People, Place & Sport
Artist Jaskirt Boora explores the role of gender and ethnicity in sport through a series of photographic portraits and recorded conversations. People, Place and Sport is a celebration of local communities and grassroots sport in the West Midlands.
Jaskirt captured inspiring images at much-loved sporting hubs on a weekly basis along with conversations with people in the community about what sports means to them. These were exhibited as an outdoor exhibition in two parts:
- a community exhibition from April to August 2022, at eight local sites across Birmingham and Sandwell.
- A large-scale outdoor exhibition from July to August 2022, at Sandwell Valley Country Park.
We worked with Creative Producer Jenny Moore, designer and fabricator Matt Moore, Blind Mice Design and Iain Armstrong of Phonoscope.
Presented by the Birmingham 2022 Festival, People, Place and Sport was generously funded by Arts Council England and The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Jaskirt Kaur Boora is an award-winning visual artist whose work focuses on a socially engaged practice, working with local communities in the West Midlands. She is interested in celebrating untold stories while exploring visual representations of gender, ethnicity and place.
Boora creates work with the aim to empower and give voice to marginalised communities. In 2021 she collaborated with women’s refuge Birmingham Crisis Centre and published a zine, Aurat ki Himmat, raising just under £500 for the refuge in the process. Currently she is working on People, Place and Sport in partnership with Multistory and Birmingham 2022 Festival, with multiple outdoor exhibitions to take place in Sandwell and Birmingham. Both projects explore personal stories through portraits, details of place and conversations that have taken place through workshops and interviews.
In December 2021 Boora won the BJP Portrait of Britain award for her portrait of Dr Mavi, and in September 2021 Boora won the RBSA 2021 Photography prize for her image of Aabidah Shah, both taken from the body of work Birmingham Lockdown Stories. This work was commissioned by GRAIN Projects in 2020, exhibited at the international Format Festival 2021, and in January 2021 sold out as Boora’s first self published book.
Boora’s work has been exhibited nationally, including Wembley stadium and Manchester’s People Museum, and has been widely published, including in The Sunday Times. Boora has also been the recipient of awards including the Photo Imaging Council Award and the Magnum & Ideas Tap Sports Award for her work on Women’s Football and Everyday Olympian.
