EMPIRE LINES: Recent Episodes
EMPIRE LINES
EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way, flows of Empires through art.
Interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith ‘Empire’.
MUSIC: Combinación // The Dubbstyle.
COVER ART: Claudia Chan.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Contemporary and performance artist Paul Maheke moves between France, Congo, and Canada, exploring the ‘archive of their body’ through drawing and dance, via Taboo Durag (2021).
To Be Blindly Hopeful emerged from the very last sentence of a journal that Paul Maheke kept between August 2020 and June 2021, capturing the turbulence of the COVID pandemic on paper. Central to his practice is a delicate dance between the individual and the collective, personal and broader sociopolitical contexts, echoing the sentiment expressed by bell hooks, who reminds us that ‘the space of our lack is also the space of possibility.’
Currently based in France, Paul shares work ‘staged’ in previous exhibitions at South London Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate Modern, highlighting how these ‘new’ drawings, prints, book illustrations, and paintings of birds have long formed part of his practice. He explains how performance and dance can be both emancipatory and trapping, with respect to queerness, masculinity, and gender, and the reality of being ‘brown body looked at by a white audience’. Exploring these lived experiences through movement, Paul’s work suggests of Stuart Hall’s thinking about living archives - but the artist also shares his lifelong admiration for the French-born ice skater, Surya Bonaly.
We delve into Paul’s plural popular culture and academic Influences like Grace Jones and Félix González-Torres, Audre Lorde and Édouard Glissant, and Bruce Nauman to Paul B. Preciado - not as icons but real, complex people. Finally, Paul highlights how his work changes in its global travels, from Paris, to the Baltic Triennale in Estonia, and Johanneburg, South Africa. He also speaks of his collaborations with family members and the fellow artist Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) for the Congo Biennale in 2021, his personal relationship with arts institutions on the continent, as a diasporic artist.
Paul Maheke: To Be Blindly Hopeful runs at MOSTYN in Wales until 29 June 2024. It includes Taboo Durag (2021), produced as a performance to camera for Glasgow International 2021. This episode marks this iteration of Scotland’s biennale festival of contemporary art, which continues until 23 June 2024.
Paul has also shown work as part of the Diaspora Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the first to feature an official performance programme co-produced with the Delfina Foundation, and in the Drawing Biennal 2024, which runs at the Drawing Room in London until 3 July 2024.
Hear another of Paul’s collaborators, Barby Asante, on Declaration of Independence (2023), part of Art on the Underground in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/aa2803b68933ab974ca584cf6a18479c
For another exhibition from MOSTYN, hear artist and curator Taloi Havini on Habitat (2017) and Artes Mundi 10: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e30bd079e3b389a1d7e68f5e2937a797
For more about bell hooks, hear Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f
And on Édouard Glissant, listen to Manthia Diawara, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, and artist Billy Gerard Frank on Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019), part of PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
In this special episode, EMPIRE LINES returns to Ingrid Pollard’s 2022 exhibition, Carbon Slowly Turning, the first major survey of her career photographing Black experiences beyond the city and urban environments, in the English countryside. It marks the artist’s participation in Invasion Ecology, a season of contemporary land art across South West England in summer 2024, questioning what we mean by ‘native’ and what it means to belong.
Since the 1980s, artist Ingrid Pollard has explored how Black and British identities are socially constructed, often through historical representations of the rural landscape. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, Ingrid draws on English and Caribbean photographic archives, with works crossing the borders of printmaking, sculpture, audio, and video installations. Their practice confronts complex colonial histories, and their legacies in our contemporary lived experiences, especially concerning race, sexuality, and identity.
Curated by the artist and Gilane Tawadros, Carbon Slowly Turning led to Pollard’s shortlisting for the Turner Prize 2022. From its iteration at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, Ingrid exposes the pre-Windrush propaganda films beneath works like Bow Down and Very Low -123 (2021), her plural influences from Maya Angelou to Muhammad Ali, and playing on popular culture with works in the Self Evident series (1992). As a Stuart Hall Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex, and with a PhD-by-publication, the artist discusses the role of research in her media-based practice. Finally, Ingrid opens her archive of depictions of African figures 'hidden in plain sight' in English towns and villages - from classical portraiture, to ‘Black Boy’ pub signs.
Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning ran at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Tate Liverpool, throughout 2022. The exhibition was supported by the Freelands Foundation and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the episode first released as part of EMPIRE LINES at 50.
Invasion Ecology is co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, runs from 1 June to 10 August 2024.
The wider programme includes anti-colonial talks and workshops with exhibiting artists, writers, researchers, and gardeners, reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals, and landscapes. Ingrid will join EMPIRE LINES in conversation with Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, and author of Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (2024), in July 2024.
For more information, follow Radical Ecology and Southcombe Barn on social media. You can also listen to the EMPIRE LINES x Invasion Ecology Spotify playlist, for episodes with Paul Gilroy, Lubaina Himid, Johny Pitts, and Imani Jacqueline Brown, plus partners from the University of Exeter, KARST, CAST, and the Eden Project in Cornwall.Ingrid Pollard’s Three Drops of Blood (2022), commissioned by talking on corners (Dr Ella S. Mills and Lorna Rose), also explores representations of ferns, botany, and folk traditions in Devon’s historic lace-making industry. First exhibited at Thelma Hubert Gallery in Honiton, it is now part of the permanent collection of The Box in Plymouth, where it will be displayed from 19 October 2024.
SOUNDS: no title, Ashish Ghadiali (2024).
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist LR (Lisa) Vandy shows EMPIRE LINES the ropes in a studio visit to Chatham’s Royal Navy Dockyard in Kent, unravelling entangled imperial and industrial relationships, dance in the African diaspora, and women’s work in abstract sculpture.
In 2022, sculptor LR (Lisa) Vandy relocated her studio from the city of London to Chatham Ropery which, with original machinery from the 19th century, has preserved traditional practices and knowledges. Rope became essential to Britain’s burgeoning maritime industry during the Georgian and Victorian eras, tied to the construction of empires, colonial hierarchies, and sites of slavery. Building in collaboration with the resident Master Ropemakers, her sculptures allude to and playfully subvert the media’s historic associations and legacy now.
From her five-metre-high figure for Liverpool’s Canning Dock, to her new, smaller body of works, Lisa walks through her collection and archive on Kent’s waterfront. Born in Coventry in the Midlands, she shares her experiences of growing up ‘by the sea’ in Sussex as a young person of Nigerian and Irish heritages, and the racialised exclusion some face from leisurely pursuits in natural environments.
Inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2006 book, Dancing In The Streets, Lisa unravels ‘collective joy’ and the central role of Black women. We see how dance has been used to resist oppression across continents, with spirit dances, raves, festivals, and carnival masquerades, interests shared by contemporaries like Theaster Gates, Hew Locke, Romuald Hazoumè, Zak Ové, and Hassan Hajjaj.
Straw-fibre figures recall Grain Mother deities, corn dollies, and Kumpo, spinning dances from the Casamance (Senegal) and Gambia. With her ongoing series of Hulls, comprised of found objects, boats, and fishing floats ‘plundered’ from DIY stores, we discuss her interest in the ‘underbelly of empire’, knotty relationships between rail, sail, and transport, and ‘migrant crises’ in the Mediterranean Sea today. Drawing on her research in museum collections, ancient silverwares, and indigo trade routes, Lisa moves on the discussion about globalised ’African masks’ as symbols of ‘aggressive protection’.
We discuss gender and identity, and how her curvilinear copper sculptures challenge conventional representations of the ‘female form’. Dynamic drawings of tornados tell of her designs for statues in the landscape - role models for those subject to the male gaze - exposing the empowering potential of contemporary art. Plus, Lisa shares why her tactile public artworks are designed to be destroyed.
LR Vandy: Twist runs at the October Gallery in London until 25 May 2024.
Dancing In Time: The Ties That Bind Us, commissioned by Liverpool Museums for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King celebrations in 2023, stands at the Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent until 17 November 2024.
On harvest rituals, hear episodes about Ashanti Hare’s performances at Against Apartheid at KARST in Plymouth (2023) and Invasion Ecology on Dartmoor (2024), and Learning from Artemisia (2019-2020), by Uriel Orlow and Orchestre Jeunes Étoiles des Astres, at the Eden Project in Cornwall.
For more photographs of Black experiences in English coastal towns, and about the transatlantic ‘Triangular Trade’ between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, hear Ingrid Pollard on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at Turner Contemporary in Margate.
For more women working in port cities, read into:
- Lisetta Carmi: Identities, at the Estorick Collection in London.
- Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, at Tate Modern in London.
And hear Chris Spring on ‘African’ textiles and Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx by Araminta de Clermont (2010) at the British Museum in London.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Editor: Alex Rees.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Filmmaker Saodat Ismailova traces stories of spirituality, dissent, and environmental extraction around the Aral Sea from post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Central Asia, via Melted into the Sun (2024).
Uzbekistan is a country at ‘crossroads of diverse material histories and migratory legacies. Part of ‘Central Asia’ - first defined by the Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt in 1843 - the region was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Russian Communist Party in the 20th century, until the Union’s collapse in 1990. As one of the first generations of post-Soviet Central Asian artists, Saodat Ismailova often draws on shared traditions and transnational connections with groups including Uyghurs in China, to Arabic communities further west, distinguishing between migration and displacement in her practice.
Starting with her documentary, Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004), to her more recent works on Chillpiq, we discuss the cultural importance of water; the Aral Sea, now the Aral Desert, was one of the world’s largest lakes until the Soviet Union steadily diverted its water sources, reducing it to 10% of its original size. From this story of the three remaining generations of fishermen on the lake, she travels to her most recent film, focussing on Al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an 8th century textile dyer and alchemist who became a ‘protosocialist’ poltiical revolutionary. We consider the role of religions and faiths including Zoroastranianism and Mazdakism, Islam, and Buddhism, evidence of cosmopolitan coexistence within empires, as well as how this figure has been appropriated in 20th century communist Russian propaganda.
Saodat shares her interests in oriental classical music and improvision in maqam and raga, as living archives that are ‘deadened’ when performed or notated, as well as archeology (and the number 40) We discuss her collective practice with Davra Collective, and global exhibitions from Tate Modern in London to documenta in Kassel. From her first residency with Fabrica, to her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2013 as part of the Central Asian Pavilion, Saodat shares her long connection with Italy, ‘the start’ of her life in Europe.
Saodat Ismailova’s film, Melted into the Sun (2024), is on view as part of Nebula, produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, which runs at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice until 24 November 2024.
Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.
Hear Nil Yalter, awardee of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and fellow Paris-practicing artist, at @ab_anbar during @londongalleryweekend 2023, with Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now).
For more on music, memory, and history, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), and Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now).
Find out more about textiles and embroidery across Central and South West Asia and North Africa with Rachel Dedman, curator of Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and the Whitworth in Manchester:
On an UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s), on EMPIRE LINES.
On the exhibition more widely, in this gowithYamo article: gowithyamo.com/blog/textiles-in-cambridge-palestinian-embroidery-at-kettles-yard
WITH: Saodat Ismailova, filmmaker and artist who lives and works between Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Paris, France. She is the initiator of the educational program CCA Lab, Tashkent Film Encounters, and the DAVRA research group, which is dedicated to studying, documenting, and disseminating Central Asian culture and knowledge.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tamsin Hong of the Serpentine Galleries, coat London’s historic statues and public monuments with fresh layers of history.
For over 30 years, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA has used Western European art history to explore contemporary culture and national identities. With his iconic use of Dutch wax print fabric - inspired by Indonesian batik designs, mass-produced in the Netherlands (and now China) and sold to British colonies in West Africa - he troubles ideas of ‘authentic’ ‘African prints’. Painting these colourful patterns on his smaller-scale replicas of sculptures of British figures like Winston Churchill, Robert Clive, and Robert Milligan, he engages with contemporary debates raised in Black Lives Matter (#BLM) and the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol.
Suspended States, the artist’s first London solo exhibition in over 20 years, puts these questions of cultural identity and whiteness, within the modern contexts of globalisation, economics, and art markets. Wind Sculptures speak to movements across borders, other works how architectures of power affect refuge, migration, and the legacies of imperialism in wars, conflict, and peace today. With his Library series, we read into Wole Soyinka, Bisi Silva, and the Harlem Renaissance, alongside canonised artists like Diego Velázquez and Pablo Picasso, engaging with modernism and ‘primitivism’.
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tamsin Hong highlight the connection between the Serpentine’s ecological work, and Yinka’s new woodcuts and drawings which consider the environmental impacts of colonialism. A self-described ‘post-colonial hybrid’, Yinka details his diasporic social practices, like the Guest Project space, G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria, and collaborations with young artists and researchers like Leo Robinson, Péjú Oshin, and Alayo Akinkubye, rethinking this 'moment' or 'fashion' for Black art.
Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States runs at the Serpentine Galleries in London until 1 September 2024. Yinka is also an Invited Artist, and participant in Nigeria Imaginary, the official Nigerian Pavilion, at the 60th Venice Biennale, which runs until 24 November 2024.
Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.
For more about Dutch wax fabric and ‘African’ textiles, listen to Lubaina Himid on Lost Threads (2021, 2023) at the Holburne Museum in Bath and British Textile Biennial 2021, and the British Museum’s Dr. Chris Spring on Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx by Araminta de Clermont (2010).
For more about Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (2010), listen to historicity London, a podcast series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are.
On bronze as the ‘media of history’, hear artist Pio Abad on Giolo’s Lament (2023) at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
On the globalisation of ‘African’ masks, hear Tate curator Osei Bonsu in the episode about Ndidi Dike’s A History of A City in a Box (2019).
For more about the Blk Art Group, hear curator Dorothy Price on Claudette Johnson’s And I Have My Own Business In This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London.
Hear curator Folakunle Oshun, and more about Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), in the episode on Lagos Soundscapes by Emeka Ogboh (2023), at the South London Gallery.
Read about Nengi Omuku in this article about Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.
And for another artist practicing in port cities like Venice, hear John Akomfrah of the British Pavilion (2024) on Arcadia (2023) at The Box in Plymouth.
WITH: Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, British-Nigerian artist. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, and Tamsin Hong, Exhibitions Curator, at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Artist Zineb Sedira records cultural and postcolonial connections between Algeria, France, Italy, and the UK from the 1960s, featuring films, rugs, and radical magazines from her personal archive.
Dreams Have No Titles (2022) is Zineb Sedira’s love letter to cinema, the classic films of her childhood in Paris, coming of age in Brixton in London, and ‘return’ to Algiers - three cities between which the artist lives and practices. Born in 1963, the year after Algeria achieved independence from French colonial rule, her and her family’s diasporic story is central to her practice.
Zineb recalls her first encounters with 'militant cinema', and international co-productions like the Golden Lion-winning The Battle of Algiers (1966). She shares her decision to represent France at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, controversial reactions from French media and society, and solidarity from her radical contemporaries and women, like Françoise Vergès, Sonia Boyce, Latifa Echakhch, Alberta Whittle, and Gilane Tawadros. We discuss the legacy of her work in the selection of Julien Creuzet, the first person of Caribbean descent and from the French overseas territories to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Zineb shares how personal histories contribute to collective memory, subverting ideas of ‘collection’, and using museum and gallery spaces to make archives more accessible. With orientalist tapestries and textiles - her ‘feminist awakening’ - we discuss how culture can both perpetuate political and colonial hierarchies, and provide the possibility to ‘decolonise oneself’. From her academic research in the diaspora, Zineb suggests how she carried much knowledge in her body as lived experience, detailing her interest in oral histories (and podcasts!), as living archives. With Nina Simone, Miriam Makebe, and Archie Shepp, performers at the Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1969), she shows her love of jazz and rock music, played with her community of squatters and fellow students from Central Saint Martins. Finally, we see how the meaning of her participatory works change as they travel and migrate between global audiences, and institutions and funding in Algiers today, via aria, her research residency for artists.
Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles runs at the Whitechapel Gallery in London until 12 May 2024. A free Artist and Curator Talk takes place at the Gallery on 11 April 2024. and the film version of the work shows at Tate Britain in London until September 2024.
Zineb Sedira: Let’s Go On Singing! ran at the Goodman Gallery in London until 16 March 2024.
Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.
For more about Souffles, Tricontinental, and the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), listen to curator Morad Montazami at Tate St Ives in Cornwall.
For more about Baya, read into:
Baya: Icon of Algerian Painting at the Arab World Institute, Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), in Paris.
Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation, part of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World. at Christie’s London.
And for other artists inspired by the port city of Venice, hear John Akomfrah of the British Pavilion (2024) on Arcadia (2023) at The Box in Plymouth, and curator Hammad Nasar on Nusra Latif Qureshi’s 2009 work, Did You Come Here To Find History?
WITH: Zineb Sedira, Paris and London-based artist, who also works in Algeria. Working across photography, film, installation and performance, she was shortlisted for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Dreams Have No Titles was first commissioned for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist and archivist Pio Abad draws out lines between Oxford, the Americas, and the Philippines, making personal connections with historic collections, and reconstructing networks of trafficking, tattooing, and 20th century dictatorships.Pio Abad’s practice is deeply informed by global histories, with a particular focus on the Philippines. Here, he was born and raised in a family of activists, at a time of conflict and corruption under the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (1965-1986). His detailed reconstructions of their collection - acquired under the pseudonyms of Jane Ryan and William Saunders - expose Western/Europe complicities in Asian colonial histories, from Credit Suisse to the American Republican Party, and critique how many museums collect, display, and interpret the objects they hold today.
In his first UK exhibition in a decade, titled for Mark Twain’s 1901 anti-imperial satire, Pio connects these local and global histories. With works spanning engraving, sculpture, and jewellery, produced in collaboration with his partner, Frances Wadworth Jones, he reengages objects found at the University of Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, St John’s College, and Blenheim Palace - often marginalised, ignored, or forgotten. With an etching of Prince Giolo or the ‘Painted Prince’, a 17th century slave depicted by John Savage, Pio outlines why his practice is anchored around the body. We also look at two reconstructed tiaras, which connect the Romanovs of the Russian Empire, to the Royal Family in the UK, all via Christie’s auction house.
Pio shares why he often shows his work alongside others, like the Filipino American artist and art historian Carlos Villa, plus the politics, collections, and textiles of Pacita Abad, his aunt. He details his use of monumental media like marble and bronze, ‘the material of history’. Pio explains his approach to ‘diasporic objects’, not things, but travelling ‘networks of relationships’, which challenge binaries between the East and West, and historic and contemporary experiences - thus locating himself within Oxford’s archives.
Ashmolean NOW: Pio Abad: To Those Sitting in Darkness runs at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until 8 September 2024, accompanied by a full exhibition catalogue.
Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Pio’s forthcoming exhibition book, is co-published by Ateneo Art Gallery and Hato Press, and available online from the end of May 2025.
For other artists who’ve worked with objects in Oxford’s museum collections, read about:
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Ashmolean NOW: Flora Yukhnovich and Daniel Crews-Chubbs, at the Ashmolean Museum.
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Marina Abramović: Gates and Portals, at Modern Art Oxford and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
For more about the history of the Spanish Empire in the Philippines, listen to Dr. Stephanie Porras’ EMPIRE LINES on an Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Basilica of Guadalupe (17th Century).
And hear Taloi Havini, another artist working with Silverlens Gallery in the Philippines, on Habitat (2017), at Mostyn Gallery for Artes Mundi 10.
WITH: Pio Abad, London-based artist, concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. He is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad.PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curators Ros Carter and Sofie Krogh Christensen chart Pia Arke’s photo-activism across the Arctic region, from a pinhole view to wider perspectives on Indigenous and Inuit experiences in the 20th century.
Though scarcely exhibited outside Scandinavia, Pia Arke (1958–2007) is widely acknowledged as one of the region’s most important artistic researchers, ‘photo-activists’, and postcolonial critics. Born in Scoresbysund, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) to a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, Arke asserted an identity that was defined as neither exclusively Danish or Greenlandic; a ‘third place’ that allowed for hybridity and resisted binary categories or polarisation. Through performance art, writing and photography, she examines the complex ethnic and cultural relationships between Denmark and Greenland, using long exposure to highlight continuities over time. Modern Danish colonial rule started in the 18th century, and Greenland wouldn’t became a fully autonomous state until the 1970s. Still dependent on grants, much of Greenland’s economic and foreign policy remains under Danish control.
In 1990, the artist developed her own hand-built, life-size camera obscura to photograph the landscapes of Greenland that she had known as a child. Reconstructed today at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and KW Institute in Berlin, the curators share how Arke was drawn to the ‘in-between’ media of photography, like herself, a ‘mongrel’ which challenged artistic conventions. Arke’s self and group portraits, reappropriated photographs, and archive collages also mark stark interventions, reinserting Indigenous and Inuit people and women into Nordic narratives, challenging the artist’s exclusion from conceptual art circles, and stereotypes of ‘naive’ and folk painting.
Arke died before she could experience the growing interest in her work; its continued relevance to questions of representation, climate crises, and the impact of global economics on Indigenous communities throughout the arctic regions, is evident in the work of other artists on display, and contemporaries like Jessie Kleemann, Anna Birthe-Hove, and Julie Edel Hardenberg. We discuss Arke’s experience of art education in Copenhagen, and the ongoing efforts by the likes of the Nuuk Art Museum to find a language for Inuit art histories. Plus, we consider shared histories between Greenland, Denmark, and the UK - including the British explorer who gave his name to Scoresbysund.
Pia Arke: Silences and Stories runs at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until 11 May 2024. The partner exhibition, Pia Arke: Arctic Hysteria, runs at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin from 6 July 2024.
A new publication on Pia Arke’s work, co-published by John Hansard Gallery and KW Institute, will be available in late April 2024. Symposiums will take place in both Southampton and Berlin too.
