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In The Showroom’s Women on Aeroplanes, three artists explore the untold contributions made by black women to transnational liberation movements New work by Lungiswa Gqunta, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa addresses the ‘herstories’ of political struggles while questioning the mechanisms which erase such women from the record Co-curated by The Otolith Collective, these responses make up the London iteration of an eponymous international project which spans two years and five cities (Berlin, Lagos, Warsaw, Beyreuth and London)   Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s installation presents research into the life and political activities of Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897–1969), a pan-African activist, co-founder of Notting Hill Carnival and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as well as founder of the Afro-Womens’ Centre in London (Ashwood Garvey’s oft-cited marriage to the radical leader Marcus Garvey is noticeably omitted from the exhibition’s overview, perhaps a wry comment on the common the practice of introducing famous woman by association to their husbands) Numerous archive folders documenting her life and work are set up across five research stations in the gallery Meticulously labelled in handwritten black ink, the folders contain newspaper clippings of Ashwood Garvey posing amongst leaders of soon-to-be independent African countries in the 1940s – including Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) – or addressing crowds in Trafalgar Square, as well as copies of her correspondence with many of the 20th century’s major black political figures (WEB Du Bois, CLR James and George Padmore amongst others) Textual interjections by the artist, including annotations scribbled onto the material and copies of correspondence with archive librarians, offer a window alongside into the painstaking process of rescuing this material from obscurity The archive addresses a clear deficit in the information commonly available on Ashwood Garvey’s remarkable life Compare her former husband’s Wikipedia entry with hers: it’s an impoverished account given the extent of her transnational enterprises, glimpsed here via Wolukau-Wanambwa’s research As a backdrop to this injustice, five brightly coloured pillars of text hang on the facing wall like banners proclaiming Ashwood Garvey’s virtues and accomplishments as the ‘most travelled’ black woman to date, a ‘great daughter’ of the