Historical Research and Curatorial Development, Turner Contemporary, 2021

While working as a curator at Turner Contemporary, Dr Leila Nassereldein supported Larry Achiampong’s studio during the early research and development of Wayfinder (2022), a feature-length film commissioned by Turner Contemporary in partnership with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and MK Gallery.

Her contribution centred on the long and often fragmented history of Black presence in Britain. Through archival and scholarly research, she traced histories extending far beyond the dominant post-war narrative of Black British life, from evidence of African presence in Roman Britain to the movement of Black people through the medieval and early modern periods.

This research helped establish a deeper historical field for the film’s exploration of belonging, displacement and national identity. Britain’s landscape could be read not as a neutral backdrop, but as a terrain already marked by movement, encounter and the selective production of historical memory.

By bringing dispersed sources into relation, Nassereldein contributed to an intellectual framework in which Black British history appeared neither recent nor peripheral, but constitutive of Britain’s social and cultural formation. Her role exemplified a research-led curatorial practice in which historical enquiry enters artistic development at an early stage, expanding the conceptual conditions from which new moving-image work can emerge.