Recommended Exhibitions:
- Outi Pieski runs at Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 6 May 2024.
- Michelle Williams Gamaker: The Silver Wave runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 27 October 2024.
- Shuvinai Ashoona: When I Draw runs at The Perimeter in London until 26 April 2024.
For more about Godland, Hlynur Pálmason (2023), read my article from the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) 2022.
On Sonia Ferlov Mancoba, hear Cobra Museum curators Winnie Sze and Pim Arts on We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948.
On long exposures, hear photographer Hélène Amouzou and curator Bindi Vora on Voyages (2023).
WITH: Ros Carter, Head of Programme (Senior Curator) at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Sofie Krogh Christensen, Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. They are the respective curators of Silences and Stories and Arctic Hysteria.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Art historian and Professor Griselda Pollock traces the memories of contemporary artist women like Sutapa Biswas, one of her students in the 1980s, and the entanglements in feminist, queer, and postcolonial thinking in art schools and universities.
Griselda Pollock has long advocated for the critical function of contemporary art - and artists - in society. Whether paintings, drawings, or sculptures, these media can translate the traumatic legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and migration into visual form, and serve as refusals to forget - especially in our memory-effacing digital age.
Born in apartheid South Africa, Griselda has lectured in global contexts; at the University of Leeds in the 1980s, she encountered Sutapa Biswas, a ‘force of nature’ and one of the institution’s first POC art students. She shares her experience of the two-way flows of teaching and learning. Drawing on stills from the artist’s new film work Lumen (2021), and historic ‘Housewives with Steak-Knives’ (1984-1985), she highlights both Bengali Indian imagery, and motifs of 17th and 18th century Old/Dutch Masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt - and why the artist ‘didn’t need Artemisia Gentileschi’ when she had the Hindu goddess Kali.
Engaging with leaders of the Blk Art Group like Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, and Claudette Johnson, we find connections with the first generation of British artists, born in the UK of migrant parents. Griselda also shares the important work of art historians and academics beyond Western/Europe, like Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Catherine de Zegher, and Hiroko Hagewara. We discuss how being open to challenge and conversation, unsettling your own assumptions, denormalising and widening visibility are all ongoing obligations. Still, with Coral Woodbury’s paintings, layered atop H.W. Jansen’s History of Art (1968), we see how little the education system has changed. Griselda concludes with thoughts on Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and challenging the norms of modernist colonial tourism within the confines of free speech and market demand.
Medium and Memory, curated by Griselda Pollock, ran at HackelBury Fine Art in London until 18 November 2023. An expanded exhibition of Coral Woodbury’s Revised Edition runs until 4 May 2024.
Griselda Pollock on Gauguin is published by Thames & Hudson, and available from 28 May 2024.
For more from Lubaina Himid, hear the artist on their work Lost Threads (2021, 2023), at the Holburne Museum in Bath: pod.link/1533637675/episode/4322d5fba61b6aed319a973f70d237b0
And read about their recent exhibition at Tate Modern, and work with the Royal Academy (RA) in London, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/the-revolutionary-act-of-walking-in-the-city
For more about The Thin Black Line exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London (1985), hear curator Dorothy Price on Claudette Johnson’s And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/707a0e05d3130f658c3473f2fdb559fc
For more about the artist Gego, who practiced in Germany and South America, read my article about Measuring Infinity at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2023), in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/infinite-viewpoints-gego-at-the-guggenheim-bilbao
WITH: Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of CentreCATH (Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History) at the University of Leeds. WITH: Griselda Pollock, Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of CentreCATH (Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History) at the University of Leeds. She won the Holberg Prize in 2020 for her contributions to feminism in art history and cultural studies, books, and exhibitions. She is the curator of Medium and Memory.
ART: ‘Lumen, Sutapa Biswas (2017) and Lubaina Himid, from the Revised Edition series, Coral Woodbury (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Artist and curator Lubaina Himid unravels entangled histories of transatlantic slavery and textile production, across continents, and Britain’s museum collections, via Lost Threads (2021, 2023).
Lubaina Himid considers herself ‘fundamentally a painter’, but textiles have long been part of her life and practice. Had she stayed in Zanzibar, the country of her birth in East Africa, she may have become a kanga designer, following a pattern set by her mother’s interest in fashion, and childhood spent around department stores in London. First commissioned by the British Textile Biennial in 2021, and installed in Gawthorpe Hall’s Great Barn, her 400m-long work Lost Threads’ flows in a manner reflective of the movement of the oceans, seas, and waterways which historically carried raw cotton, spun yarn, and woven textiles between continents, as well as enslaved people from Africa to pick raw cotton in the southern states of America, and workers who migrated from South Asia to operate looms in East Lancashire. Now on display in Bath, the rich Dutch wax fabrics resonate with the portraits on display in the Holburne Museum’s collection of 17th and 18th century paintings - symbols of how much of the wealth and prosperity of south-west England has been derived from plantations in the West Indies.
Lubaina talks about how the meaning of her work changes as it travels to different contexts, with works interpreted with respect to Indian Ocean histories in the port city of Sharjah, to accessible, participatory works in Cardiff, and across Wales. We consider her ‘creative interventions’ in object museums and historic collections, ‘obliterating the beauty’ of domestic items like ceramics, and her work with risk-taking curators in ‘regional’ and ‘non-conventional’ exhibition spaces. We discuss her formative work within the Blk Art group in the 1980s, collaboration with other women, and being the first Black artist to win the Turner Prize in 2017. And drawing on her interests in theatre, Lubaina hints at other collections and seemingly ‘resolved’ histories that she’d like to unsettle next.
Lubaina Himid: Lost Threads runs at the Holburne Museum in Bath until 21 April 2024.
For more about Dutch wax fabric and ‘African’ textiles, hear the British Museum's Dr. Chris Spring on Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx, Araminta de Clermont (2010).
For more about Claudette Johnson, hear curator Dorothy Price on And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London.
Hear artist Ingrid Pollard on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate.
Hear curator Griselda Pollock from Medium and Memory (2023) at HackelBury Fine Art in London.
And for more about the wealth of colonial, Caribbean sugar plantations which founded the Holburne Museum, hear Dr. Lou Roper on Philip Lea and John Seller’s A New Map of the Island of Barbados (1686), an object in its collection.
Recommended reading:
On Lubaina Himid: gowithyamo.com/blog/the-revolutionary-act-of-walking-in-the-city
On Maud Sulter: gowithyamo.com/blog/reclaiming-visual-culture-black-venus-at-somerset-house
On Sonia Boyce: gowithyamo.com/blog/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition
On Life Between Islands at Tate Britain: artmag.co.uk/the-caribbean-condensed-life-between-islands-at-the-tate-britain
WITH: Lubaina Himid, British artist and curator, and professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Himid was one of the first artists involved in the UK's Black Art movement in the 1980s, and appointed MBE and later CBE for services to Black Women's/Art. She won the Turner Prize in 2017, and continues to produce work globally.
ART: ‘Lost Threads, Lubaina Himid (2021, 2023)’.
SOUNDS: Super Slow Way, British Textile Biennial (2021).
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Decolonial thinker Professor Paul Gilroy joins EMPIRE LINES live in Plymouth, to chart thirty years since the publication of The Black Atlantic, his influential book about race, nationalism, and the formation of a transoceanic, diasporic culture, of African, American, British, and Caribbean heritages.
Published in 1993, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness explores the interconnectedness of Black diasporas and communities across Western/Europe. He argues that the experience of slavery and colonisation, racism and global migration has shaped a unique Black cultural identity that transcends national borders.
By examining the cultural contributions of Black individuals in music, literature, and art, Paul suggests that the Black Atlantic remains a site of resistance and creativity. Highlighting the plural and complex experiences of Black people throughout history and today, he challenges the notion of a singular, essential Black identity. We consider some of the transdisciplinary artist-activist-academics referenced in his texts, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall, and James Baldwin, to more contemporary figures, like Nadia Cattouse, bell hooks, and June Jordan, and Angeline Morrison. Plus, Paul talks about his early interests in music journalism, research into Black jazz and blues music, as well as British folk and country songs - and even Eminem.
We consider Paul’s engagements with Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the Midlands, and how his practice challenges ideas of Black nationalism, Afro-centrism, and political Blackness. We discuss too his ideas about afro-pessimism and planetary humanism, and how capitalism, militarism, and the environment has changed over the last thirty years. A self-described ‘child of Rachel Carson’, he details his support for Extinction Rebellion, and the obligation of older generations to find hope in an era of climate and ecological crises. Finally, Paul describes his ‘Creole upbringing’ in north London, connecting with his Guyanese heritage in the multicultural, cosmopolitan city, and how his mixed parentage shaped his relationship with rural landscapes, including the south-west of England, from where we speak.
This episode was recorded live at the Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth - a series of talks and live performances, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s formative text - in November 2023: eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-atlantic-tickets-750903260867?aff=oddtdtcreator
For more, listen to Ashish Ghadiali on the exhibition Against Apartheid (2023): pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3
For more about Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now (2021-2022) at Tate Britain in London, read my article for Artmag: artmag.co.uk/the-caribbean-condensed-life-between-islands-at-the-tate-britain/
For more about Ingrid Pollard, hear the artist on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4
For more about the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, listen to Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cab2757a707f76d6b5e85dbe1b62993
WITH: Professor Paul Gilroy, sociologist, Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London (UCL), and Co-Chair of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network (BAIN). He won the Holberg Prize in 2019.
ART: ‘’The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy (1993-Now) (EMPIRE LINES Live in Plymouth, with Radical Ecology)’PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey joins EMPIRE LINES live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, to discuss Afrogallonism, uplifting communities with upcycled plastic waste, and how the traditional Ghanaian harvest festival of Homowo challenges colonial hierarchies of gender.
Accra-based artist Serge Attukwei Clottey works across installation, performance, photography, painting, and sculpture, exploring personal and political narratives rooted in histories of trade and migration. He refers to his practice with yellow plastic, Kufuor-era, cooking oil cans as ‘Afrogallonism’, using found and recycled materials to create a dialogue with the city’s cultural history and identity, whilst exploring the meanings that are invested in everyday objects, and how they circulate in local and global economies.
Referencing Ghana’s historic wealth, a region known as the Gold Coast during British colonial rule during 19th and 20th century, Serge’s installations like Follow the Yellow Brick Road (2015-2020) also serve a practical function, in creating wealth and employment for the local community. On display alongside his existing work at the Eden Project is a new audio piece, a remembrance of famine that once befell pre-colonial Ghana, and is once again impacting farmers as a consequence of climate change.
Serge talks about his family’s migration from city of Jamestown/Usshertown, in British Accra, to La (Labadi), on the coast, and how water has long infiltrated his practice. We discuss the realities of resource extraction and consumption captured by his work, connecting with the likes of Romauld Hazoumè, El Anatsui, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji.
Serge shares his interest in political performance art, and collaborating with young people. We open My Mother’s Wardrobe (2015-2016), in which Serge invited men to wear women’s clothes and make-up to perform everyday and ritual tasks, disrupting conventions of gender and sexuality imposed upon and appropriated by many African countries during colonial rule. And Serge talks about his commissions across the world, from Desert X, to Kew Gardens, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, where his Windrush Portrait of Mr. Laceta Reid proudly stands.
This episode was recorded live at Reclaim - a weekend of talks and events at the Eden Project in Cornwall, curated to support mental and planetary wellbeing - in January 2024: edenproject.com/visit/whats-on/reclaim
Acts of Gathering runs at the Eden Project in Cornwall until 14 April 2024. For more, hear curators Misha Curson and Hannah Hooks in the episode on Learning from Artemisia, Uriel Orlow and Orchestre Jeunes Étoiles des Astres (2019-2020): pod.link/1533637675/episode/0e8ab778b4ce1ad24bc15df3fec5a386
For more about African masks and performance, listen to Osei Bonsu, curator of A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410
About Ashanti Hare, and the south-west arts ecology, hear curator Ashish Ghadiali on Radical Ecology’s recent exhibition at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3
For more ‘African’ textiles, hear Dr. Chris Spring on Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx, Araminta de Clermont (2010): pod.link/1533637675/episode/a32298611ba95c955aba254a4ef996dd
And on sea/water as a historical archive, listen to these episodes on:
John Akomfrah’s Arcadia (2023), at The Box in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/31cdf80a5d524e4f369140ef3283a6cd
Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), at the Barbican in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/1792f53fa27b8e2ece289b53dd62b2b7
WITH: Dr. Serge Attukwei Clottey, Accra-based visual artist.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist - and winner of Artes Mundi 10 - Taloi Havini mines connections between extractive industries in the Pacific Islands, and Wales. documenting the environmental damage caused by colonial, and patriarchal, relations with land, in Habitat (2017).
The Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea was the largest in the world when it first opened in 1972. Run by the Australian mining company, Conzinc Riotinto, it symbolises how legacies of extraction - in colonialism, and contemporary capitalism - are often entangled. Born in Bougainville, and now based in Brisbane, Taloi Havini’s own multidisciplinary artistic practice is informed by her matrilineal ties to her land and communities. In Habitat, a three-channel, immersive video installation, Taloi follows the journey of a woman called Agata, as she continues to investigate the legacies of resource extraction in Panguna and the Pacific region. Moving from lush greens to lurid blue waters - unnatural colours which Taloi hasn’t tampered with in film - we trace the poisonous tailings, waste products of mining, that have destroyed the landscape.
Taloi talks about how mining has ‘robbed’ people of sustainable ways of living, and how communities have come together to resist the imposition of destructive, gendered relationships to land. She describes various women as leaders, and shares her research-based practice, based on the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous Knowledge Systems,. Taloi details her work in ‘countermapping’, turning the same tools used by 19th century British settler-governments in Australia and New Zealand (Aoterea) for colonial discovery, plunder, and control, to showing evidence for those seeking environmental compensation. She also shares how her communities asked her to use drones, challenging the temporal othering of Indigenous identities.
Acknowledging her particular identity from the Nakas Tribe of Hakö people, Taloi connects with the practices of other Pacific artists, and details her forthcoming curatorial project, Re-stor(y)ing Oceania at Ocean Space, part of the Venice Biennale. On her announcement as winner of Artes Mundi 10, the UK’s largest contemporary art prize, she connects with her contemporaries - including John Akomfrah, Rushdi Anwar, Alia Farid, and Naomi Rincón Gallardo - and the solidarity shared by this year’s participants, most of whom come from areas of conflict, in seeking peace with respect to the situation in Palestine. She also shares how the work translates as it travels, challenging stereotypes like the ‘tropicalisation’ of Pacific identities, by platforming everyday Indigenous and Black experiences and identities. And at the Prize announcement in Cardiff, we discuss how Habitat resonates in local communities in Wales, a nation with its own particular relationship with oil, gas, and coal resource extraction.
Artes Mundi 10 runs at venues across Wales until 25 February 2024.
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology ran at the Barbican in London until 14 January 2024, and travels to FOMU in Antwerp, Belgium until 14 August 2024.
WITH: Taloi Havini, multidisciplinary artist based in Brisbane, Australia. She uses a range of media including photography, audio–video, sculpture, immersive installation and print, to probe intersections of history, identity, and nation-building within the matrilineal social structures of her birthplace in Arawa, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. Taloi is the curator of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania: Latai Taumoepeau, Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta at Ocean Space, Venice (2024), and winner of Artes Mundi 10 (AM10), the UK’s leading biennial exhibition and international contemporary art prize, presented with the Bagri Foundation.
ART: ‘Habitat, Taloi Havini (2017)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Jamie Ruers, Mariano Ben Plotkin, and Mariano Ruperthuz Honorato, from the Freud Museum in London, reinterpret psychoanalysis through 20th century Latin American pop culture, relocating the practice in radio shows, surrealist photographs, women’s magazines, and comic books from the 1960s, like Freud: El Mago de los Sueños (The Wizard of Dreams).
Psychoanalysis is often considered a practice of the Global North, starting in Sigmund Freud’s home in Vienna before World War II. But South America has been at the forefront of the practice since the end of the 20th century, where it is is even more popular than Europe. So who are the figures who led - and simultaneously developed - such thinking? And how did Buenos Aires come to have the highest proportion of psychoanalysts in the world?
Curator and researchers Jamie Ruers, Mariano Ben Plotkin, and Mariano Ruperthuz Honorato share how psychoanalysis permeated all layers of society, especially pop culture. They draw on existing traditions and new trends like magical realism, associated with Jorge Luis Borges. We discuss the ‘cultural complex’ of dreams and sex, and the difference between Freudism and psychoanalysis, highlighting histories of exchange and reinterpretation, agency and appropriation for economic gain, rather than simplying adoption or propagation, of Freud’s thinking. Beyond Spanish, Portuguese, both languages of colonial import, we consider the many ways Freud’s works were translated, and some of those he failed to credit, whose contributions have been written out of history, like Peruvian psychiatrist Honorio Delgado, Julio Pires Porto-Carrero, founder of the Society of Brazilian Psychoanalysis (1928), and disciple of Juliano Moreira, the son of a Black slave who picked up Freud’s ideas and circulated them throughout Brazil.
We hear Gastão Pereira da Silva’s radio programmes, authored ‘in the vein of Dr. Frasier Crane’, and read women’s magazines like Idilio, illustrated by exiles like the German-Argentinian photographer Grete Stern, whose surrealist images highlight the intellectual interests and engagements of women, and shared experiences of migrants across continents. Plus, contemporary artworks and interventions in Freud’s former home in London challenge the exotification of South America, connecting the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of people both past and present.
Freud and Latin America runs at the Freud Museum in London until 14 July 2024.
For more from the Freud Museum in London, hear:
Co-curators Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells on a Red-Figure Hydria of Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ancient Greece (380-360BCE), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/7a89c8d48acda4147d3d51c5a065b942
And Professor Craig Clunas on a Pierced Jade Scholar Screen, China (19th Century), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/44861b4a5e6a32380693ec6622210890
WITH: Jamie Ruers, art historian. Mariano Ben Plotkin and Mariano Ruperthuz Honorato, authors of Estimado Dr Freud: una cultura historia del psicoanálisis en América Latina (Edhasa, 2017), provides the narrative which guides the exhibition. They are the curator, and researchers, of Freud and Latin America.
ART: ‘Freud: El Mago de los Sueños (The Wizard of Dreams), Vidas Ilustres Comic Book (1963)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Jana Manuelpillai revisits the Madras College of Arts and Crafts, the first British colonial art school set up in India, through the post-independence practice and striking monochrome works of A.P. Santhanaraj.
The Madras College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, was the first art school in India, set up by the British colonial administrator in 1850. Post-independence in 1948, as the Government College of Arts and Crafts, teachers like K.C.S. Paniker and S. Dhanapal, and A.P. - Andrew Peter - Santhanaraj, transformed from the School, from its ‘Kensington style’ education, to focus on Indian influences. Historical attention has focussed on schools in Bombay, Baroda, Calcutta, and Delhi, but curator Jana Manuelpillai suggests that this actually let a more ‘authentic’ southern idiom to flourish - something he continues to explore with contemporary artists.
Marking 55 years since Madras State was renamed Tamil Nadu, Jana shares footage from his meetings with the Santhanaraj, and outlines his plural influences, from Indian fresco painting to the art of Jackson Pollock. We discuss the diversity and deep practice of traditional religions in the south, and the differences between European primitivism and nativism, ‘othering’ the likes of Pablo Picasso. Plus, we discuss the globalisation of contemporary art markets, challenging London, New York, and Paris’ primacy, and the ‘stamps of approval’ they’ve granted diaspora artists past.
A.P. Santhanaraj (1932-2009): Modern & Contemporary Art from South India ran at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS in London until 23 September 2023. You can find more at the Noble Sage Art Collection, online and in London.
For more South Asian art histories, hear curator Hammad Nasar on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/f6e05083a7ee933e33f15628b5f0f209
And read more about the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery and The Box, in my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/small-and-mighty-south-asian-miniature-painting-and-britain-1600-to-now-at-mk-gallery
WITH: Jana Manuelpillai, Director of The Noble Sage Art Collection, which specialises in Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani contemporary art. He is the curator of A.P. Santhanaraj (1932-2009): Modern & Contemporary Art from South India.
ART: ‘The Madras College of Arts and Crafts, India (1850-Now)’.
IMAGE: Installation View.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcastAnd Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Interdisciplinary artist Osman Yousefzada crafts stories of working-class migration experiences, unwrapping the influence of his mother and many other textile makers in his diaspora community in Birmingham.
From large-scale textile works to prints and drawings, Osman Yousefzada’s practice considers representations and reimaginings of working class migration experience. Growing up in a British-Pakistani diaspora community in Birmingham in the 1980s, Yousefzada’s craft is grounded in his childhood experiences, watching his mother, ‘a maker’ of shalwar kameez and other textiles.
A new exhibition at Charleston in Firle draws connections between these domestic, private spaces, the Bloomsbury group and fashion, and the artist’s public practice. We look at a new series of works on paper, on public display for the first time, inspired by characters in the Falnama, a book of omens used by fortune tellers in Iran, India and Turkey during the 16th and 17th centuries. At the time, people seeking insight into the future would turn to a random page and interpret the text; Yousefzada transposes this to the present day, to tell stories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, and recreate such talismans that protect or heal and work as guardians of the immigrant experience.
The artist describes his large-scale textile series, Queer Feet, Afghan rugs, topped with ceramic works, and embroidered with found objects that reference Islamic and Asian design histories. We discuss his expanded, Sufistic, spiritual practice. We also consider the healing potential of museums, and the various media used by the artist in storytelling, with his book, The Go-Between (2022).Osman Yousefzada runs at Charleston in Firle until 14 April 2024.
