Assistant Editor, Turner Contemporary, 2021
While working as a curator at Turner Contemporary, Leila Nassereldein served as Assistant Editor of Barbara Walker, the first monograph dedicated to the British artist’s practice. Published alongside Walker’s site-specific installation Place, Space and Who, the book brought together 79 images spanning more than two decades of work, with essays by Sarah Martin, Paul Gilroy and Aïcha Mehrez, and an interview with the artist by Courtney J. Martin.
Nassereldein edited contributions including Gilroy’s essay, working across argument, structure, tone and consistency while preserving the distinct critical position of each writer. Her role required close attention to the relation between text and image, ensuring that the publication could hold together Walker’s sustained inquiry into race, class, gender, power and representation without reducing the work to a single interpretive frame.
The editorial process centred the politics of visibility that run through Walker’s practice: the recovery of Black presence from histories and institutions that have rendered it marginal, anonymous or absent. Rather than treating the monograph as documentation alone, Nassereldein helped shape it as a critical object in its own right – one in which scholarship, visual sequence and artistic practice entered into dialogue.
The publication received the Historians of British Art’s 2023 Book Award for an Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue; the prize citation praised its account of the politics of visibility and the ethics of care within Walker’s portraiture, as well as the strength of its critical essays and artist interview.
