Have You Met: The Right to Ambivalence

About Olema Kweli

Olema Kweli is a researcher working across Black visual culture, cosmopolitanism, beauty politics and intimacy. Her research is concerned with the everyday spaces where relationships, humour, and care become visible. 

She is especially interested in adornment, Black cosmopolitanism, and the small ways people make sense of themselves and one another. Her work is shaped by her Kenyan and African American background, and by a life lived across the United States, Kenya, Hong Kong, China, Tanzania, and the Netherlands.

Her work approaches visual anthropology as a way of staying with complexity, particularly in moments of contradiction, discomfort, pleasure, and ambivalence. In The Right to Ambivalence, Olema turns the camera toward Black hair practices in Amsterdam, moving across salons, homes, dinner tables, and intimate friendships.

As both filmmaker and participant, she brings her own relationship to hair into the research encounter. Having never shown her natural hair on camera in her adult life, she enters the film through the same vulnerability and scrutiny that the project explores. Her work asks how Black hair might be understood beyond fixed ideas of pride, shame, resistance, or assimilation, and instead approached as a site of material intimacy, labour, memory, and relation.

About Shaquille Shaniqua Joy

Shaquille Shaniqua Joy is a moderator and cultural curator whose practice centers on storytelling. Working across conversations, programmes and exhibitions, Shaquille explores how subjectivity and lived experience can serve as vital forms of knowledge. 

Their curatorial and conversational practice emphasizes exchange over extraction: as a moderator, they prioritize conversations rather than interviews, cultivating environments where complexity, nuance, and vulnerability can be explored. 

Through this approach, Shaquille collaborates with cultural institutions, museums, platforms, and brands to create encounters where listening, resonance, and embodied presence become central methods of inquiry, including formats such as Living Room Session.

About Living Room Session

Living Room Session is a recurring curatorial framework and live program curated and hosted by Shaquille Shaniqua Joy. Each edition invites artists across different disciplines into the metaphorical setting of a living room.