For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/osman-yousefzada-at-charleston-in-firle
For more about the material power of embroidery, listen to curator Rachel Dedman on an UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s) at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Whitworth in Manchester, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/92c34d07be80fe43a8e328705a7d80cb
WITH: Osman Yousefzada, interdisciplinary artist and research practitioner at the Royal College of Art, London. He is a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, and Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at the Birmingham School of Art. His first book, The Go-Between (2022), is published by Canongate. Alongside his solo exhibition at Charleston, he exhibits in group exhibitions including Embodiments of Memory at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent and Design Museum’s REBEL, and his Migrant Godx can be found at Claridge’s Art Space, Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery, and soon, Camden Art Centre, as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023. He will exhibit at the 60th Venice Biennale, and the V&A in London, in 2024.
ART: ‘Queer Feet, Osman Yousefzada (2023)’.
SOUNDS: ‘Home Grown - Osman Yousefzada x Selfridges’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curators Hannah Hooks and Misha Curson connect global environments and food practices, from guerrilla gardeners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to foragers in Palestine, challenging extractive, colonial approaches to land through contemporary art at the Eden Project in Cornwall.
Artemisia afra – or African wormwood – is traditionally used as a medicine to prevent and treat malaria. This knowledge has long been passed down through generations and communities via music and craft, both marginalised in Western rational thought. In the 1970s, research to develop new anti-malarial drugs led to the discovery, extraction, and patenting of Artemisin - already used for two thousand years in China and Asia. Whilst still cultivated by some women’s cooperatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the plant, and its producers, have been continually suppressed and banned, by the Belgian colonial administration in the 19th century, to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Big Pharma businesses.
With a multimedia installation of film, song, and tea tastings, Swiss artist Uriel Orlow seeks to platform these ongoing practices. He joins other contemporary artists in Acts of Gathering, a new exhibition at the Eden Project in Cornwall which explores how our relationship with food is linked with the land, environment, and labour that goes into its production. Harvest festivals in Homowo in Ghana and Guldize in Cornwall link the different practices of Serge Attukwei Clottey and Jonathan Baldock. Meanwhile, in Jumana Manna’s film FORAGERS (2022), we see how Israeli nature protection laws prohibit the foraging of native plants, alienating Palestinians from their land, and sustainable harvesting practices.
Curators Misha Curson and Hannah Hooks connect traditions across cultures, acknowledging how human and planetary health are also entwined. We discuss legacies of extraction in science, botany, and renewed mining in Africa. Misha and Hannah suggest why some local methods are classed (and commodified) as sustainable, while others are marginalised by globalisation, industrial farming, and neoimperial hierarchies. Plus, we discuss the opportunities Eden presents for public participation, access, and activation as a non-conventional museum space, its position within the wider arts ecology of south-west England, and its own regeneration, as a former clay mine.
Acts of Gathering runs at the Eden Project in Cornwall until 14 April 2024.
For more, join EMPIRE LINES in conversation with artist Serge Attukwei Clottey at Reclaim - a weekend of talks and events at Eden, curated to support mental and planetary wellbeing - which takes place from 27-28 January 2024: edenproject.com/visit/whats-on/reclaim
For more about the arts ecology of south-west England, hear curator Ashish Ghadiali on Radical Ecology’s recent exhibition at KARST in Plymouth, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3
And Morad Montazami, curator of the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), currently at Tate St Ives in Cornwall: pod.link/1533637675/episode/db94bc51e697400326f308f6c6eaa3c6
For more on music, memory, and history, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/1792f53fa27b8e2ece289b53dd62b2b7
And on the globalisation of 'African' masks, listen to Osei Bonsu, curator of A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410
WITH: Misha Curson and Hannah Hooks, Senior Arts Curator and Arts Curator at the Eden Project, Cornwall.
ART: ‘Learning from Artemisia, Uriel Orlow and Orchestre Jeunes Étoiles des Astres (2019-2020)’.
SOUNDS: Orchestre Jeunes Étoiles des Astres.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Matthew Barrington marks 220 years since the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave uprising, unreeling how resistance continues with a series of films, from the first zombie horrors, to contemporary Caribbean and diasporic documentaries.
The Caribbean island of Haiti is often reduced to binary representations, of the 18th century Haitian Revolution and its iconic leader, Toussaint Louverture, or environmental disasters, with the earthquake of 2010. But resistance has long been central to Haitian identities and the popular imagination - past and present. Since 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived on Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French colonists all attempted to ‘settle’ the land. The Revolution was the first and only successful uprising of self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in the island region of Saint-Domingue, a rebellion that still resounds across the islands and diasporas today - whether in the words of Naomi Osaka, or filmmakers like Esery Mondesir, who say ‘we’ve been screaming Black Lives Matter (#BLM) for over 200 years’.
Marking 220 years since the Revolution, and formation of the first independent Black republic on 1 January 1804, Barbican Cinema curator Matthew Barrington shares some of the ways Haiti is depicted on screen. We cover 70 years of films, travelling from ‘exotic’ plantations to more everyday scenes, starting with Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), which birthed the horror genre. Drawing on Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of factory owner Murder Legendre, and own othering, we discuss how such movies often sensationalised local spiritual practices as ‘superstitions’, and reinforced racial and gender hierarchies with their Western European-centric gaze. But they can also be read more subversively, in relation to colonialism, as evidence of forced labour, slavery, and capitalist extraction. We find similar tropes in gothic and body horrors, from vampires to killer plants, and connect with post-colonial landscapes across the Caribbean like Cuba.
Contemporary filmmakers also grapple with the ‘ghosts’ of colonialism and capitalism. Matthew explains how the continued extraction of wealth from the islands, many of which were forced to pay reparations to their former enslavers, has perpetuated political instability, forcing many into exile or to migrate for economic opportunities. He shares classic films by Raoul Peck and Arnold Antonin, connecting with Third Cinema, and more experimental works by award-winning makers like Miryam Charles and Gessica Généus. Exploring the occupation and ongoing intervention by the US, and the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier in the 1970s and 1980s, we see how the distance of diasporas often creates the conditions for rebellion, protest, and radical community-building today, as well as pluralising perspectives of well-known landscapes, like New York City. Finally, we discuss the importance of art, visual culture, and Carnival in the context of this ongoing underdevelopment and high illiteracy rates in Haiti, and how public institutions like the National Portrait Gallery will mark this vital anniversary.Visions of Haiti ran at the Barbican Cinema in London throughout October 2023.
WITH: Matthew Barrington, film curator and researcher. Matthew is the Manager of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image in London, a programmer for the Essay Film Festival and the London Korean Film Festival, and has worked with the Open City Documentary Festival. He is also a curator of cinema at the Barbican Centre, including the series, Visions of Haiti.
ART: ‘White Zombie, Victor Halperin (1932) (EMPIRE LINES x Visions of Haiti, Barbican Cinema)’.SOUNDS: ‘White Zombie, Victor Halperin (1932)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Photographer Armet Francis documents African diasporic cultures across ‘The Black Triangle’, and captures the co-founding of the Association of Black Photographers in London, now Autograph ABP, 35 years ago.
For over four decades, Jamaican-British photographer Armet Francis has taken portraits that celebrate the resilience and survival of African diasporic cultures. Having immigrated with his family as a young child in the 1950s, he was part of the post-Windrush generation, acutely aware of his ‘cultural displacement’ and ‘political alienation’ as the only Black child in his school in London Docklands. Drawing on the transatlantic slave trade route, between Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Armet developed the idea of ‘The Black Triangle’ to guide his photographic practice from 1969, as a means to connect with the rich and diverse pan-African communities.
Armet details his ‘social documentary’ approach, his experiences as one of the first Black photographers to shoot fashion, and how he challenged exotic tropes in commercial, white photography and advertising. He shares images of Notting Hill Carnival, Brixton Market, and tributes to those who protested the injustice of the New Cross Fire in 1981. Armet retells the unlikely story of taking Angela Davis’ photograph at the Keskidee Centre, his engagement with activists like Malcolm X and Stuart Hall, and how he had to ‘become Black’ before he could becoming politically conscious and active in civil rights movements.
Armet was also the first Black photographer to have a solo exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London when The Black Triangle series was exhibited there in 1983. Five years later, he co-founded the Association of Black Photographers, now Autograph ABP, where he has represented the series in 2023. To mark both anniversaries, he talks about what it was like founding the institution, working with the likes of David A Bailey, Mark Sealy, and Charlie Phillips, and his ongoing practice in the archives, keeping record of the important contributions - and canons - of British history.
Armet Francis: Beyond The Black Triangle runs at Autograph ABP in London until 20 January 2024.
Hear from many more artists and photographers who’ve worked with Autograph on EMPIRE LINES:
Ingrid Pollard on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4
Curator Florence Ostende on Carrie Mae Weems’ series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996), at the Barbican in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/b4e1a077367a0636c47dee51bcbbd3da
And curator Alice Wilke on Carrie Mae Weems’ Africa Series (1993), at the Kunstmuseum Basel: pod.link/1533637675/episode/d63af25b239253878ec68180cd8e5880
Johny Pitts on Home is Not a Place (2021-Now) at The Photographers’ Gallery in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/70fd7f9adfd2e5e30b91dc77ee811613
John Akomfrah on Arcadia (2023) at The Box in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/31cdf80a5d524e4f369140ef3283a6cd
For more from Autograph’s contemporary programme, hear photographer Hélène Amouzou and curator Bindi Vora on Voyages (2023), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/a97c0ce53756ecaac99ffd0c24f8a870
WITH: Armet Francis, Jamaican-British photographer. He is a co-founder of the Association of Black Photographers in London, now Autograph ABP.
ART: ‘The Black Triangle, Armet Francis (1969) (EMPIRE LINES x Autograph)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Editor: Nada Smiljanic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Writer and musician Kalaf Epalanga moves between Angola, Portugal, and Brazil, sounding out colonial histories and contemporary migrant experiences through kizomba and kuduro music, in Whites Can Dance Too (2023).
‘It took being caught at a border without proper documents for me to realise I'd always been a prisoner of sorts.’ Kalaf Epalanga’s debut novel follows a young man migrating from Africa to Western Europe, when he is suddenly stopped on his journey and demanded his papers by the immigration police. Finding work in various jobs, he does soon find community - and freedom - in the dance clubs of the cities.
Whites Can Dance Too is an invitation to ‘embrace the other’ and it's also a form of auto-fiction. Kalaf migrated from Angola to Portugal, the former a colony, known as Portuguese West Africa until 1951, which remained a province and state of the Portuguese Empire until 1975. First publishing in Portuguese, Kalaf details the legacies of this colonisation in contemporary culture, taking from the Latin tradition of writing the stream of consciousness, and challenging Anglophone standards with oral storytelling. Kalaf also talks about his relationship with translation - and why the English language edition is his favourite.
Drawing on his background in electronic dance music, Kalaf relocates techno on the African continent, combining elements of the traditional African zouk and contemporary kuduro genres to design kizomba, or dance parties. We talk about sound as a vibration - a migration - which can articulate emotions and memories beyond words, and why curating exhibitions or DJ sets is a form of storytelling too. Traveling across continents, he shares some of his literary inspirations, from Ondjaki to Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, and how he has connected with Afro-Brazilians since working in South America. We also discuss the relationship between diasporas in the Global South, and the importance of supporting cultural and literary industries.
Whites Can Dance Too by Kalaf Epalanga, translated by Daniel Hahn, is published by Faber, and available in all good bookshops and online. You can find Kalaf’s book playlist here, and the Kizomba Design Museum playlists here.
For more artists practicing between Angola and Portugal, listen to Osei Bonsu, curator of A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, on Edson Chagas’ Tipo Passe series (2014) on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410
WITH: Kalaf Epalanga, Angolan musician and writer. Now based in Berlin, Germany, he is a celebrated columnist in Angola, Portugal, and Brazil. He fronted the Lisbon-based electronic dance collective Buraka Som Sistema, and founded the Kizomba Design Museum, which launched at the São Paulo Biennial 2023. He was also co-curator of Africa Writes 2023 at the British Library in London. Whites Can Dance Too is his debut novel.
ART: ‘Whites Can Dance Too, Kalaf Epalanga, translated by Daniel Hahn (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Contemporary artist Maha Ahmed reconnects Asian art forms along the Silk Road, migrating between traditional Mughal and Persian miniature paintings, Japanese woodblock prints, and imported Islamic ceramics.
Where Worlds Meet captures both Maha Ahmed’s practice and life. Born in 1989 in Pakistan, she first studied Miniature Painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore from Imran Qureshi, pursuing her practice in that city, and also London, Tokyo, and Dubai, where she is currently based. Ahmed’s detailed paintings relate to her own migrations, each one populated with one or two birds in flight. Over time, her titles have shifted, from references to noise, towards solitude, emptiness, and meeting ‘a wall at every turn’. Ahmed speaks about her experience of isolation in Japan, and the loneliness shared by many during COVID lockdowns. But she also shares how Japan offered her many meeting points in her artistic journey, as displayed in her Leighton House exhibition.
Maha’s miniatures draw from traditional Persian and Mughal manuscripts, and classical Japanese forms. Though historically-informed, her application of colour is wholly contemporary, with rich greens and blues lent from her time working at an illustration studio in Tokyo. She talks about about artistic exchanges between Asia and East Asia, and how woodblock prints, pigments, and dyes were often traded along the Silk Road, inspiring interdisciplinary and multimedia artworks. These are cultural histories which decentre and exclude Western Europe entirely, often absent in the art historical canon.
The artist also combines historic and contemporary media; some are aged, with paint layered atop tea and coffee-stained paper, and some are stark and modern. She links back to London with ‘An Unfolding’ (2023), a work specially commissioned for Leighton House, which references the importance of colour in ‘non-representational’ art. Ahmed also details how she draws from the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and how, as a Muslim, she feels ‘comfortable appropriating’ the colours of its 18th century Arab Hall, adorned with vivid ceramic tiles from Turkey and Greece, Egypt and Syria.
Maha Ahmed: Where Worlds Meet runs at Leighton House in London until 3 March 2024.For more, you can read my article in recessed.space: recessed.space/00156-Maha-Ahmed-Leighton-House
For more about Oneness (2022) at Leighton House, hear artist Shahrzad Ghaffari on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/a8cb557e566005623d9ad59e8e0a3340
For more about Imran Qureshi, listen to Hammad Nasar in the EMPIRE LINES episode on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009): pod.link/1533637675/episode/f6e05083a7ee933e33f15628b5f0f209
And read more about the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery and The Box, in my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/small-and-mighty-south-asian-miniature-painting-and-britain-1600-to-now-at-mk-gallery
WITH: Maha Ahmed, contemporary artist, whose works draw inspiration from traditional Persian and Mughal manuscripts and classical Japanese painting techniques. She has lived and worked in Lahore, London, and Tokyo, and is currently based in Dubai. She is represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London, and Galerie Isa in Dubai.
ART: ‘Where Worlds Meet, Maha Ahmed (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
EDITOR: Luke Mathews.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
For EMPIRE LINES’ 100th episode, we join artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah to journey the Columbian Exchange, connecting continents from the 15th century, and contemporary port cities from Plymouth to Sharjah and Venice.The Columbian Exchange refers to the widespread transfer of plants, animals, goods, and people between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe - or the ‘Old’ and ‘New World’ - since the 1400s. With five screens, Arcadia considers these layered, overlapping journeys, travelling across stormy seas and sublime, epic landscapes. But these histories are also ‘interrupted’ with symbolic images of trade, disease, and smallpox, highlighting the fatal, often ‘genocidal’, nature of colonial encounters.
Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah talks about his intersectional, environmentally-engaged films, comparing previous works like Purple (2017) to this first ‘post-human project’. He connects historic viruses - often represented by Indigenous cultures in vivid oral and visual sources like Aztec codexes and ‘plague journals’ - with his experience producing during the COVID pandemic. Drawing on his work with the Black Audio Film Collective, John shares his collaborative, ‘democratic’ approach to filmmaking. And, 400 years since the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth to transport the Pilgrims to North America, we discuss the meaning of Arcadia’s immersive cinematic display for the port city today.
John Akomfrah: Arcadia runs at The Box in Plymouth runs at The Box in Plymouth until 2 June 2024. He will represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale 2024 in Italy from 20 April to 24 November 2024.
For more on water and migration on film, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/1792f53fa27b8e2ece289b53dd62b2b7
For more on sublime landscapes, listen to photographer David Sanya on the EMPIRE LINES episode about Lagos Soundscapes, Emeka Ogboh (2023): pod.link/1533637675/episode/dd32afc011dc8f1eaf39d5f12f100e5d
WITH: Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA, British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), and now Smoking Dogs Films, with works including The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a moving portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s life and work recently on display at Tate Britain. Arcadia (2023), which premiered at the Sharjah Biennial 15 in the United Arab Emirates, is co-commissioned by The Box, Plymouth, Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam, and Sharjah Art Foundation.
ART: ‘Arcadia, John Akomfrah (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Alice Wilke transports from Switzerland to sub-Saharan cities in Africa, tracing Carnival traditions across continents, via Carrie Mae Weems’ 20th century wallpapers, ceramic plates, and photographs.
In 1993, the North American artist Carrie Mae Weems undertook a ‘pilgrimage’ to West Africa to discover her heritage. With photographs of historic architectures, former slave sites, and colonies, she seeks to retell histories about the origins of civilisation - but ones which also highlight her position as a contemporary artist practicing from a diaspora.
As The Evidence of Things Not Seen - the final stop on Weems’ current ‘world tour’ of exhibitions - opens in Switzerland, curator Alice Wilke talks about how the show has changed from between the Barbican, in London, and Basel. Starting with the Missing Link series (2003), we consider the particular history of Carnival in Basel, a time of social and political critique, and tradition with unexpected connections to the Caribbean. We see how Weems relocates celebrated - and celebrity - Black women like Mary J. Blige in her practice, composing photographs like Baroque paintings to play on conventions of Western/European art, and keep stories alive through their retelling. Moving through Weems’ wider work, we consider the racism, internalised shadism, and hyper-visibility of Black people in society, and what European institutions haven’t yet seen, in their under-representation of POC artists.
Carrie Mae Weems. The Evidence of Things Not Seen runs at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland until 7 April 2024. For more, you can read my article.
Part of JOURNEYS, a series of episodes leading to EMPIRE LINES at 100.
Return to Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now at the Barbican in London, with curator Florence Ostende’s EMPIRE LINES episode on From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996): pod.link/1533637675/episode/b4e1a077367a0636c47dee51bcbbd3da
For more about Weems’ wallpapers, read about BLACK VENUS: Reclaiming Black Women in Visual Culture at Somerset House, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/reclaiming-visual-culture-black-venus-at-somerset-house
For more about Dogon architecture in Africa, listen to Dr. Peter Clericuzio’s episode on The Great Mosque(s) of Djenné, Mali, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/079e9ccf333c54e7116ce0f9a6e7a70c
WITH: Alice Wilke, assistant curator at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland. She has worked as a research assistant at the city’s HGK FHNW Art Institute, where she supervised the podcast series Promise No Promises!, the Kunsthalle Göppingen, and the Museum Tinguely. She is the assistant curator of The Evidence of Things Not Seen, with curator Maja Wismer.
ART: ‘Africa Series, Carrie Mae Weems (1993)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Hammad Nasar expands ideas of miniature painting, moving around South Asia and Western Europe from the 17th century to now, with Nusra Latif Qureshi’s 2009 digital print scroll, Did You Come Here To Find History?
Beyond the Page, a touring exhibition of South Asian miniatures, is truly historic and historical. At its core are more than 180 detailed, small-scale works on paper, dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the time when the Mughal Empire ruled over much of South Asia. But these miniature paintings are borrowed not from contemporary India or Pakistan, but the British Museum in London, the Tate and V&A, and the Royal Collection. So how did this wealth of South Asian miniature paintings come to be held (and hidden away) in Britain’s greatest collections – and what does it mean for this sheer quantity to be here now?
Hammad Nasar, one of the exhibition’s curators, puts these works in conversation with those by leading contemporary artists from South Asia and its diasporas, including Hamra Abbas, Imran Qureshi, Shahzia Sikander, Khadim Ali, and Ali Kazim. We consider their practice across media, highlighting the different forms in which miniature practice lives and lives on, whether in sculpture, film, or architectural installations. Travelling along Nusra Latif Qureshi’s digital-printed scroll, we unpick the layers of portraits, from contemporary passport photographs, to traditional portraits from Venice and Mughal India. With a miniature painting of Saint Rabia, the first female saint in Sufi Islam, Hammad also highlights how women and the body have been represented in Islamic cultures, pluralising perspectives on the past.
Connecting Britain and South Asia, we consider the foundation of the world-renowned Miniature Department of the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan, and how artists have long engaged with a range of non-Western/European media, including Japanese woodblock prints. Hammad defies the marginalisation of miniatures – due to their size, and ‘non-conventional’ means of distribution and display – suggesting that art markets and institutions must ‘grow up’ in their appreciation of the media. We also trace migrations and two-way flows, how courtly and Company paintings influenced well-known Dutch Masters like Rembrandt, to Anwar Jalal Shemza, a multidisciplinary artist of modernist and abstract works. Plus, Hammad talks about the ‘empire-shaped hole’ in British history, and why it is important that we share uncomfortable histories like the legacy of the East India Company to challenge the displacement of empire, as something that happened over there and then.
Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now runs at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes until 28 January 2024, then The Box in Plymouth in 2024.
For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/small-and-mighty-south-asian-miniature-painting-and-britain-1600-to-now-at-mk-gallery.
Part of JOURNEYS, a series of episodes leading to EMPIRE LINES at 100.
