works in this exhibition explore timely themes of identity and community, urban and domestic space, migration, memory and the politics of everyday life.
Some of these photographs draw attention to slow, quiet gestures, small acts that shape how we look after ourselves and each other in challenging times, while others take aim at the violence of beauty norms, chronicle protests or consider the ambivalence of motherhood.
POST Photography Collective is a UK-wide support network committed to making motherhood visible in the photographic industry. UK Black Female Photographers (UKBFTOG) uplifts, empowers and celebrates Black female photographers across the UK. Lisel Haas (1898-1989) was a German-born Jewish photographer who settled in Birmingham in 1938 with her partner Greta Bermbach. Worth Paying For was a 1980s campaign by Rhonda Wilson MBE (1953-2014) that toured Birmingham in the 1980s combining staged imagery with testimonies from women workers paid unequal wages.
The exhibition marks Luna’s first print exhibition and continues the Birmingham-based photography organisation’s commitment to supporting women and non binary image-makers in the West Midlands and beyond, creating space for dialogue around representation and solidarity within the photographic community. Kindly supported by the BCU RAADBCU Research Grant.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS (in alphabetical order)
Alishah Iqbal; Caitriona Dunnett; Cheyenne Hall; Editoriat; Ellie Smith; Kara White; Laura Gale; Puffin Alwarey; Safa Basharat Malik; Sylwia Ciszewska-Peciak; Vicky Hodgson
© Editoriat / Luna: Care & Defiance 2026