For more on contemporary miniature painting, hear contemporary artist Maha Ahmed on Where Worlds Meet (2023) at Leighton House in London, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/fef9477c4ce4adafc2a2dc82fbad82ab
WITH: Hammad Nasar, curator, writer and researcher. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, where he co-leads the London, Asia Programme, and co-curator of the British Art Show 9 (2020–2022). He is the co-curator of Beyond the Page, an exhibition supported by the Bagri Foundation.
ART: ‘Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Photographer Hélène Amouzou, and curator Bindi Vora, capture the in/visibility of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe, moving between 21st century Togo and Belgium in a series of haunting autoportraits.
Born in Togo, and now based in Belgium, Hélène Amouzou’s self-portraits consider how migration has shaped her identity. Her blurred, ghostly figure, set against suitcases, and the peeling wallpaper of a destitute attic, suggests at the sense of in/visibility, and the particular experiences of women trapped in domestic spaces. These photographs, created during a period where she was seeking political asylum, have become documents of her family’s two-decade long journey seeking safety and citizenship during the 1990s and 2000s.
As the artist’s first exhibition in the UK opens at Autograph, she details her practice, and use of long exposures and sweeping motions to suggest continuities between past and present. Hélène shares Togo’s perspectives on northern European countries, as informed by colonial histories and myths. Togoland was a ‘protectorate’ of the German Empire in West Africa from 1884 to 1914, an area which included the current state of Togo and much of Ghana, and which Europeans had long dubbed ‘the Slave Coast’. During the First World War, it was invaded by British and French forces, and endured military rule by the latter until its independence in 1960. She likens Belgium’s location - similarly placed between France and Germany - whilst curator Bindi Vora connects with her own family’s experiences of displacement, herself a second-generation Ugandan-Asian migrant with connections to both Kenya and India. Plus, we discuss the impact of this public exhibition on Hélène’s private, intimate practice, and what it means to display these works in the context of the British media discourse about ‘migrant crises’.
Hélène Amouzou: Voyages runs at Autograph in London until 20 January 2023.
Part of JOURNEYS, a series of episodes leading to EMPIRE LINES at 100.
For more on Nil Yalter, hear the artist on Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now) at Ab-Anbar Gallery in London on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/36b8c7d8d613b78262e54e38ac62e70f
WITH: Hélène Amouzou, Togo-born and Belgium-based photographer. Bindi Vora, British-Indian interdisciplinary photographic artist, and curator at Autograph. Her first book is Mountain of Salt (2023), based on a 2020-2021 series of the same name.
ART: ‘Hélène Amouzou: Voyages (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali connects climate science, contemporary art, and activism, cultivating a radical, cultural ecology in the countryside of south-west England, in their multidisciplinary exhibition, Against Apartheid.
As environmental crises disproportionately affect Black and brown communities, and the resulting displacement often racialised, should we consider these states of ‘climate apartheid’? And could contemporary art help to bridge the gap between science and academics, and everyday action guidance? Against Apartheid, a multidisciplinary exhibition in Plymouth, puts these practices, histories, and geographies in conversation, from vast wallpapers charting global warming, to an intimate portrait of Ella Kissi-Debrah, and plantation paylists collected by the Barbadian artist Annalee Davis, linking land ownership in Scotland and the Caribbean from the 19th century Abolition Acts. Other works affirm how historic ecologies of empire – African enslavement, the middle passage, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples - continue to shape our present and future, in the geopolitics of international borders, migration, and travel.
Activist and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali talks about his work as ‘organisation’, not curation, and how we can resist the individualisation that prevents effective collective political action. From his background in film, he suggests why museums and exhibitions might be better places for screenings than cinemas, outside of the market. We discuss why both rural countryside and urban city landscapes should be considered through the lens of empire, drawing on ‘post-plantation’ and anti-colonial thinkers like Paul Gilroy, Françoise Vergès, Sylvie Séma Glissant, and Grada Kilomba. We relocate Plymouth’s global history, a focus since #BLM, reversing the notion of the particular and ‘regional’ as peripheral to the capital. We explore the wider arts ecology in south-west England, and how local connections with artists like Kedisha Coakley at The Box, and Iman Datoo at the University of Exeter and the Eden Project in Cornwall, also inform his work with global political institutions like the UN.
Against Apartheid runs at KARST in Plymouth until 2 December 2023, part of Open City, a season of decolonial art and public events presented by Radical Ecology and partners across south-west England.
For more, join EMPIRE LINES at the Black Atlantic Symposium - a free series of talks and live performances, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s formative text - which takes place from 24-26 November 2023: eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-atlantic-tickets-750903260867?aff=oddtdtcreator
Part of JOURNEYS, a series of episodes leading to EMPIRE LINES at 100.
For more on Ingrid Pollard, hear the artist on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4
For more about climate justice, listen to artist Imani Jacqueline Brown on What Remains at the End of the Earth? (2022) at the Hayward Gallery on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/639b20f89d8782b52d6350513325a073
For more about the Eden Project, hear curators Hannah Hooks and Misha Curson on Uriel Orlow’s Learning from Artemisia (2019-2020) on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/0e8ab778b4ce1ad24bc15df3fec5a386
WITH: Ashish Ghadiali, Founding Director of Radical Ecology and Co-Chair of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network (BAIN) at University College London (UCL). He is the Co-Chair and Co-Principal Investigator of Addressing the New Denialism, lead author on a publication on climate finance for COP28, and a practicing filmmaker with recent credits including Planetary Imagination (2023) a 5-screen film installation, for The Box, Plymouth, and the feature documentary, The Confession (2016) for BFI and BBC Storyville. Ashish is the curator of Against Apartheid.ART: ‘Radical Ecology, Ashish Ghadiali (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
EDITOR: Nada Smiljanic.
Curator Dorothy Price outlines the figures of Claudette Johnson, a founder member of the Black British Art Movement (Blk Art Group), and one of the first ‘post-colonials’ practicing in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the Midlands from the 1980s to now.
Ever so-slightly-larger than-life, Claudette Johnson’s drawings of Black figures reflect the status of their artist. A founding member of the Black British Arts Movement or Blk Art Group in the 1980s, she was a leading figure in a politically-charged creative community - called the first ‘post-colonials’ by Stuart Hall, for being born and raised in Britain. Johnson worked closely with fellow ‘post-Windrush’ contemporaries include Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard and Maud Sulter, Marlene Smith and Lubaina Himid - but her work has been relatively underrepresented.
As the artist’s first public monographic exhibition opens in London, curator Dorothy Price talks about her practice in the Wolverhampton Young Black Artists Group - which predated the YBAs - and formative speech in the First National Black Arts Conference in 1982. Dorothy shares personal insights from the groundbreaking ICA exhibition, The Thin Black Line, and Claudette’s complex position as a Black European artist of African and Caribbean descent. Drawing on the Courtauld’s permanent collection, we see the artist’s work with African masks, sculptures, and conventional representations of Black women, challenging the colonial foundations of Western European modernism, and reappropriating the ‘primitivism’ of the likes of Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin to state her place in art history. We also discuss her contemporary practice, and how the history of the Black British Arts Movement can decentre the contemporary ‘Brixtonisation’ of the singular Black experience, drawing attention to cities in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the Midlands.
Claudette Johnson: Presence runs at the Courtauld Gallery in London until 14 January 2023. For more, you can read my article.
For more about Keith Piper, hear curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery on Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (2023) at the Fitzwilliam Museum on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/a5271ae2bc8c85116db581918412eda2
For more on Ingrid Pollard, hear the artist on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4
For more about the ‘Brixtonisation’ of the Black British experience, listen to artist Johny Pitts on Home is Not A Place (2021-Now) at The Photographers’ Gallery on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/70fd7f9adfd2e5e30b91dc77ee811613
For more on Hurvin Anderson, hear Hepworth Wakefield curator Isabella Maidment on his Barbershop (2006-2023) series on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/5cfb7ddb525098a8e8da837fcace8068
Recommended reading:
- On Lubaina Himid: gowithyamo.com/blog/the-revolutionary-act-of-walking-in-the-city
- On Maud Sulter: gowithyamo.com/blog/reclaiming-visual-culture-black-venus-at-somerset-house
- On Sonia Boyce: gowithyamo.com/blog/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition
- On Life Between Islands at Tate Britain: artmag.co.uk/the-caribbean-condensed-life-between-islands-at-the-tate-britain/
WITH: Professor Dorothy Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld, London. She is also Editor of Art History, journal of the Association for Art History, and founder of the Tate/Paul Mellon Centre’s British Art Network subgroup on Black British Art. Dorothy is the co-curator of Presence.
ART: ‘And I Have My Own Business In This Skin, Claudette Johnson (1982)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Contemporary artist Barby Asante moves through the London Transport Museum to Stratford Station, coming together with Black women TfL staff to take public space in a collective choral performance, a Declaration of Independence (2023).
In 2023, Transport for London (TfL)’s Art on the Underground invited Barby Asante to present a new iteration of her Declaration of Independence, a participation-based work which draws on West African communing traditions. In collaboration with TfL employees, the ensemble vocalise the contemporary experiences of people of colour, and reactivate oft-static historical documents.
Barby talks about her time in the photography archives at the London Transport Museum, finding images of women of colour at work in different roles, including those employed by London Transport’s direct recruitment in Barbados and the Caribbean in 1956. She details the role of public art, in widening access, and encouraging connections between personal, postcolonial, and migration histories. Plus, Barby shares the many Declarations - many of which are neither written, nor codified - which have influenced her practice, and how the testimonies and collective work has changed on its travels between Berlin, Germany, and Bergen, Norway.
Declaration of Independence performed at Stratford Station in London on 17 September 2023, part of Art on the Underground. The visual artworks remain on display at Stratford, Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Green Underground stations.
WITH: Barby Asante, London-based artist, educator, and researcher. Her practice and research is concerned with the politics of place, space and the ever-present histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism.
ART: ‘Declaration of Independence, Barby Asante (2023)’.
SOUNDS: Declaration of Independence Collective.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist and curator Tony Albert collects Aboriginalia, colonial kitsch still found in Australia’s second-hand and souvenir shops, to reconstruct historic racial stereotypes and reclaim contemporary Indigenous experiences.
From ‘Picanniny Floor Polish’ to ‘Bally Boomerang Pinball Machines’, Sydney-based artist and collector Tony Albert has long been fascinated by Australiana, tourist objects which attempt to define, and commodify, Aboriginal and Torres Strati Islander peoples. Transforming them into grand sculptural installations, his works are political interventions with these vintage objects, and reappropriations of their use and meaning - which refuse to shy away from the shameful status they now hold.
One such installation lends its name to Story, Place, a group exhibition in London, which brings together contemporary Indigenous artists from Australia and the diaspora. Tony talks about the plurality of Indigenous identities and lands across Australia, comparing the country’s diversity to that of the European continent, and using ‘dreamtimes’ to dispel the creation myth of Captain James Cook’s Botany Bay landing in 1770. From his working-class upbringing in North Queensland, to working in cities like Brisbane with the likes of Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee, he unpacks the importance of collaboration and collective practice. As a member of the Kuku Yalanji peoples, Tony shares his perspectives working within museums and institutions ‘made by white people, for white people’ - and why these particular works must travel to Europe and America, to highlight shared colonial histories, and what Aboriginality means today.
Sullivan+Strumpf: Story, Place runs at Frieze No.9 Cork Street in London until 21 October, as part of Frieze London 2023. Join the Gallery this Saturday (12 October), for special exhibition tours and artist talks.
For more about terra nullius, listen to EMPIRE LINES Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992, with Jeremy Eccles on Judy Watson (https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e02b445e9c355b30b90c77df1f39264d) and Dr. Desmond Manderson on Gordon Bennett (https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/8ab2ce0a86704edc573cb86a69e845e1
For more on Cigar Store Indians, listen to Anna Ghadar on Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson (1992-1993): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e02b445e9c355b30b90c77df1f39264d
WITH: Tony Albert, multidisciplinary artist and curator. He is the first Indigenous artist on the board of trustees for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a First Nations Curatorial Fellow, and a founder member of the Brisbane-based collective, proppaNOW, with artists Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee. He is the co-curator of Story, Place, with Jenn Ellis.
ART: ‘Story, Place, Tony Albert (2023)’.
IMAGE: Installation View.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Eleanor Nairne traces the migrations of contemporary artist Julianknxx, as he travels between European port cities, and back to the Barbican in London, collaborating with Black choirs and musicians.
Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx challenges stereotypes around African art, history, and culture through the lens of his personal experiences. Crossing the boundaries between poetry and music, audio and visual art, his new multichannel installation at the Barbican is born out of a year of travelling over four thousand kilometres across Europe, from Berlin to Barcelona, in a process of collaboration and ‘active listening’ with Black choirs and collectives.
Curator Eleanor Nairne shares her experience of working with the artist, and how their interdisciplinary practice challenges the singular ‘Black experience’. We discuss the importance of water and migration, ‘shipwrecked’ cities like Amsterdam, and how the language of historical reckonings is rooted in transatlantic slavery and colonialism. Drawing on academics like Édouard Glissant and Lorna McDaniel, we consider the role of songs as non-conventional sources, sites of community and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge. Plus, Eleanor details the importance of immersion in unsettling narratives - including online.
Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight runs at the Barbican in London until 11 February 2024. The exhibition is also accessible online via WePresent, the global arts platform of WeTransfer.
For more, you can read my article.
For more about A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, listen to curators Osei Bonsu, Jess Baxter, and Genevieve Barton on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410
For more about Johny Pitts, hear the artist on Home is Not A Place (2021-Now) at The Photographers’ Gallery on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/70fd7f9adfd2e5e30b91dc77ee811613
Part of EMPIRE LINES at 90, exploring the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade through contemporary art.
WITH: Eleanor Nairne, Senior Curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London. She is the curator of Chorus in Rememory of Flight.
ART: ‘Chorus in Rememory of Flight, Julianknxx (2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican)’.
SOUNDS: Aron Kyne; THABO; Boras Choir.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Contemporary artist Elsa James moves through the Museum of London Docklands’ London, Sugar & Slavery gallery - and so, the missing histories of the 17th and 18th centuries - in her 2023 film, Living in the Wake of the Lust for Sugar.
In 2023, the Museum of London Docklands invited artist and activist Elsa James to make a disruptive intervention in their London, Sugar & Slavery gallery. Finding the enslaved African voice missing - from both this particular space, and museums more widely - Elsa shot a seven-minute film in shades of black and red, embedding in the space her personal, contemporary experience from the British African-Caribbean diaspora, as connected with the long history of the transatlantic slave trade.
With movement, dance, and audio, Elsa reimagines the gallery as the galley of a slave ship. Talking about the toppling of statues from Edward Colston to Robert Milligan, she details who controls historical narratives and memory, and why we should reconsider the history of transatlantic slavery as the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Elsa illuminates her neon ‘Ode to David Lammy MP’ (2022), influences from Stuart Hall to Windrush thinkers, and the parallel othering of her home base, Essex, made apparent by her research into historical Black women like Princess Dinubolu, Hester Woodley, and Mary Prince. Drawing on her work with the International Slavery Museum, we discuss the importance of local and global collaborations in platforming a plurality of voices, problems with the commercial art market, plus her interdisciplinary practice, from neon signs to performance art.Living in the Wake of the Lust For Sugar is publicly available online, via the Museum of London Docklands website and social media.
For more about Carrie Mae Weems, listen to Barbican curator Florence Ostende on From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996), on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/b4e1a077367a0636c47dee51bcbbd3da
Part of EMPIRE LINES at 90, exploring the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade through contemporary art.
WITH: Elsa James, British African-Caribbean conceptual artist and activist. Born in London, she has lived in Essex since 1999; working across media, much of her current practice considers what it means to be Black in Essex today.
ART: ‘Living in the Wake of the Lust for Sugar, Elsa James (2023)’.
SOUNDS: Elsa James.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery locate Cambridge within the transatlantic slave trade, connecting global commodities and local consumption, historic and contemporary art, to reveal how five hundred years of colonial resistance constructed new cultures, known as the Black Atlantic.
Between 1400 and 1900, European empires colonised much of the Americas, transporting over 12.5 million people to these colonies from Africa as slaves. It’s a history often recounted as something singular, concluded in the past - detached as happening ‘then, and over there’ - else told from the perspective of imperial powers. But in their resistance of colonial slavery, people also produced new cultures that continue to shape our present. Black Atlantic, a new exhibition at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, reconnects the institution’s collection, university, and city more widely with these global histories. Installed within the Founder’s Galleries, part-funded by the profits from the transatlantic slave trade, it builds on the ‘grandeur and smugness’ of the Fitzwilliam’s architecture - an intervention which asks whether it is possible to decolonise museums, as imperial infrastructures.
Co-curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery consider contrasts and continuities between historic and modern works, with contemporary Black artists like Barbara Walker and Keith Piper, Alberta Whittle and Donald Locke commenting on visibility, racism, and colourism, and how visual representations of Black people have shifted over time. Vicky smashes stereotypes about abolitionism, ceramics, and popular culture, from the UK’s largest pro-slavery punch bowl, to Jacqueline Bishop’s new Wedgwood dinner set. Plus, with a botanical painting from a Caribbean plantation - one of the first signed works by a Black artist of a Black subject - we travel between environments in West Africa, North and South America, and Europe, finding examples of exploitation, agency, and self-liberation - and pathways to future ‘repair’.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance runs at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge until 7 January 2024, the first in a series of exhibitions and gallery interventions planned until 2026.
For more on the South Sea Bubble, listen to Dr. Helen Paul on The Luxborough Gallery on Fire (c. 18th Century): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/c02b6b82097b9ce34d193c771f772152
Part of EMPIRE LINES at 90, exploring the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade through contemporary art.
WITH: Dr. Jake Subryan Richards, Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Victoria Avery, Keeper of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum. They are co-curators of Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance.
ART: ‘The Coloureds’ Codex, Keith Piper (2023); Vanishing Point 25 (Costanzi), Barbara Walker (2021); Breadfruit Tree, John Tyley (1793-1800); History of the Dinner Table, Jacqueline Bishop (2021)’.
IMAGE: Installation View.
SOUNDS: Jacqueline Bishop: History at the Dinner Table. Produced by Storya.co. With special thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Rachel Dedman unpicks the personal and political histories woven into Palestinian textiles, the role of the ‘embroidered woman’ in resistance movements, and how the British Mandate changed clothes after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century.
With a century of dresses, jackets and coats - ‘hundred-year-old sisters’ - from Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, a new exhibition in Cambridge shows embroidery as both a historic and living tradition, and why clothing could be some of the most significant cultural sources from Palestine today. A split-front jellayeh, stitched up after World War I, reveals how British occupation of the former Ottoman territories affected social codes. Studio photographs of urban, middle-class Jerusalemites wearing European imports - and ‘traditional’ clothes like costumes - speak to class and regional inequalities, as much as diversity.
Reading textiles like history books, curator Rachel Dedman reveals how women’s bodies have long been sites of national identity, through the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, Naksa (setback) in 1967, to the first Intifada against Israel. We look at a dress patched up with a United Nations Relief and Works Agency-issued bag of flour, to find histories of resistance, transnational solidarity, and economic empowerment. Plus, Rachel explains ‘auto-orientalism’, and refashions the keffiyeh, revealing the role of men in this women’s work, and deconstructing binaries between genders, arts and crafts.
Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery runs at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until 29 October 2023, then the Whitworth in Manchester into 2024.
For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/textiles-in-cambridge-palestinian-embroidery-at-kettles-yard
WITH: Rachel Dedman, curator, writer, and art historian, and Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at Victoria and Albert Museum. Rachel is the curator of Material Power, and previously curated Labour of Love: New Approaches to Palestinian Embroidery at the Palestinian Museum, West Bank, 2018.
ART: ‘UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Writer and photographer Johny Pitts captures everyday experiences from Black communities around the British coast, bringing together the sights, sounds, and sofas shared from Liverpool to London, in his touring installation, Home is Not a Place.
In 2021, Johny Pitts and the poet Roger Robinson set off on a journey clockwise around the British coast, to answer the question: 'What is Black Britain?' Their collaboration, Home is Not is Place, captures contemporary, everyday experiences of Blackness between Edinburgh and Belfast, Liverpool and Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948.
Setting out from London, the multidisciplinary artist challenges the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Black experiences, and binary media representations of Black excellence, or criminality. Johny shares stories of migration, how Brexit and COVID changed his perceptions of local environments, and archive albums from his own childhood in multicultural, working-class Sheffield. Flicking through shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, we find his travels-past in 1980s bubble-era Japan. And in his Living Room, we sit down to discuss Afropean, inspirations like James Baldwin, Paul Gilroy, and Caryl Phillips, plus his sister Chantal’s pirate radio playlists, and the role of family and community in his practice.
Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place runs at The Photographers’ Gallery in London until 24 September 2023. Join the Gallery this Thursday (7 September), and next, for special exhibition tours and artist talks.
For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo.
For more about Autograph, hear artist Ingrid Pollard’s EMPIRE LINES on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4
WITH: Johny Pitts, photographer, writer, and broadcaster from Sheffield, England. He is the curator of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) award-winning Afropean.com, and the author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2021).
ART: ‘Home is Not a Place, Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson (2021-Now)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Multimedia artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown maps out the long history of extractivism in southern America, constellating 18th century settler colonialism, to oil and gas extraction, and contemporary environmental crises.
South of the Mississippi River sits the US state of Louisiana, a place transformed from ‘Plantation County’ in the 1700s, to an ‘apartheid state’, and today, ‘Cancer Alley’, for its polluted land and water. Colonial legacies have contributed to contemporary environment problems - including Hurricane Katrina - and continue to shape community planning and housing, a phenomenon known as ‘extractivism’.
Artist Imani Jacqueline Brown pushes back against the ‘segregation’ of human/nature, and Black humans from humanity, in her multidisciplinary practice. The artist shares how culture is too ‘entangled’ with public political action, and her ‘grassroots research’ in permit applications awarded to fossil fuel businesses like Texaco (now Chevron) and the Colonial Pipeline Company. The artist describes how she has collaborated to map enslaved peoples’ burial grounds, as marked by magnolia trees, highlighting pan-African traditions of ecological regeneration. Drawing on her work with Follow the Oil and Occupy Museums, Brown suggests that culture and capitalism are often closely linked - and the unique power of repackaging these projects in the form of artistic constellations.
What Remains at the End of the Earth? (2022) is on view at Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, which runs at the Hayward Gallery in London until 3 September 2023, part of the Southbank Centre’s Planet Summer.
WITH: Imani Jacqueline Brown, artist, activist, writer, and researcher from New Orleans, now based in London. She is a research fellow at Forensic Architecture.
ART: ‘What Remains at the End of the Earth?, Imani Jacqueline Brown (2022)’.
IMAGE: Installation View.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Folakunle Oshun links Peckham in the UK, and Lagos in Nigeria, with water and two centuries of shared colonial histories. Artist David Sanya captures European statues and lingering stereotypes in West Africa. Plus, Emeka Ogboh projects the sounds of the megacity onto the streets of south east London, and recreates the taste of migration with a brand new beer.
Often called ‘Little Lagos’, Peckham in south east London is home to one of the largest Nigerian diaspora communities. When the West African country declared independence after a century of British colonial rule in 1960, the flow of migration soon increased, with economic crises and civil unrest in the country. But individuals and families have long moved between both places. As a port city, Lagos became key to the transatlantic slave trade; its name meaning ‘lake’, after the Portuguese, the first Europeans in the area.
Using water as a channel to connect Lagos and London, a new exhibition at the South London Gallery brings together both Nigerian and British-Nigerian artists like Yinka Shonibare, crossing generations and diasporas. Its curator Folakunle Oshun, founder and director of the Lagos Biennal, describes growing up with CNN, navigating imperial architectures in Berlin and Paris, and why he’d never drive in London. Artist Emeka Ogboh takes us beyond the museum space, using loudspeakers to project the sound of Lagos’ Danfo bus drivers onto the streets of Peckham. We sip his ‘bittersweet’ beer made in collaboration with local brewery Orbit, a blend of English hops and Nigerian alligator pepper, and discuss how food and art can together capture the ‘multisensorial’ experience of migration.
Plus, closer to the River Thames, Birmingham-based artist David Sanya traces his travels from Nigeria to the UK, and how he combines the European artistic tradition of the sublime with Lagos’ distinctive lake and seascapes, creating contemporary photographs of his own environments.
Lagos, Peckham, Repeat: Pilgrimage to the Lakes runs at South London Gallery until 29 October 2023.
Reframe: The Residency Exhibition runs at the Southbank Centre until 27 August 2023, part of the Southbank Centre’s Planet Summer.
For more, you can read my article.
For more on A History of City in a Box, hear artist Ndidi Dike on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410
WITH: Folakunle Oshun, artist, curator, and founder and director of the Lagos Biennal. He is the co-curator of Lagos, Peckham, Repeat. Emeka Ogboh, sound and installation artist best known for his soundscapes of life in Lagos. Born in Nigeria and based between Lagos and Berlin, he creates multisensory work that takes the form of audio, installation, sculpture, and food and drink. David Sanya, artist and photographer. Born and raised in Lagos, he migrated to the UK in 2016, and practices between Birmingham and London. His collaborative work, I AM YOUR MOTHER DISMANTLED, is on view as part of Reframe: The Residency.
ART: ‘Lagos Soundscapes, Emeka Ogboh (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
In this bonus episode, brought to you with historicity Tokyo, Japan House London curator Hiro Sugiyama, and contemporary artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, ride the great waves of Japanese graphic design, commercial illustration, and counterculture, from the 1980s to now.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, heta-uma rocked the established conventions of Japanese art, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma challenges what is ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’ or skilled art - as well as what ‘subcultures’ mean in the context of a global mainstreaming in Japanese art, embodied by Hokusai’s The Great Wave.
Hiro Sugiyama, artist and co-curator of WAVE, has brought the annual exhibition in Tokyo to Japan Houses in San Francisco, Sao Paolo, and London. From his training at Yumura Teruhiko’s Flamingo Studios in Shinjuku, we return to the city’s Inari shrines with the surrealistic paintings of Suga Mica, and Showa period traditions with Tsuzuki Mayumi. Both artists also detail the long role of women artists in commercial illustration, the two-way exchanges between Japanese and Western European art traditions like ‘superrealism’ and ‘hyperrealism’, and how contemporary Japanese artists take as much from the concept of haziness (morotai), as David Hockney and the films of David Lynch.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts runs at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/wave-currents-in-japanese-graphic-arts-at-japan-house-london
This episode was produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo, a podcast series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are.
WITH: Hiro Sugiyama, artist and a curator of WAVE. Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, contemporary artists based in Japan. WITH: Hiro Sugiyama, artist and a curator of WAVE. Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, contemporary artists based in Japan. Eyre Kurasawa and Bethan Jones are interpreters based in London.
ART: ‘WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts (2023)’.
IMAGE: Installation View.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Photographer Gregor Sailer exposes the neo-imperial scramble for resources in the Arctic Circle and the Polar Silk Road, with stills frozen in white cubes at the Natural History Museum in London.
Climate change is melting ice across the Arctic Sea, opening a channel known as ‘The Polar Silk Road’- and for traders, access to a wealth of natural resources. The term was defined by contemporary China, a nod to the long history of the the Eurasian Silk Road, characterised by the exchange of tea, spices, and disease. But these stark monochrome settings are contemporary sites of geopolitical conflict over the ownership and exploitation of oil, gas, and borders, all subjects of a new Cold War; the damage endured by local Indigenous people, animals, and plants has global impacts.
From isolated research centres to Icelandic geothermal power plants, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer captures man-made architectures across the region, but always avoids photographing people themselves. He talks about documenting the ‘surreal’, the sustainability of travel photography, and how taking one-shot analogue photographs makes him more present in his environments.
The Polar Silk Road: Photographs by Gregor Sailer runs at the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum in London, part of the programme Our Broken Planet, throughout 2023.
Part of EMPIRE LINES Photography Season, exposing different perspectives on the past. Listen to the other episodes on Carrie Mae Weems, Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, and Nil Yalter’s Exile is a Hard Job.
WITH: Gregor Sailer, artist and photographer.
ART: ‘Photographs of the Polar Silk Road, Gregor Sailer (2017-2021)'.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
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Artist Nil Yalter, a pioneer in 20th century video and multimedia installations, explores the often challenging experience of being an immigrant in a foreign country, through her transnational wallpapers, posters, and photographs of Turkish workers, in Exile is a Hard Job.
Born in Egypt in 1938, Nil Yalter moved from Istanbul to Paris in 1965. Since the 1970s, she has pioneered the practice of socially-engaged video art; working at the intersections of feminist, anti-racism, and labour movements, her media is always decided by the political issue at hand. But her contemporary practice has always been historically-informed, drawing on literatures and languages from the Ottoman Empire.
Pasted up in global cities from Valencia to Mumbai, ‘Exile Is a Hard Job’ includes defaced photographs exposing the living conditions of illiterate ‘guest workers’. Navigating between private, intimate spaces, and public displays, the artist also considers the ethics of photography, using her practice to reflect the loss of identity felt in these communities. She talks about its latest installation at Ab-Anbar Gallery in London, the parallels between her ‘illegal’ practices and subjects, and why women are often ‘doubly punished’. Plus, Yalter describes her motivations for migration from Turkey to France - ‘to learn’ - why MENA artists produce the most exciting work today, and how she feels about her status as the ‘grandmother’ of viral, video art.
Nil Yalter: Exile is a Hard Job ran at the Ab-Anbar Gallery in London throughout June 2023. The artist will return for the gallery’s full reopening in the autumn. This episode was recorded at London Gallery Weekend 2023.
For more about Nalini Malani, hear the artist and curator on My Reality is Different (2022).
Part of EMPIRE LINES Photography Season, exposing different perspectives on the past. Listen to the other episodes on Carrie Mae Weems, Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, plus Gregor Sailer’s series, The Polar Silk Road.
WITH: Nil Yalter, Turkish-French contemporary artist who currently lives and works in Paris. Her works feature in many notable public collections including the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
ART: ‘Exile is a Hard Job, Nil Yalter (1974-Now)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curators Osei Bonsu, Jess Baxter, and Genevieve Barton cross the diverse landscapes, borders, and generations of contemporary African photography, exposing how the past, present, and future can co-exist on camera. Plus, contemporary artist Ndidi Dike revisits the ‘living archive’ of colonialism in Nigeria, from Independence House in Lagos, to London.
Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, Africa’s cultures and traditions have often been seen through Western lenses. By 1914, European powers had colonised 90% of the African continent, often using the media to construct Africa and Black diasporas, in opposition to whiteness. But photography - and photographic traditions of preservation - has long been used by artists on the continent, whether in the pioneering work of studio photographers like James Barnor in pre-independence Ghana, as a means of anti-colonial resistance and political protest in the 1950s, or powerful shots of modern Nigerian Monarchs.
Tate Modern’s A World in Common platforms how artists are reclaim Africa’s histories and reimagining its contemporary place in the world. Curator Osei Bonsu connects show how masks, removed from their ritual context for display in European museums, can also address contemporary questions of restitution, highlighting Edson Chagas’ passport-style photographs connecting Portugal and Angola. Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton look at how globalisation, inequality, migration, and urbanisation, are differently experienced across the continent, and how their ‘hopeful’ exhibition focusses as much on climate activism as climate change. Moving beyond Afrofuturism and pan-Africanism towards ideas around ecology and global solidarity, we see how artists exercise agency in ever changing cities, and through boundary-pushing practices of ‘expanded photography’. Plus, moving from the diaspora London to practice in Lagos, multimedia artist Ndidi Dike explains what discarded files and archive documents from Nigeria can reveal about the post-colonial government.
A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography runs at Tate Modern in London until 14 January 2024.
For more, you can read my article.
Part of EMPIRE LINES Photography Season, exposing different perspectives on the past. Listen to the other episodes on Carrie Mae Weems, Nil Yalter’s Exile is a Hard Job, plus Gregor Sailor’s series, The Polar Silk Road.
WITH: Osei Bonsu, British-Ghanaian curator and writer, and a curator of International Art at Tate Modern. He is the curator of A World in Common, with co-curators Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton. Ndidi Dike, Nigeria-based visual artist working in sculpture and mixed-media painting.
ART: ‘A History of a City In a Box, Ndidi Dike (2019) (EMPIRE LINES x Tate Modern)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Florence Ostende visualises how violence against African Americans has been perpetuated throughout history, and challenged with contemporary art, by developing Carrie Mae Weems’ radical photographic practice from the 1980s to now, and how she reframes whiteness, and ‘Anglo-America’, in relation to Black subjects.
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary US artists, and interest in her films, installations, and performance artworks is rising in Europe too. From her first UK exhibition with Autograph, founded in Brixton to support Black photographers, Weems returns to London with her largest UK exhibition to date, spanning three decades of her multidisciplinary practice, and over 300 years of American history.
Curator Florence Ostende talks about how her ‘direct intervention’ in daguerreotypes taken from the Harvard Museum archives - with colour, tints, and text - challenges their use in perpetuating systemic racism, inequality, and violence, whilst blurring the boundaries between past and present to reveal how colonial stereotypes still linger today. Alongside these ‘appropriated photographs’, she details the artist as art historian - and her bid to expose the Black Abstract Expressionist painters hidden in plain sight. Beyond her iconic Kitchen Table (1990) series, we see Weems’ political activism, with works addressing women’s position in domestic spaces and Marxism, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the murder of George Floyd. Ostende reveals why Weems literally puts the muse in Museums, the complex relationship between artist and institution, and what it was like to work with the artist - and ‘win over’ the Barbican’s brutalist architecture.
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now runs at the Barbican in London until 3 September 2023.
For more, you can read my article.
Part of EMPIRE LINES Photography Season, exposing different perspectives on the past. Listen to the other episodes on Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, Nil Yalter’s Exile is a Hard Job, plus Gregor Sailor’s series, The Polar Silk Road.
For more about Autograph, hear artist Ingrid Pollard’s EMPIRE LINES on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4
WITH: Florence Ostende, Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. She is the co-curator of Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now.
ART: ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems (1995–1996)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Morad Montazami assembles the revolutionary artist-professors and students of the Casablanca Art School who constructed the post-colonial state of Morocco in the 20th century, and how North African crafts were part of both transnational networks, and local traditions, pre-dating Western European modernism.
The Casablanca Art School proposed a bold, revolutionary new wave of Arab visual culture following Morocco’s declaration of independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in 1956. Reflecting a new social awareness, Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi looked beyond Western European academic traditions - and demanded the removal of all Greco-Roman sculptures - sending students to travel more locally, where they encountered traditional arts and crafts more modern than Klee and Kandinsky.
The Tate is the only institution in the world to hold works by all three of the Casablanca trio. Morad Montazami, a curator of a landmark new show in St Ives, explores how the School’s many artists worked across painting, sculpture, graphic design, and architectural murals, integrating art and infrastructure, and artists and the economy. Plus, why we should decentre the Bauhaus as a Western European school, how artists incorporated modern abstract influences alongside Mexican, pan-Arabic, and Marxist revolutionary politics, why a Dutch anthropologist coined the phrase Afro-Berberism, and how the absence of museum spaces after empire provided an opportunity for more public, accessible art - for the nation to ‘build itself’.
The Casablanca Art School: Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde, 1962-1987 runs at the Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 14 January 2024, then at the Sharjah Art Foundation into 2024.
For more, you can read my article.
WITH: Morad Montazami, art historian, a publisher and a curator. He is the director for the platform Zamân Books & Curating, committed to develop studies of Arab, Asian and African modernities, and co-curator of The Casablanca Art School.
ART: ‘Multiple Marrakech/Multiple Flamme (Multiple Marrakech, Multiple Flame), Mohamed Ataallah (1969)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist Shahrzad Ghaffari replies to orientalism in the Arts & Crafts Movement, William De Morgan’s Arab Hall, and the new contemporary architecture of Leighton House in London, in her Persian poetry-inspired mural paintings.
Since reopening in 2022, Leighton House has commissioned contemporary, often SWANA-based artists, to respond to its interiors and collection - particularly, the vivid ceramic tiles collected from Turkey and Greece, Egypt and Syria, which shroud its 18th century Arab Hall. Iranian-born, Canada-based Shahrzad Ghaffari was the first invited to contribute to the museum’s redesign. A new exhibition, Journey to Oneness, follows her process to construct the spiral staircase which now sits at the House’s core – a ‘totem of union’, connecting East and West, the historic and the contemporary.
The artist details how Islamic patterns and Persian poetry permeates her practice, interests shared with the House’s creator, Lord Leighton. Shahrzad describes her movement back to abstract, calligraphic painting after studying graphic design, and why making public art is a physical, constructive act. Plus, she details Iran’s contemporary political landscape which informs Lion and Sun (2010), painted in response to the women-led protests which followed the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan - and its continued resonance amidst global attention on the death of Mahsa Amini.
Shahrzad Ghaffari: Journey to Oneness runs at Leighton House in London until 1 October 2023. Leighton House is a finalist for the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2023.
For more, you can read my article in recessed.space.
WITH: Shahrzad Ghaffari, contemporary artist. As a member of the Ghaffari family which sired such Persian masters as Sani-ol-Molk and Kamal-ol-Molk Ghaffari, Shahrzad continues a family tradition spanning 150 years.
ART: ‘Oneness, Shahrzad Ghaffari (2022)’. ADDITIONAL SOUNDS: Nagihan Seymour and Dr Usama Hasan, from Perspectives on the Arab Hall, Smartify audio tour.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Najlaa El-Ageli explores how Colonel Muammar Gaddafi colonised Libya’s character and identity from the 1960s to its post-Arab Spring present, and how contemporary artists play with the totalitarian props he used to perform and enact control.
During the 20th century, Libya became the main stage for much social change across the ‘Middle East’ and North Africa, including anti-colonial resistance. Armed with his Third International Theory, and strong words against Western imperialism, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi truly sought total power, control, and mass surveillance of his public - to become King of his own ‘United States of Africa’. Still today, ten years after the Arab Spring and Gaddafi’s death, the legacy of the leader and his dictatorship continues to shape national identities.
Najlaa El-Ageli, curator of Totalitarian Props, points out his signature sunglasses, headgear, and use of the colour green, contrasting the leader’s ‘performance’ - or pantomime - with lived experiences of his authoritarian regime. Beyond Libya, we look to the British colonisation of Egypt, and the ideals embodied by solidarity movements like pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism. Through the work of Tewa Barnosa, El-Ageli’s details the role of humour in social coping - and what it was like to curate an exhibition with the younger artist, creating an exhibition which spans generations and diasporas.
Totalitarian Props runs at The Africa Centre in London until 19 July 2023, as part of Shubbak Festival 2023.
WITH: Najlaa El-Ageli, architect, curator, and founder of Noon Arts. Projects. She is the co-curator of Totalitarian Props.
ART: ‘Silent Protests, Tewa Barnosa (2023)’. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum, unpacks how the artist encountered Japan in Europe, and how woodblock prints shaped his perspectives in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, an ‘artist’s colony’ on the outskirts of Paris.
Unlike other post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh never travelled outside of Europe. He didn’t need to; for him, the idea of ‘exotic’ places was often enough to inspire his vivid practice. van Gogh found ‘foreign’ inspirations in cities like Paris and London. His paintings were displayed at the same time as the Paris Universal Exhibition (1889) and as an avid collector of Japanese prints, he also attended the city’s new Asian art exhibitions. Exposure to artists like Katsushika Hokusai shaped his perspectives on his own local environment, his elongated forms, and his surprising use of the colour blue.
But it was in the countryside - and the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise - where Vincent van Gogh realised these various influences in their most vivid visual forms. Here, he spent just 74 days before his death, but produced a painting per day - and was close to the global recognition he gets today. Following their landmark Van Gogh and Japan (2018), Van Gogh Museum curator Nienke Bakker talks about their new exhibition, the first ‘serious’ study of the end of his life, how Vincent’s landscapes combined both local and global images, plus the often unequal relationship between rural and urban spaces.
Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months runs at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until 3 September 2023, and then the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, until 4 February 2024.
For more, read my article in The New European: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-exhibition-that-re-frames-van-goghs-last-days/
WITH: Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She is a curator of Van Gogh in Auvers.
ART: ‘Old Vineyard with Peasant Woman, Vincent van Gogh (1890)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curator Isabella Maidment steps into Hurvin Anderson’s studio and barbershop, a point of cultural connection between Birmingham and the Caribbean, reconstructed at the Hepworth Wakefield.
Contemporary artist Hurvin Anderson first painted a barbershop in Birmingham in 2006. For more than 15 years, he has returned to and reworked this space, an important social setting, especially for men, in Black British communities. As a second-generation migrant, whose parents migrated from Jamaica, Anderson practiced in the post-Windrush diaspora in 1980s Britain, creating works which connect cultures in Britain and the Caribbean - and Life Between Islands.
As Salon Paintings, the first complete exhibition of the Barbershop series, opens at The Hepworth Wakefield, curator Isabella Maidment talks about Anderson’s surreal use of mirrors and layers, why he thinks of the barbershop like an impressionist cafe, and how this particularly regional setting can travel and translate across the country and Europe.
Hurvin Anderson: Barbershop and Hurvin Anderson Curates run at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire until 5 November 2023, then at the Hastings Contemporary in East Sussex, and the Kistefos Museum, Norway, into 2024.
For more, you can read my article in recessed.space: https://recessed.space/00107-Hurvin-Anderson-salon-painting
Part of EMPIRE LINES' Windrush Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush's arrival in the UK from the West Indies. Listen to the other episode from Indo + Caribbean: The creation of a culture at the Museum of London Docklands: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/c475cec4c78ad87b9cf73326b823cb8c
WITH: Isabella Maidment, Senior Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield. She is a co-curator of Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings.
ART: ‘Is it OK to Be Black?, Hurvin Anderson (2015)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Curators Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble unwrap the underrepresented history of Indian indenture in the British Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries, through Richard Fung’s 2012 documentary film, Dal Puri Diaspora. Plus, artist Salina Jane, and Chandani Persaud, tuck into contemporary Indo-Caribbean and Trinidadian food and culture in London today.
In Dal Puri Diaspora, filmmaker Richard Fung travels from Toronto to Trinidad, and Guyana to India, tracing the migrations - and many variations - of a dish often called Caribbean or West Indian roti. After the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British and Dutch Caribbean plantation owners still required cheap labour and, having successfully petitioned the British government, recruited indentured workers from India. Over 450,000 men and women would make the five month journey by boat, working for three to five years in return for transport, a minimal wage and some basic provisions, until the scheme’s end in 1917. Yet whilst 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Windrush migrations, these stories of Caribbean migration remain comparatively overlooked in British histories.
Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble, curators of Indo + Caribbean, explore the reasons why workers decided to leave India, and how we can curate complex histories of opportunity, restriction, and resistance. They share personal experiences informed by caste, gender, and women’s agency, and how museums might use AI to fill the gaps in the archive. Artist Salina Jane highlights how Indo-Caribbeans connect with their heritage today, sharing sugar cane and cocoa drawn from her own growing allotment, and Kew Gardens in South London. Plus, Chandani Persaud looks at the evolution of food and labour in the local community - from suppression to celebration and commercialisation in Western cultures - highlighting how colonialism still shapes tastes and identities.
Indo + Caribbean: The creation of a culture runs at the Museum of London Docklands in London until 19 November 2023.
For more on Trinidad, hear Gérard Besson’s EMPIRE LINES on The Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), Trinidad (c. 1902-1910): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/8d33407d49e5d371cb5d4827088d896c
Part of EMPIRE LINES' Windrush Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush's arrival in the UK from the West Indies. Listen to the other episode with Isabella Maidment, curator of Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings.
WITH: Shereen Lafhaj, Curator at the Museum of London, and Makiya Davis-Bramble, Curator at Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. They are the co-curators of Indo + Caribbean. Salina Jane, a British artist of Indo-Caribbean descent making art about the experience of her family's journey from India through indentured labour to Guyana. Chandani Persaud, founder of Indo-Caribbean London.
ART: ‘Dal Puri Diaspora, Richard Fung (2012)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Artist Musquiqui Chihying brushes up the history of displaying sick and strong Asian bodies, from the Formosa Hamlet or human zoo at the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, to COVID-19, both connected to their own contemporary exhibition in London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery.
Musquiqui Chihying’s multimedia installation, ‘Too Loud a Dust’, delves into two events from 1910: the construction of t he Formosa Hamlet by the Japanese Empire at the Japanese-British Exhibition in London, and the publication of ‘Diseases of China’ by the British missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell. With soil ‘stolen’ from the Japanese Garden, which remains in White City today, and dust from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, he considers how indigenous Korean and Ainu Japanese bodies were represented then and now, and how transparent glass has been used to separate - and - other viewers and subjects.
The artist connects the contemporary and the historic, sharing how archive colonial postcards recalled the Dragonball cards he collected in his home in Taiwan, his pan-Asian influences including the Japanese proto-feminist poet, Masano Akiko, and why his research during the COVID pandemic, revealed continued racism and prejudices against Asian people, and contemporary ‘neocolonialism’ between China and Africa. Cleaning a museum may be a necessary task, but the dust in display cabinets also carries valuable information, challenging concepts of ‘purity’, and how anthropology and natural history museums ‘function’.
Musquiqui Chihying: Too Loud A Dust runs at the Tabula Rasa Gallery in London until 29 June 2023.
WITH: Musquiqui Chihying, contemporary visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation, and contemporary social culture in the Global South.
ART: ‘Too Loud a Dust, Musquiqui Chihying (2023)'.
IMAGE: Installation View.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Tate Modern curator Nabila Abdel Nabi plants European abstract art in transnational networks of spirituality and theosophy, through Hilma af Klint’s 1908 series or cycle, The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple.
Abstract artists Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian never met. But in their respective environments of Sweden and the Netherlands, both invented new languages of visual art as rooted in nature at the turn of the 20th century. Departing from traditional landscapes - with a touch of Vincent Van Gogh - they embarked on radical and ethereal painting series, connecting humans as a part of. not separate to, ecology.
Nabila Abdel Nabi, a curator of Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Forms of Life, explores how showing these artists in conversation defies their typical depiction as solitary artists who worked alone. We see Klint and Mondrian as active participants in global communities, with works that speak to scientific debates around Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the spiritual and philosophical movement, theosophy. Rethinking ‘control’ and ‘rationality’ - as stereotypes of abstract art, and concepts used to exclude women artists from history - Abdel Nabi underlines af Klint and Mondrian’s intuitive practices, and how both used abstraction not to defy nature, but to think through it.
Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life runs at the Tate Modern in London until 3 September 2023.
For more on theosophy, hear Jessica Albrecht’s EMPIRE LINES on the 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cf022e2ac70910d0741747e59f2f6f2
For more on Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern, listen to Carine Harmand, Keith Shiri, and Richard Gray on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/bc78f4df16a50055611d88aa812c7bfb
WITH: Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and a curator of Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life.
ART: ‘The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint (1908)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, weaves together the histories of Black artists who stayed in Southern America during the Great Migration, like the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.
Black artists based in the American South have always forged unique artistic practices - as multigenerational as multimedia in form. Using found and ‘reclaimed’ materials, their sculptures, paintings, drawings, and quilts speak to these artists’ individual ingenuity, and the enslavement, Jim Crow-era segregation, and institutionalised racism which continues to colour America’s past and present.
Geographically isolated, but well-connected within communities, artists like Thornton Dial, Estelle Witherspoon, and the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers have challenged conventions about the education and display of art - perhaps why they’ve been overlooked in the canon of art history. As a landmark exhibition opens in London, ‘activist curator’ Raina Lampkins-Felder shares why so many artists stayed on their lands, and why last names like Lockett, Bendolph, and Pettway crop up time and again. We travel from plantations and kitchen tables, to yard shows, typically Southern sculpture parks, where artists self-represent and directly communicate with their publics. We hear about the women at the fore of the first Black-owned businesses in the US, what the Freedom Quilting Bee and local churches had to do the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how contemporary housetop textiles continue to ‘bend and break’ traditions today.
Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South runs at the Royal Academy in London until 18 June 2023.
WITH: Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is the curator of Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.
ART: Quilts by the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.
IMAGE: Installation View.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
We return to Nalini Malani’s immersive installation My Reality is Different as it iterates in London, where curator Priyesh Mistry draws out the colonial and classical connections between the contemporary artist’s animation chamber, and the permanent collections of the National Gallery.
Born in British India in 1946, the year before Partition, contemporary artist Nalini Malani has always focussed on both ‘fractures’ and continuity. From paintings to animations, her ambitious practice has always challenged conventions - none more so than her new installation, in which she ‘desecrates’ well known works of art with her iPad, drawing out overlooked details, and immersing the viewer in her own perspectives.
As My Reality is Different moves from the Holburne Museum in Bath to London, curator Priyesh Mistry explains how Malani’s ‘endless paintings’ speak to historical continuities, from the economics of slavery, to contemporary violence, and the treatment of women in ancient Greece as Cassandra and Medea. He explores the artist’s use of Instagram as a ‘democratic platform’, and how the exhibition radically changes our realities, in how and what we see in these paintings, and museums as products of imperial exchange.
Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the National Gallery in London until 11 June 2023.
For more, listen to the artist Nalini Malani on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/74b0d8cf8b99c15ab9c2d3a97733c8ed
And read my article in gowithYamo:gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review
WITH: Priyesh Mistry, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London, and a curator of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different.
ART: ‘The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Winnie Sze and Pim Arts, curators at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, carve out the connections between Dutch, Danish, and South African artists like Ernest Mancoba, and see how African masks and sculptures, encountered in European museums, shaped abstract-surrealism in the 20th century.
Cobra - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam - were three cities at the core of a pan-European political art movement, calling for freedom and common humanity in the wake of World War II. Drawing on cubism, expressionism, and surrealism, they shared Pablo Picasso’s attraction to African masks and sculpture. Yet, they worked between abstract and figurative art, some seeking to escape the exotification, othering, and orientalism of movements past.
Born in British-colonial South Africa in 1904, Ernest Mancoba didn’t ‘come into contact’ with African sculpture as art until he travelled to ethnographic and colonial museums in Paris and London. Along with artists like Sonia Ferlov and Egill Jacobsen, he became a leading figure in collaborative movements like Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), based in Denmark. Winnie Sze and Pim Arts curate two of three exhibitions celebrating 75 years of the Cobra art movement (1948-1951), which focus on Scandinavia. They detail the differences between African and Western sculpture, how Danish artists used satire and Degenerate Art in acts of resistance against the Nazi Empire, and why Denmark has been othered in the history of avant-garde art.
The three exhibitions of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art run at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands until 14 May 2023. For more, you can also read my review of Cobra 75 in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/a-triptych-of-danish-modernism-cobra-and-degenerate-art-in-denmark.
WITH: Pim Arts, curator of We Kiss the Earth - Danish Modern Art 1934-1948. Winnie Sze, curator of Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov. Both exhibitions are part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art.
ART: Works from ‘We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948’.
IMAGE: Peter Tijhuis.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Design Museum curator Rachel Hajek makes sense of Ai Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects, from ancient Chinese porcelain to Lego bricks, and how the contemporary artist’s fascination with the history of making is itself making history.
One of the world’s most well-known living artists and activists, Ai Weiwei works across disciplines, from film and sculpture, to collection, curation, and archealogical excavation. But Making Sense is his first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and how traditional crafts and artefacts can help us re/consider what we value today. One of Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects features over 200,000 hand-crafted porcelain spouts from Song dynasty China, their sheer quantity a testament to the scale of mass-production in Asia, many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
Curator Rachel Hajek digs into Weiwei’s practice and politics, exploring tensions between the minor and the monumental, construction and destruction, and past and present. Plus, how the artist reimagines ‘Western masterpieces’ like Claude Monet’s Waterlilies with LEGO. to articulate his relationships with his father, a poet subjugated during the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese state today.
Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum in London until 30 July 2023.
For more, read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/visit-japan-for-free-from-london
WITH: Rachel Hajek, Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, and a curator of Making Sense.
ART: ‘Spouts, Ai Weiwei (2023)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells, curators at the Freud Museum London, dig into the Austrian’s collection of ancient objects, and how archaeology shaped his approach to psychoanalysis in the 20th century.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) simultaneously pioneered both psychoanalysis and global antiquity. Fascinated by classical cultures, he collected objects across space and time, from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, finding interconnections across the Mediterranean and Middle East. Freud challenged historical precedents - posing Moses as an Egyptian, not a Jew - but he also appropriated classical history to legitimate his practice, and reckon with ideas like the Oedipus Complex.
But above all, Freud saw the mind and conscious as ‘an archaeological site’. Likewise, Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells dig into his study to find the objects for Freud’s Antiquity, unearthing his complex position as both a product and critic of 19th century imperialism. They share how Freud challenged the Western ownership of both historical objects and knowledge, the parallels between individual and human history, why his writings reflect the Nazification of Europe before World War II, and how the violence of empire continues to impact our present.
Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire runs at the Freud Museum London until 16 July 2023.
For more on Freud’s Asian objects, listen to Professor Craig Clunas, curator of Freud and China, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/44861b4a5e6a32380693ec6622210890
WITH: Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London (UCL). Daniel Orrells, Professor of Classics and Centre Director for Queer@Kings at King’s College London (KCL). They are co-curators are Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire.
ART: ‘Red-Figure Hydria, Greece (380-360BCE)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Could the state of state-lessness mean a more continental, inclusive sense of belonging? The contemporary Southeast and East Asian artists of the collective Kakilang certainly think so. Challenging their conflation as ‘Chinese’, their joint exhibition in London spans the historical migration routes of Vietnamese refugees, to audio maps of Taiwan, and post-Tsunami Japan - regions rarely considered by Western audiences, and rarely from local perspectives. Yet these diverse artworks really speak to similarities, rather than distinct identities, between Asian countries, connecting built and natural environments across the continent. Take Law Yuk-Mui’s 2021 video ‘River Atlas’, which follows the flows of rivers with the same name in Hong Kong and India, two former colonies in the British Empire.sh
Curator Ling Tan reveals how photographic art can refocus our attention from the coloniser/colonised relationship, onto common experiences between artists in Asia, in diasporas, and in the UK. They also speak of the role of language for the 46 million people who use Hokkien, and why their captions read in traditional Mandarin, not the simplified form common in China. Drawing on their own practice as an artist, we see how comforting foods could break down the stereotype of Asian countries as environmentally destructive - and why the exhibition combines new scaffolding and neo-Gothic architecture, to reconstruct shared colonial pasts.
State-less 無國界 runs at Two Temple Place in London until 9 April 2023. (You’ll find all the links in the episode notes.)
WITH: Ling Tan, curator of State-less 無國界. They are an artist and the Associate Artistic Director of Kakilang (formerly Chinese Arts Now, CAN), an annual festival which celebrates the work of artists from across the wide spectrum of East and Southeast Asian heritages.
ART: ‘River Atlas, Law Yuk-Mui (2021)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Rijksmuseum curator Valika Smeulders polishes and personalises our understanding of the Dutch Golden Age, from their joint exhibition with the UN, Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery.
When Slavery opened at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2021, it was one of the first exhibitions of its kind. Spanning 250 years from the 17th to the 19th century, it told Dutch colonial history as a common, national history, centred on lived experience. Its ten stories travel from Brazil, Suriname, and the Caribbean, to South Africa, Asia, and the Netherlands, featuring those who were enslaved, those who profited from slavery, and those who resisted the plantation system. These personal stories connect us as individuals across space and time, asking difficult questions. Were European abolitionists so important in ending the transatlantic slave trade? And what does it mean to be a descendent of plantation owners today?
As an adapted version of the exhibition opens at the United Nations in New York, curator Valika Smeulders explores how material and immaterial cultures together reveal ‘what you don’t see’ in museums, why museums must collaborate, how temporary exhibitions can change permanent collections, and the power of personal storytelling in spaces of contemporary political power.
Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery runs at the United Nations Headquarters Visitors’ Lobby in New York until 30 March, then across UN offices throughout 2023. You can also access the entire exhibition online.
WITH: Dr. Valika Smeulders, one of the four curators of Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery, in Amsterdam (2021) and in New York (2023). She is the head of the Department of History at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
IMAGE: Richard Koek.
SOUNDS: Rijksmuseum.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Japan House curator Hashimoto Mari and translator Eyre Kurasawa unravel kumihimo, the ancient craft of Japanese silk braiding, and how its contemporary reconstructions connect Edo-era samurai armour with French military fashions from the 19th century.
Literally translated as ‘joining threads together’, kumihimo is the intricate Japanese practice of cord braiding. Its strong and flexible ‘structure’ has lent its use to everything from samurai sword scabbards and handles, tying high-fashion kimono and haori following the restoration of the Emperor Meiji in 1868, to origami, solar panels, and aerospace engineering today.
Japan House’s new exhibition highlights the work of DOMYO, a Tokyo-based workshop established in 1652 which still practices and researches this traditional craft, with the Shōsōin (Imperial) Repository in Nara. Curator Hashimoto Mari unravels the simultaneous evolution of braiding in China, Asia, and South America, its surprising overlaps with Western textile designs like tartan, and how contemporary modeller Hasegawa Akira reconstructs Napoleonic army jackets, replacing ‘Russian braids’ with kumihimo to hint at the common threads between Japanese and European military histories.
KUMIHIMO: Japanese Silk Braiding by DOMYO runs at Japan House London until 11 June 2023.
For more, read my review of KUMIHIMO in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/visit-japan-for-free-from-london
WITH: Hashimoto Mari, curator of KUMIHIMO: Japanese Silk Braiding by DOMYO. She is the vice-chairperson of EISEI BUNKO, and a writer and editor who specialises in the Japanese arts. Eyre Kurasawa is an interpreter, writer, and researcher in Japanese and English.
ART: ‘French Army Tunic, Hasegawa Akira (2021)’.
SOUNDS: DOMYO.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Curator Barnaby Wright transports us from the Courtauld Gallery in London, to the Caribbean island of Trinidad, as seen - and heard - by Peter Doig, one of Europe’s most highly valued contemporary painters.
Peter Doig’s vast figurative paintings pay homage to the many places where he has lived and practiced - though never really called home. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, his career has been characterised by constant travel and movement, and his status as Europe’s most expensive living artist. But his landscapes are layered in with multiple, and more popular, inspirations - like found photographs, films, and above all, music - settings which move between figuration and abstraction, actuality and the imagination.
Trinidad is perhaps the unlikely focus of the Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition, which shows works painted since Doig’s recent return to London from the Caribbean, where he has lived since 2002. Mainstream art markets often prize Doig’s isolated Canadian mountain scenes, influenced by the likes of Edvard Munch, but here we see the artist as an active participant in Port of Spain’s local community, practicing with the BBC’s Boscoe Holder, poet Derek Walcott, and prisoners on the island of Carrera. Curator Dr. Barnaby Wright delves into Doig’s loving depictions of the Mighty Shadow, a titan of Trinidadian calypso and soca, why Carnival keeps him working all night, and how the self-portrayed ‘outsider’ both draws from - and challenges - exotifying gazes on non-European subjects from post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin.
Peter Doig runs at the Courtauld Gallery in London until 29 May 2023.
WITH: Dr. Barnaby Wright, curator of Peter Doig. He is the Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art.
ART: ‘Painting on an Island (Carrera), Peter Doig (2019)’.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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We're back offline, and inside Banned., a new exhibition blending archive and present-day photography at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Curator Sabina Desir joins Anita, Mark, and Julie - three children of Black and Indigenous American airmen stationed at RAF Manston in the 1950s - to imprint their portraits of racial identity and ambiguity in Britain.
Between 1951 and 1958, 2500 US Air Force servicemen and women were stationed at RAF Manston, near Margate. 200 were African American, and others were from non-white Indigenous and ethnic groups. After finding a 1957 newspaper article in the East Kent Times which downplayed the level of segregation imposed on British soil - and the furious responses this triggered from residents at the time - curator Sabina Desir began to reach out to those in the community today. Anita, Mark, and Julie, portrayed on the walls by local artist Richard Birch, share their lived experiences of tracing their ancestry - some, all the way back to Cherokee chiefs. Plus, Sabina exposes the different perceptions of the post-war Windrush generation, new connections in Charlie Evaristo-Boyce's pop art series, and the power of representing these people in the same place where they were banned.
Banned. runs at the Turner Contemporary in Margate until 8 May 2023.
PRESENTER: Sabina Desir, curator of Banned. She is the Artistic Director and Creative Producer of the Ramsgate-based Freedom Road Project. Anita Stokes, Mark Mahan, and Julie Wing are all children of Manston US Air Force Servicemen, working with the Banned. project.
ART: Children of the Manston US Air Force Servicemen Print Series, Richard Birch (2023)
IMAGE: 'Anita Stokes, Mark Mahan, and Julie Wing, in front of their portraits in Children of the Manston US Air Force Servicemen Print Series, Richard Birch (2023)'.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way, flows of empires through art.
Interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith ‘empire’.
Now, EMPIRE LINES is moving offline for good - with even more exclusive interviews recorded on location with the world's leading curators, historians, and artists, bringing museums and exhibitions to meet you.
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MUSIC: Combinación // The Dubbstyle
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic
Dr. Sarah Longair unseats European powers' efforts to control the East African coast, through a Kiti Cha Enzi, or Swahili Chair of Power, produced in the 19th century.
Intricately decorated with an ivory inlay, a large, wooden throne sits proudly - not in its place of production of Witu, Kenya, but the stores of the British Museum. Kiti cha enzi, or seats of power, were used as thrones by Swahili rulers from the 18th century. Their distinctive form incorporates myriad cultural influences, highlighting the vibrant pre-colonial trading history of the Swahili community, while their symbolic use speaks to shifting patterns of power on the African coast. Produced as Germany and Britain competed for colonial control on the East African coast, this chair is a material symbol of how a small Swahili community resisted European expansion. Its seizure from the Swahili Sultan Fumo Bakari, and subsequent relocation by Admiral Fremantle to the National Maritime Museum, and later British Museum, speaks to our current interests in the colonial origins of museum objects. But it also reveals the complex rivalries between Western imperial pofwers, and how East African leaders exercised their own agency by playing them against each other.
PRESENTER: Dr. Sarah Longair, Senior Lecturer in the History of Empire at the University of Lincoln.
ART: Kiti Cha Enzi (Swahili Chair of Power), East Africa (19th Century).
IMAGE: 'Sketch of Kiti Cha Enzi of the Sultan of Witu, British Museum Af1992,05.1. Drawing: S Longair'.
SOUNDS: Radi Cultural Group.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Chris Spring tears up stereotypes of African textiles, through Araminta de Clermont's 2010 photograph, Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx.
Three young men wait at a bus stop near Cape Town in South Africa, clad in blankets of brilliant blue and rose red. Historically, these 'African' woven textiles were originally manufactured by Europeans during the colonial period. Dutch imperial traders, who first entered the Indian Ocean trade in the mid-seventeenth century, only added to the existing vigorous trade in textiles which had been carried out by Indian, Arab, and Chinese traders for many centuries before the arrival of Europeans. From indigo resist-dyed blauwdruk, to Swahili kanga, and South African shweshwe, these ‘authentic’ products are truly the hybrid product of places and peoples working across and within empires - from factories in Manchester, to migrant merchants from Kutch, and businesses within the Japanese Empire.
This confident photograph speaks to how patterns and designs had always been dictated by African taste, aesthetics, and patronage, and utilised by women to communicate across gendered and religious social boundaries. Now representative of diverse African identities and indigeneity, these fabrics unsettle ideas of what an 'African' textile should look like, revealing innovation and modernity - all the way to the Marvel film, Black Panther.
PRESENTER: Dr. Chris Spring, artist, writer and former curator in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum He was the curator of Social Fabric: African Textiles Today, at the British Museum and William Morris Gallery.
ART: Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx, Araminta de Clermont (2010).
IMAGE: 'Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx'.
SOUNDS: Chad Crouch.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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We're back offline, and in the artist's bedroom at Van Gogh House in London, as Vaishnavi Mohan pins down Harold Offeh's sound installation, We Came Here, an imagined conversation on migration between Vincent Van Gogh and the Jamaican-born, Brixton-based community leader, Olive Morris.
In 1873, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Stockwell in South London. Almost a century later, Olive Morris, a Jamaican-born community leader, was actively campaigning for feminist, Black, and squatters' rights in nearby Brixton. Researching the lives of these two 20 year olds, Harold Offeh, Van Gogh House's then artist-in-residence, became intrigued by the idea of the artist as a ‘migrant’ in London. His sound installation, We Came Here, is an cross-generational conversation between artist and activist, exploring their shared and common experiences of London, housing rights and social justice, and the development of their individual sociopolitical awarenesses. Community Engagement Guide Vaishnavi Mohan shares narratives of young migrants arriving in London today, delving into questions of access and decolonisation of the museum space.
We Came Here runs at Van Gogh House London until 18 December 2022.
PRESENTER: Vaishnavi Mohan, Community Engagement Guide at Van Gogh House, and science communicator.
ART: We Came Here, Harold Offeh, with voice actors Abel Enkelaar and Nkara Stephenson (2022).
IMAGE: 'Van Gogh's Bedroom.'
SOUNDS: Extract from We Came Here, Harold Offeh.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Deborah Lee-Talbot exposes the political agency of Indigenous women in British New Guinea, through a photograph of the Papuan Geua, taken in the 1880s.
In her European 'Mother Hubbard' dress, and necklace made of local shells, Geua's status as a powerful, 'Big Woman' of Papua New Guinea is without question. A politically motivated Indigenous intermediary, she collaborated with the British missionaries and explorers that visited Port Moresby during the late nineteenth century, when the island was known as British New Guinea in the British Empire. Geua' prominence is evidenced by her repeated presence throughout the London Missionary Society's (LMS) archives, photographed by the likes of George Lawes. Her images serve in part as mission propaganda for European audiences, revealing what it was like for religious missionaries in the tropical Pacific region. Yet rereading Geua’s photograph from her perspective challenges the idea of Papuans' evolution as Christians, exposing Geua’s own agency as an Indigenous woman, and her critical role in bridging two distinctive cultures - as well as the unique role colonial photographs play today.
PRESENTER: Deborah Lee-Talbot, doctoral candidate in Australian-Pacific and archival history at Deakin University, Australia.
ART: Indigenous Intermediary Geua in ‘Photographs Mainly of Port Moresby’, George Lawes, (1880s).
IMAGE: 'Geua'.
SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Helen Paul bursts the South Sea Bubble, tracing the triangular trade of slavery between London and Britain's colonies in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, via John Cleveley's 18th century painting, The Luxborough Galley on Fire.
Sailing into the dark green waters of the mid-Atlantic Ocean, the Luxborough Galley is in imperilled. Consumed by flames, with no land in sight, its white passengers frantically firefight - to no avail. Commissioned by one of the ship's few survivors for display in Greenwich, John Cleveley's six oil paintings recast the story as one of British heroism - erasing the history of the South Sea Company's colonial profiteering, catastrophic South Sea Bubble of 1720, and scapegoating its enslaved Black passengers for carelessly causing the blaze. Still housed in the National Maritime Museum, on the southern bank of the River Thames, John Cleveley’s rendering exposes London's vast investment into the international slave trade, linking British colonies across the world. By focussing on cannibalism, it unintentionally commemorates the inhumanity, lack of civislisation, and crimes against humanity committed by its white colonial benefactors.
PRESENTER: Dr Helen Paul, lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton, and Honorary Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at UCL.
ART: The Luxborough Galley on Fire, 25 June 1727, John Cleveley the Elder (c. 18th Century).
IMAGE: 'The 'Luxborough Galley' on fire, 25 June 1727'.
SOUNDS: One Man Book.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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James Marriott traces the flows of Britain's global oil empire in the 20th century, from a village in Nigeria to The Beatles' 1965 vinyl, Drive My Car.
Penned by Paul McCartney and John Lennon in 1965, ‘Drive my Car’ transported The Beatles on their way to international success. It is the soundtrack of the British empire of the 1960s, characterised by pop culture domination and high-powered men in business suits, rather than top hats and general's uniforms. This ‘late empire’ was built on petrol, plastics, airplanes and vinyl records - which permeated British homes and everyday lives. Tracing the crude oil connections between Ogoni in Nigeria to refineries in Wales, and the colonial heritage of businesses like Shell-BP, James Marriott exposes the pipeline politics underlying Britain’s global empire of oil.
PRESENTER: James Marriott, writer and activist at Platform. He is the co-author of Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation with Terry Macalister, published by Pluto Press in 2021. He is executive producer of THE OIL MACHINE (2022), a documentary film screening across the UK in November 2022.
ART: Vinyl Record of Drive My Car, The Beatles (1965).
IMAGE: 'Women at the EMI factory packing the Rubber Soul album'.
SOUNDS: Atlas Sound.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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We're back offline, and into the deep black exhibition space of Bath's Holburne Museum, where artist Nalini Malani coats fresh layers upon classical paintings from the National Gallery in her new installation, My Reality is Different.
Artist Nalini Malani disrupts Western linear perspectives – in art, and in history. In My Reality is Different, the viewer is engulfed within a dark cavern, a panoramic 40 metres of wall space, shot with nine overlapping video projections all playing in a continuous loop. With tens of iPad-drawn animations. she adds layers to classical paintings from the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum in Bath. Born in 1946 in Karachi, British India, and now practicing in Mumbai, Malani has always radically questioned conventions of painting and drawing. She talks about reworking well-known works of art from alternative, and critical, perspectives, highlighting histories of the subaltern, women, and the colonial and imperial sources of wealth behind contemporary art collections.
Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the Holburne Museum in Bath until 8 January 2023, and then the National Gallery in London from 2 March to 11 June 2023.
For more, read my review of My Reality is Different in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review.
PRESENTER: Nalini Malini, Mumbai-based artist. In 2020, she became the first-ever artist to receive the National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship.
ART: My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022).
IMAGE: 'Nalini Malani in front of Caravaggio’s 'The Supper at Emmaus' (1601) at the National Gallery'.
SOUNDS: Extract from My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Michele Lamprakos reconstructs the imperial flows of Islamic and Byzantine architecture from 8th century Spain, through the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, or the Mezquita.
A strange, hybrid building dominates the southern Spanish city of Córdoba. Part mosque, part cathedral, the Mezquita was first constructed by the early Islamic Umayyad dynasty - then seized, 'purified,' and consecrated as a Christian church in the 13th century. This infamous Christianised mosque, complete with crucero, epitomised the imperial 'Christian universe' of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg dynasty's victory over Islam. Still, much of the Islamic fabric was politically preserved – and even reconstructed - in testament to Spain's long history of religious rivalry and reconciliation. Tracing these unending cycles of Christianisation and re-Islamification reveals Spain's imperial ambitions in northern Africa, and how the Mezquita remained a political tool through the 20th century General Franco dictatorship to today.
PRESENTER: Dr. Michele Lamprakos, Associate Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland-College Park.
ART: The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba (8th Century).
IMAGE: ‘Mezquita, Cornelia Steffens'.
SOUNDS: Gnawledge.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Peter Good traces the flows of Persian wine culture through precolonial India into Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, via the Queen Anne Wine Bottle from Shiraz.
No other alcoholic drink has inspired - or intoxicated - our imaginations quite like wine. Long considered the perfect gift from visitors, this striking sapphire blue bottle from Shiraz was presented to the English Queen Anne in 1708 - one of many bought and sold by the English from Persia, now Iran. Perhaps surprisingly common, this artefact of the Safavid Empire's multimillion pound wine industry reveals early modern Europe's obsession with Persian wine, from its mythical properties as an elixir of life, to the courtly manners of its taste and consumption. But it also speaks to attitudes towards non-European and Islamic powers before the rise of formal empires in the Indian Ocean. Far from imposing their 'superior' culture upon local powers, European elites adopted and mimicked the practices of their Asian counterparts, from cultivating grapevines and vineyards, to the paradisic Persian gardens of the English East India Company. Since swallowed into existing European tastes, the Queen Anne bottle brings Iran's unique viticulture to light, forcing us to reconsider our privileging of Western wines in popular culture and museum collections today.
PRESENTER: Dr. Peter Good, Lecturer in Early Modern Europe and the Islamic World at the University of Kent. He specialises on cross-cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Europeans and Asian states in the Indian Ocean. He is the author of The East India Company in Persia: Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022.
ART: Queen Anne Wine Bottle, Shiraz (1708).
IMAGE: 'Saddle Flask - Type II PC-078 Queen Anne Flask'.
SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the Turner Contemporary in Margate, for their latest exhibition Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning. Artist Ingrid Pollard explores her career of photographing Black experiences, beyond the city and urban environment, to the English countryside.
Since the 1980s, artist Ingrid Pollard has explored how identities of Britishness and Blackness are socially constructed, through history and the rural landscape. Drawing on British and Caribbean photographic archives, her works cross boundaries in photography, sculpture, film and sound, confronting complex, often racist histories. She discusses how pre-Windrush propaganda films inspired works like Bow Down and Very Low -123 (2021), her influences from Maya Angelou to Muhammad Ali, and exposing those Black experiences often 'hidden in plain sight'.
Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning runs at the Turner Contemporary in Margate until 25 September 2022.
Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Malangatana Ngwenya and Althea McNish.
PRESENTER: Ingrid Pollard, Guyanese-born British artist, photographer, and researcher. She uses portraiture and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs like Britishness, race, and sexuality. She was Stuart Hall Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex (2018), and has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2022.
ART: Self Evident, Ingrid Pollard (1992).
IMAGE: 'Self Evident'.
SOUNDS: Water Features.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the William Morris Gallery, in London, for their latest exhibition Althea McNish: Colour is Mine. Co-curator Rose Sinclair unwrap McNish's bold textile designs, and Caribbean and British colonial connections, through her infamous Batchelor Girl's room installation
Althea McNish was one of the UK’s most innovative textile artists. Born in Trinidad, she moved to the UK in 1950, and became the first designer of Caribbean descent to achieve international recognition. Her bestselling wallpapers, interior designs, furnishing and fashion fabrics were commissioned by the likes of Liberty, Dior, and Hull Traders. Co-curator Rose Sinclair talks about meeting the artist, who was both a 'Citizen of the World' and part of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and McNish's transformative impact as a Black woman defining British design.
Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Malangatana Ngwenya and Ingrid Pollard.
PRESENTER: Rose Sinclair, co-curator of Colour is Mine, and Lecturer in Design Education at Goldsmiths University.
ART: Batchelor Girl's Room, Althea McNish/Studio Nyali (1966/2022).
IMAGE: 'Althea McNish: Colour is Mine'.
SOUNDS: The Up Beat.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the Tate Modern, in London, for their latest exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders. Returning to EMPIRE LINES, Richard Gray joins curator Carine Harmand to explore the works of Mozambican artist, Malangatana Ngwenya. Plus, curator Keith Shiri unveils Malangatana's restored mural at the all-new Africa Centre in London.
White gnashing teeth, wide eyes, and clawed hands of humans and animals dominate Malangatana’s Untitled (1967). Otherwise titled How Long Will This Go On?, the overwhelming oil work is a horrifying visualisation of the violence endured by his native Mozambique, as it struggled for independence from Portugal's Estado Novo until 1975.
A prominent political figure, Malangatana joined the Mozambique liberation movement FRELIMO in 1964, and was imprisoned by the Portuguese secret police. Neither a propagandist nor a 'pamphleteer', his works nevertheless embody his own politics and biography, from his artist's block after prison, to his efforts to memorialise the 'Mozambican personality'. Practicing in both colonial and post-colonial Mozambique, he straddled empire lines across Africa, contesting the notion of Europeanisation as civilisation.
Set against the exhibition and sounds of Mozambique musicians, curator Carine Harmand and Richard Gray reveal the two way flows between European modernism and Africanist art, and how the artist appropriated and benefitted from surrealism's international network. Plus, film curator Keith Shiri shares his experiences with the artist at the recent reopening of the Africa Centre.
Surrealism Beyond Borders runs at the Tate Modern in London until 29 August 2022.
The Africa Centre in London reopened on 9 June 2022.
Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Althea McNish and Ingrid Pollard.
PRESENTERS: Carine Harmand, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and of Surrealism Beyond Borders. Richard Gray, postgraduate research student at SOAS University of London. He was the co-curator of Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution at the Brunei Gallery, and formerly a 'cooperante internacionalista' (internationalist co-worker), contracted as a teacher by the Mozambican government in the late 1970s. Keith Shiri, film curator, founder, and director of Africa at the Pictures, the London African Film Festival, and the Africa Media Centre at the University of Westminster. He is the curator of the Icons of the Africa Centre Series at The Africa Centre, and is a BFI London Film Festival Programme Advisor.
ART: Untitled, Malangatana Ngwenya (1967).
IMAGE: 'Untitled'.
SOUNDS: Adlina Tatana // Alda Ngwenya, Vasco Sambo.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Sonal Khullar sounds out how the Long Partition shapes Indian and Pakistani identities, through Bani Abidi's 2016 audio installation, Memorial to Lost Words.
Memorial to Lost Words has been seen and heard across Edinburgh, Berlin, Sharjah, and Chicago. But its installation at Lahore Museum in Pakistan, as part of the city’s inaugural Lahore Biennale in 2018, marked a kind of homecoming. Bani Abidi’s eight-channel soundscape recalls over a million Indian soldiers who served in the British Indian Army during World War I, through Punjabi music, an oversized statue of Queen Victoria, and the English-translated letters of those who never returned home. A counter-monument, it remembers ordinary civilians and soldiers, rather than the generals and rulers celebrated by architects like Edward Lutyens. It also exposes the lingering imperial legacies of literature, like Rudyard Kiping's Kim and the Zam-Zammah, and how museum collections, like people, were partitioned between post-colonial India and Pakistan.
Part of EMPIRE LINES' Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Nalini Iyer.
PRESENTER: Dr. Sonal Khullar, W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations (2015) and completing a book manuscript The Art of Dislocation on conflict, collaboration, and contemporary art from South Asia.
ART: Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum, Bani Abidi (2016/2018)
IMAGE: 'Memorial to Lost Words'.
SOUNDS: Bani Abidi, Saad Sultan, Ali Aftab Saeed, Harsakhian.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Nalini Iyer rereads South Indian and diasporic experiences of Partition, through Balachandra Rajan's 1958 novel, The Dark Dancer.
Born in British India but educated at Cambridge University, V. S. Krishnan finally returns to his home country on the eve of its independence in 1947. But after many years cut off from his family and culture, this South Indian civil servant has become a typical colonial product - the 'brown-skinned Englishman' and bureaucrat idealised by the likes of Lord Macauley. Krishnan's relationships with women reveal other Indias - of Gandhian independence and Hindu nationalism - that he has never known. Witnessing the bewilderment and gendered violence of the Long Partition through the eyes of the civil servant, writer Balachandra Rajan explores how the colonial experience caused existential identity crises. Drawing from his indirect experience, Rajan's novel platforms the perspectives of those diasporic South Indians, seemingly unaffected by the civil conflict, and how Britain too was irrevocably changed by the imperial experience.
Part of EMPIRE LINES' Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Sonal Khullar.
PRESENTER: Dr. Nalini Iyer, Professor of English at Seattle University and Editor-in-Chief of South Asian Review.
ART: The Dark Dancer, Balachandra Rajan (1958).
IMAGE: 'Balachandra Rajan'.
SOUNDS: G. Las.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Piotr Puchalski depicts interwar Poland's imperial aspirations, through the Maritime and Colonial League's 1938 poster, Colonial Days: We Demand Colonies For Poland.
Facing economic crises and the onset of World War II, Poland looked to Africa as a source of material wealth, potential place of alternative appeasement, and site of refuge for its Jewish population. With their abundance of 'exotic' fruits and peoples, propaganda posters advertised Poland's Colonial Days events in April 1938, improving public awareness of places like Cameroon, Madagascar, and Liberia, and bolstering national support for elites' ever-shifting visions for colonialism. Colouring Eastern European perceptions of Africa, this poster highlights how colonialism was a truly global phenomenon, attracting the interest of powers without colonies of their own. Today, Poland is more often considered a victim of imperial exploitation – most famously by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - than a historic empire or colonial power. But Colonial Days reveals persistent Polish cultural and socioeconomic insecurities, and how European political and artistic trends, from racial pseudoscience to modernism, were moulded by colonial interactions.
PRESENTER: Dr. Piotr Puchalski, Assistant Professor of Modern History at the Pedagogical University of Kraków. He specialises in the history of Poland, colonial empires, international relations, and contemporary tourism. He is the author of Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939, published by Routledge in 2022.
ART: Colonial Days: We Demand Colonies For Poland Poster, Maritime and Colonial League (1938).
IMAGE: 'Colonial Days Poster'.
SOUNDS: Gary War.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Hooda Shawa rewrites the fairytales in England's 18th century country houses, exposing the Indian and Palestinian foundations of Derbyshire's Kedleston Hall.
Nestled amidst acres of rolling hills, Derbyshire's Kedleston Hall boasts artistic masterpieces, Peacock dresses, and even an 'Eastern Museum' - all furnished from a fairytale. But this neo-classical mansion has a darker past, as the ancestral home of the English Curzon family, including Lord Curzon, who served as the Viceroy of India (1899-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-1924) in the British Mandate in Palestine. Now part of the National Trust's Colonial Countryside Project, Kedleston Hall speaks to the hidden connections between historic slavery and plantation ownership, and contemporary wealth and political power - including the collapse of India's textile industry, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement today. In the wake of her own childhood experiences, Hooda Shawa explores what Kedleston Hall means for her own British Kuwaiti heritage and, beyond the Raj, what Palestine's lesser-known occupation reveals about its continued struggle for independence now.
PRESENTER: Hooda Shawa Qaddumi, Founder and Managing Director of TAQA: Toward Achieving Quality in Art, a Kuwait-based company that produces and promotes independent cultural and artistic initiatives. They write for projects including 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object.
ART: Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (18th Century).
IMAGE: 'Kedleston Hall'.
SOUNDS: Ergo Phizmiz.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Stephanie Porras carves out the Chinese connection between Spain's colonies in Mexico City and Manila in the Philippines, in a 17th century ivory statue of St. Michael the Archangel.
With gently curving wings, the figure of St. Michael the Archangel has stood watch over Mexico City, the former Spanish colony of New Spain, since the 17th century. But this particular statue was actually produced far across the Pacific, in the smaller Spanish colony of the Philippines by Chinese or 'Sangley' sculptors, themselves immigrants to the archipelago. Whilst initially produced to furnish Catholic churches for the recently converted, such statues were quickly appropriated by those seeking to monetise mass production in Asia. Carved from African imported ivory, and modelled on artworks from the Spanish Flanders, this St. Michael from Manila embodies the intertwining of devotional and transpacific trading networks within the global Spanish empire. Rather than cultural hybrids, these statues challenge the very concept of 'Chineseness', highlighting how artists appropriated imperial Spain's territorial and mercantile ambitions for their own ends.
PRESENTER: Dr. Stephanie Porras, Associate Professor and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University. She is the author of The First Viral Images, published by Pennsylvania State Press in 2023.
ART: Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Basilica of Guadalupe (17th Century).
IMAGE: 'Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Chinese Hispano-Philippine Carvers'.
SOUNDS: The Anchorites.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Jared Hardesty picks up the party debris littered by New England's illegal imperialists, via John Greenwood's 1750s painting, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam.
Drinking, gambling, and debauchery reign in a private club in Paramaribo, then the Dutch colony of Surinam. John Greenwood's 18th century scene boasts of the illegal behaviour of ship captains and merchants from Britain’s New England colonies in North America, painted for proud display in their Rhode Island offices. This souvenir of a colonial gap year obfuscates the cruelty of Dutch colonialism. But its Black figures hint at the exploitation of enslaved Africans, which underpinned these excesses of empire, and generated the wealth which transformed New England into the birthplace of US industrial capitalism. Painted at a time when it was officially illegal for outsiders to trade on the island, Greenwood's image suggests of the lucrative interimperial trade networks open to individual exploitation, which gave rise to goods like the so-called Surinam Horse. As the sole surviving painting of the artist's time in Surinam, Sea Captains is thus a unique, unintentionally subversive artefact.
PRESENTER: Dr. Jared Ross Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is the author of Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate, and EMPIRE LINES listeners can get 30% off the text with the code RISINGSUN30.
ART: Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, John Greenwood (c. 1752-1758).
IMAGE: 'Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam'.
SOUNDS: MG Studios.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Caitlin Harvey maps out land transfers from Indigenous communities to European education institutions, through an 1873 Map of New Zealand’s 'Colonial' University.
Depicting the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, a vast map outlines the lands around the Kimihia and Hakanoa Lakes and Waikato River. It's largest feature, thousands of acres in size, is labelled 'Endowment for Colonial University' - referring to the British University of New Zealand, hundreds of miles away in Christchurch. Exporting the Oxford model, 19th century settler-governments across the world supplied higher education institutions with enormous tracts of Indigenous lands, sometimes violently seized, their lease and sale generating great income. Possibly the longest-lasting myth of the land-grant university is that its operations exist in one, fixed place. Indeed, students often nostalgically associate their university with its distinct city or campus. But this map exposes their mobile and broad territorial reach, how university-building was used as a tool of imperial expansion, and who was excluded from the production of new knowledge and wealth in these new 'progressive' institutions.
PRESENTER: Dr. Caitlin Harvey, Research Fellow in History and POLIS at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.
ART: Map of Endowments for 'Colonial' University, New Zealand (1873).
IMAGE: 'Endowments'.
SOUNDS: onion.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Saygin Salgirli mines the hidden link between four early modern empires, in a 17th century Painting of Silver Labourers in Potosí, Bolivia.
In a peaceful mountain landscape, three labourers in colourful turbans and tunics mine silver together in a metric, obedient rhythm. Likely painted for the first non-European text on the Americas, this idyllic depiction of labour has a more complicated past. Its novel, imagined imperial ideal of work is unlocatable to any specific context. Instead, it speaks to the interconnected economies of the Ottoman and Spanish Empires, South Asia, and Safavid Iran - all of which restructured their labour forces to mine silver or to produce goods to trade for it - and how wealth was really generated.
Previously part of the Inca Empire, Bolivia's silver output drastically increased under Spanish imperial rule. With widescale extraction, harsh economic reforms, and coercive and slave labour, Potosí’s silver mines became the gossip of global imperial capitals, as imported metals flooded their markets. 'No longer workers, but the human shapes of wage-labour,' these figures reveal the overlooked connections between these newly globalised markets, the abstraction of labour rather than art, and how labour and land were reorganised to meet demand in new, capitalist modes of production.
PRESENTER: Dr. Saygin Salgirli, Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia.
ART: Painting of Silver Labourers in Potosí, Bolivia, from Translation of the History of the New World (c. 17th Century).
IMAGE: 'Mining Silver in Potosí (Bolivia)'.
SOUNDS: CLOUDWARMER.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Aisha Hussain plays out tropes of Ottoman Turks in English Orientalist theatre, in two 17th century productions of The Tragedy of Mustapha.
In 1553, the Ottoman Sultan Soleyman ordered the murder of his eldest son and heir to the throne, Prince Mustapha. Stranger than fiction, his story speaks to the crises of succession, sibling rivalries, and infanticide that marred the imperial Ottoman Court. Though set in modern day Hungary, this true story was first - and most fully - staged by the English playwrights Fulke Greville and Roger Boyle over a century later. Greville and Boyle's Turkish tragedies closed the chasm between Ottoman Muslims and English Christians, drawing on the parallel crises facing the newly restored English King Charles II. Their characters challenged the tropes of violent, lustful Turks, revealing the merits of the Ottoman Empire, and making its people and politics more relatable for contemporary English audiences. The Mustapha story offered audiences an alternative to the monolithic view of Muslim power, asking human questions around weakness, political duty, and gender parity that apply to us all.
PRESENTER: Aisha Hussain, PhD student at the University of Salford and Events Editor at Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs). Her research focusses on Ottoman Turkish Otherness, Orientalism, and crusading and anti-crusading discourses in early modern English drama.
ART: The Tragedy of Mustapha, Fulke Greville (1609) and Roger Boyle (1665).
IMAGE: 'The Tragedy of Mustapha'.
SOUNDS: MWE.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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For EMPIRE LINES’ 40th episode, Professor Craig Clunas dials in from London’s Freud Museum to tell me about curating their latest exhibition, Freud and China, and shrinking the international networks of psychoanalysis.
Smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Austria before World War II, Sigmund Freud's Chinese jade screen was amongst his most prized antiquities. Much like his chow dogs and cherry blossom trees, these modern objects were taken as historic, decorative and academic goods, exposing European ideas about Asia in the 19th century.
Practicing from the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, Freud became a global celebrity as the founder of psychoanalysis, a mental health therapy which went international during his lifetime, But how much did Freud really think about China, and how did these objects help him curate his academic environment?
Curator Craig Clunas uses this jade screen as a window into everything from Edward Said's Orientalism, the two-way flows in thought between Freud and Asia, and contemporary efforts to broaden and decolonise art history.
Freud and China runs at the Freud Museum in London until 26 June 2022.
PRESENTER: Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, and curator of Freud and China.
ART: Pierced Jade Scholar's Screen, China (19th Century).
IMAGE: 'Pierced Jade Scholar's Screen'.
SOUNDS: Bernd Burnson.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Anna Ghadar turns back against colonial archives of Native American peoples, via Fred Wilson's 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society, Mining the Museum.
Amidst precisely whittled arrowheads, and expertly crafted tools, five Cigar Store Indians in feathered bonnets stand dressed for battle. But beyond confrontation, they turn away from their viewers, engaging in conversation with portraits of modern Native American individuals instead. These figures comprise some of 100 objects in Mining the Museum, artist Fred Wilson's 1992 exhibition at Baltimore’s Maryland Historical Society. Established as one of England's thirteen colonies in 1632, the state has struggled with a fraught narrative which prioritises post-settler narratives, and others pre-contact, Native, and non-white histories. Redressing their absence in the archive, these objects reveal how European settlers relied on Native peoples as educators, leaders, and guiders, turning their backs against outdated visions of the past. Understanding the exhibition itself as the artwork, Mining the Museum also pushes the boundaries of contemporary curation, and speaks to modern legacies of colonialism in Baltimore's racial and environmental politics today.
PRESENTER: Anna Ghadar, History of Art and Visual Culture MSt graduate from Lady Margaret Hall College, University of Oxford. She is an art historian and contemporary arts administrator in New York.
ART: Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson (1992-1993).
IMAGE: 'Portraits of Cigar Store Owners'.
SOUNDS: Ketsa.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi fires up legacies of British colonialism in contemporary American consumption, through Johnson Brothers' Old Britain Castles Ceramic Plate, produced from 1930.
Manufactured for export to America, Old Britain Castles promised to connect consumers with their 18th century colonial origins. Produced by the British firm Johnson Brothers from 1930, designers used engravings of Blarney Castle in Ireland to target new immigrants, capitalising on class dynamics after the American Revolution. Miscalculated marketing strategies may have backfired, but the pattern remained in production for 84 years. Antiquated by design, these imagined heirlooms challenge the idea of the 'Roaring Twenties', revealing how many Americans longed to return to a time of perceived tradition, stability, and values. With their combination of fine art and function, they also speak to the neoimperial business practices of Staffordshire's Wedgwood pottery ever since.
PRESENTER: Dr. Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is the author of The Material Culture of Tableware: Staffordshire Pottery and American Values.
ART: Old Britain Castles Ceramic Plate, Johnson Brothers (1930).
IMAGE: 'Blarney Castle in 1792, Johnson Bros'.
SOUNDS: sawsquarenoise.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Tim Murray smashes imperial stereotypes of Asia through tastes and trades, in a 19th century Standard Willow Ceramic Plate from Josiah Spode's Staffordshire pottery.
Adorning dinner tables across the world, Josiah Spode's Chinese-inspired ‘Standard Willow’ rapidly became the world's most popular ceramic pattern. Produced in Staffordshire from 1790, its blue-and-white pines and pagodas speak to Asia's ascendant economic and cultural status - and imperial European efforts to imitate and overtake China in the 19th century. Excavated from former settler societies as far as Australia, such tea sets are testament to the mutual expansion of the British Empire and the global ceramics market, connecting colonial territories with cultural tastes through new trading tactics, and aggressively advertised chinoiserie.
Digging into the rise of mass-produced pottery unearths how European potteries came to provide the global standard and entry-point for England’s rapidly expanding consumer classes, subverting our contemporary stereotypes around low quality, mass-produced Chinese goods. But this particular porcelain also reveals the hairline cracks in imperial control in Asia, and Europe's fragile competitive edge in modern markets.
PRESENTER: Dr. Tim Murray, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at La Trobe University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
ART: Standard Willow Ceramic Plate, Josiah Spode (1800-1820).
IMAGE: 'Standard Willow Ceramic Plate'.
SOUNDS: Christian H. Soetemann.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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A. A. Bastian navigates the commercial and Christian aspirations of Euro-American trading empires in 19th century Asia, through a Water Splotch from the Bay of Bengal in Levi Savage's ship diary.
Hugging India's glistening Bay of Bengal, Euro-American ships like the Monsoon and Fire Queen carried goods and peoples to and from Calcutta, the meeting point of the British and Mughal empires. An emblem of the unique, long-distance aspirations of Euro-American traders, the ship speaks to the uneven distribution of knowledge and benefits in global supply chains. But a water-stained diary kept by one of the Monsoon's passengers, the American Mormon Levi Savage, reveals how such economic and religious missions were not all smooth sailing. Navigating these storms challenges the typical paths of European empires, exposing Asian traders’ power to attract and indirectly incentivise the construction of a European delivery network - their failure to fully foresee their rising racism and greed - and the very movements of empire.
PRESENTER: A.A. Bastian, author of 'The Other Bayonet: A New Source to Frame the Second Anglo-Burmese War' in the Journal of Burma Studies. She is a regular reviewer at the Washington Independent Review of Books.
ART: Water Splotch from the Bay of Bengal, Ship Diary of Levi Savage (1852-1853).
IMAGE: ‘Savage, Levi vol. 1, 1852'.
SOUNDS: Virlyn.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Mona Narain reimagines Britain through the eyes of the colonial Indian subject, via Elizabeth Hamilton's 1796 novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.
Following the adventures of the fictional Indian Rajah Zāārmilla in London, Elizabeth Hamilton's Letters upends stereotypical narratives of the imagined east. Staged in a series of letters, her novel refocusses 18th century Britain through the eyes of the colonised, comparing cultures and challenges the Indian aristocrat's initial adoration of imperial Britain. From the 'benevolent' British East India Company to the Orientalist scholars of the Asiatic Society, Letters embodies Britain's bids to justify their presence in India, but also the public's ambivalence towards colonisation. Using Zāārmilla's outsider perspective, Hamilton scathingly satirises social ills closer to home, speaking to her own marginalisation as an Irish-Scottish, woman writer.
PRESENTER: Dr. Mona Narain, professor of English at Texas Christian University and Scholarship Editor at ABO Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. She is a Consultant Chair on American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Women's Caucus, and co-edits the Bucknell University Press Transits book series.
ART: Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Elizabeth Hamilton (1796).
IMAGE: 'Translation of the letters of a Hindoo Rajah'.
SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Desmond Manderson lashes new layers atop Australia's colonial founding myths, through Gordon Bennett's 1991 painting, Possession Island.
When Captain Cook planted the Union Jack on Possession Island in 1770, Australia was entirely subsumed within the British Empire. Colonial imaginings of this moment reinforced the legal myth around terra nullius, still propagated in constitutional classes today. Gordon Bennett whip-splashes alternative histories atop the time-worn tropes, exposing the hidden witnesses to violence at Australia's coming-of-age party. Possession Island perverts our expectations of empty, untamed lands, and collapses the strict divisions between aboriginal, colonial, and post-colonial art. Showing at the Tate Modern's 'A Year in Art: Australia 1992', the painting also challenges colonisation in the canon - from contemporary Australian artists like McCubbin, through to Jackson Pollock's American modernism.
Part of EMPIRE LINES' Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992. Listen to the other episodes with Jeremy Eccles.
PRESENTER: Dr. Desmond Manderson, Professor and Director of the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities at Australian National University. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
ART: Possession Island (Abstraction), Gordon Bennett (1991).
IMAGE: 'Possession Island/(Abstraction)'.
SOUNDS: New Weird Australia.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Jeremy Eccles etches out the colonial and continued denial of discrimination against Australia's Indigenous communities, through Judy Watson's 2005 series, a preponderance of aboriginal blood.
Sixteen black and white documents from the Queensland State Archives, dating back to 1866, map out Australia's discriminatory race-based system of citizenship rights. Now splattered with blood red ink by the artist Judy Watson, they stand central in the Tate Modern's latest show, 'A Year in Art: Australia 1992'. This little recognised year in Australian history witnessed the landmark Mabo Decision, in which the Indigenous Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo legally asserted his peoples' pre-colonial rights to their land. As a 'city Aboriginal', Watson's blood-stained book speaks to Britain's unique colonial aspirations for 'White Australia', the oft-silenced violence behind terra nullius, and the ongoing battle for social and historical inclusion still faced by Indigenous Australians.
Part of EMPIRE LINES' Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Desmond Manderson.
PRESENTER: Jeremy Eccles, editor of the Aboriginal Art Directory in Australia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and a member of the International Association of Art Critics.
ART: a preponderance of aboriginal blood, Judy Watson (2005).
IMAGE: 'a preponderance of aboriginal blood'.
SOUNDS: New Weird Australia.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
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Dr. Lily Filson reroutes religious loot through the 6th and 8th centuries, via the Teak Column of al-Qalis, produced in Yemen, and plundered for Saudi Arabia.
A tall wooden column towers over pilgrims to the heart of the Islamic faith in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Installed around the 8th century as Islamic pious plunder, it is one the last surviving remnants of the Christian church al-Qalis, erected in Sana’a, Yemen over a century beforehand. Revealing unique religious motifs, mosaics, and materials from Yemen, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it stands as a silent witness to centuries of conquest and cultural exchange between the Christian Byzantine and Aksumite, and emergent Islamic empires. But as Saudi Arabia's campaign of aerial bombardment continues to destroy Yemen today, its tales of tolerance make a loud call to rescue the region and its historical records, before they are forever lost.
PRESENTER: Dr. Lily Filson, Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
ART: Teak Column of al-Qalis, Mecca (6th Century).
IMAGE: ‘Teak Column'.
SOUNDS: Traditional Music Channel.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Tessa Murphy retouches European renderings of colonial Caribbean commerce in the 18th century, through Agostino Brunias' oil painting, Linen Market, Dominica.
Painted around 1780, Linen Market, Dominica depicts a Caribbean port town teeming with commerce. Great ships and local Kalinago canoes straddle the coastline, as people of all races and classes and barter for carrots, calabashes, and callaloo, the new global goods of imperial exchange. Italian artist Agostino Brunias' bustling waterfront conveys the convergence of cultures in Britain's so-called Ceded Islands, acquired from France following its success in the Seven Years War. Brunias' image of abundance depicts the extraordinary and everyday exchanges of empire for Western consumption. glossing over the realities of slavery, social hierarchy, and interconnected Caribbean colonies. The artist's paintings and own biography still hint at the island's intertwined indigenous and imperial, colonial and Creole histories.
PRESENTER: Dr. Tessa Murphy, Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her latest book is The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean.
ART: Linen Market, Dominica, Agostino Brunias (c. 1780).
IMAGE: 'Linen Market, Dominica'.
SOUNDS: Toybox.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
For EMPIRE LINES’ 30th episode, we’re heading offline and out into the museum space - to SOAS’ Brunei Gallery, in London. Richard Gray is co-curator of their latest exhibition, Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution.
Cashew nuts are a paradoxical symbol in Mozambique. Brought over from Brazil by 16th century Portuguese colonists, they were used to attract - and commit - Mozambican peasant farmers to compulsory cultivation. Yet they became a national icon for post-colonial Mozambique, peppering propaganda imagery from its independence in June 1975. Associated with abundance, Mozambique produced and processed over half the world’s cashew supply, which remained the state's greatest export until the 1980s.
Kept illiterate under Portuguese rule, Mozambique's masses were mobilised using vivid visual art. The Frelimo government celebrated the industry's revival with colourful posters, symbolising the post-colonial promises of plenty, socialist internationalism, and a new humanity. But beyond propaganda, these posters reveal how artist collectives appropriated communist and capitalist graphic design, including comics, creating a movement which threatened those who sought to destabilise Mozambique from the inside out, like South Africa and Zimbabwe. Set amongst the sounds of Nampula province, co-curator Richard Gray traces the colonial history of the cashew nut to the neoimperial practices of international financial institutions today.
Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution runs at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, London until 11 December 2021. Find out more about the exhibition online, read the catalogue of interviews with the surviving artists, and attend SOAS School of Arts' special seminar on 11 December 2021.
PRESENTER: Richard Gray, postgraduate research student at SOAS University of London. He is the co-curator of Our Sophisticated Weapon and formerly a 'cooperante internacionalista' (internationalist co-worker), contracted as a teacher by the Mozambican government in the late 1970s.
ART: Let Us Harvest All The Cashew Nuts, To Harvest The Nuts Is To Develop Mozambique, Alexandre Milhafre (c. 1979).
SOUNDS: TRKZ.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
*CORRECTION: The war with Renamo caused around one million civilian deaths and displaced five million throughout Mozambique. Around one million were likely displaced from Nampula province, from where many went to Malawi.
Dr. David Damrosch intertwines imperial expectations in 18th century Europe with Middle Eastern realities, in Antoine Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuit, or The Thousand and One Nights.
Filled with flying carpets and trapped genies, the tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Scheherazade might seem little more than bedtime stories. But the tales of The Thousand and One Nights iwere born out of the real experiences of 8th century Middle Eastern empires, evolving at the crossroads of Sassanid Persia, Abbasid Baghdad, and Ottoman Cairo and Damascus. Published in 18th century Paris, Galland's epochal French edition brought the tales beyond the Arabian peninsula, adding Aladdin and Ali Baba to his Syrian source manuscript, and transforming the tales into a work of world literature. A thousand years on, it too was informed by the imperial dynamics of the aging Ottoman Empire, the young French empire of Louis XIV and Napoleon, and their mutual rival, the Holy Roman Empire of the Austrian Habsburgs. Galland's edition is embedded with the turquoiserie and territorial ambitions of 18th century Europe. But retelling the tale of the tales reveals their subversive potential, seized upon by souk storytellers, European orientalists, and contemporary Arabic novelists alike.
PRESENTER: Dr. David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and founder of the Institute for World Literature. He is the author of Around the World in 80 Books, published by Pelican Books in November 2021.
ART: Fifth Edition of Les Mille et Une Nuit (The Thousand and One Nights), Antoine Galland (1729).
IMAGE: 'Frontispiece and Title Page of Les Mille et Une Nuit'.
SOUNDS: Lobo Loco.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Dorothy Armstrong untangles British efforts to redefine colonial Indian culture, through a 19th century knotted pile carpet woven in Lahore Central Jail.
Produced with the low-cost labour of Indian prisoners, jail carpets were big business in the British Empire. Beyond physical coercion, imperial authorities also trapped India in their vision of 'authentic' oriental aesthetics, privileging Persian patterns and Parisian market demands over traditional Mughal methods. This particular carpet was one of a pair, purchased at the 1881 Punjab Exhibition for what would become the V&A Museum. Riding the history of both carpets - one surviving, and missing - into mass manufacture reveals how South Kensington intervened in the crafts of the colonised, centralising control and defining expectations both in India and at home, then and now.
PRESENTER: Dr. Dorothy Armstrong, May Beattie Visiting Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. She was previously a lecturer and tutor in Material Histories of Asia for the V&A/Royal College of Art History of Design Programme.
ART: Knotted Pile Carpet, Lahore Central Jail (c. 1880).
IMAGE: 'Carpet with woollen pile, palmette and leaf designs on a black ground with a red ground border, woven in Lahore Jail, c.1880'.
SOUNDS: V&A.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Jessica Albrecht busts the founding myths of 19th century Buddhist revivalism, through a Statue of Colonel Henry Steel Olcott at Fort Railway Station in Sri Lanka, the former British colony of Ceylon.
Known as the 'White Buddhist', US Colonel Henry Steel Olcott is celebrated for sparking Sri Lanka's Buddhist revival movement in 1880s. Golden statues scatter across the island in tribute to the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, the source of religious and educational reform and resistance to British colonial rule in Ceylon.
But these statues also pose complex post-colonial questions, like whether Olcott's book, The Buddhist Catechism, was anything but 'Protestant Buddhism', or his schools simply new institutions of external control. Instead of pulling Olcott down, his statues invite us to figure out those silenced in the archives, whether the non-white Buddhists of the Panadura Debate, or the women behind Ceylon's girls schools - without whom Olcott would not have the same standing today.
PRESENTER: Jessica Albrecht, PhD student at the University of Heidelberg and editor at EnGender Journal. She focusses on the colonial entanglements of feminism and religion.
ART: 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s).
IMAGE: 'Statue of HSO in front of Main Railroad Station in Colombo, Sri Lanka'.
SOUNDS: Kala Ketha.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Robert Larson replays the sounds of activism against apartheid and American neo-imperial hegemony, through Artists United Against Apartheid's 1985 song, Sun City.
Field recordings from South Africa's anti-segregation protests open Sun City, a single, album, and music video released in October 1985. Miles Davies, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Run DMC joined fifty Artists United Against Apartheid, a multicultural collective who boycotted performing in the racialised regime. Striking its Sun City casino complex, where capitalistic excess comingled alongside extreme poverty, these artists targeted the homeland seizures at apartheid's core. Their lyrics shine light on how apartheid accelerated British and Dutch colonial methods, and relied upon the United States' neo-imperial international hegemony. Yet Sun City's uniquely anti-West critique also speaks to American understandings of racial solidarity, questioning the role of Western musicians as political activists, fundraisers, and historians of Africa.
PRESENTER: Dr. Robert Larson, independent historian and knowledge producer. He received his PhD in history from the Ohio State University in 2019, specialising in the anti-apartheid movement.
ART: Sun City, Artists United Against Apartheid (1985),
IMAGE: 'Coretta Scott King, Little Steven, Julian Bond, and Vernell Johnson (Manhattan Records) at a press conference hosted by Mayor Andrew Young in Atlanta'.
SOUNDS: Artists United Against Apartheid.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Juan Luis Burke reorders urban spaces in colonial Mesoamerica, through Cristóbal de Villalpando's 1695 painting, View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City.
The Plaza Mayor sits at the historical heart of the sprawling megalopolis of Mexico City. Previously the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, it became the Mesoamerican capital of the Spanish Empire in the 16th century. With his expansive, bird’s eye view, Cristóbal de Villalpando depicts everyday encounters between classes and clashes against the colonial urban order for the viceroyalty's eye. Now housed in England, this colonial commission shows the Plaza as a marketplace of imperial ideas, revealing co-option and cooperation between indigenous Mexicans, Asian merchants, and European and Spanish colonisers. Five hundred years after the fall of the ancient Aztec imperial capital, Tenochtitlán, the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City remains a site of protest today.
PRESENTER: Dr. Juan Luis Burke, Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the University of Maryland.
ART: View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, Cristóbal de Villalpando, (c.1695).
IMAGE: ‘View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City'.
SOUNDS: Victrola.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Deniz Karakaş follows the flows of water pipeline politics in the Ottoman Empire, through Mimar Sinan's 16th century Uzun Kemer Ottoman Aqueduct Bridge.
On the outskirts of Istanbul, the ruins of the Uzun Kemer Aqueduct symbolise the superhuman strength of modern Ottoman engineering. Yet, constructed on the foundations of old Constantinople, with methods drawn from the Roman and Byzantine Empires, these grand architectures really make visible the everyday actors of empire. Drawn from Serbia, Albania, Greece, and Armenia, the hired hands of suyolcu (water conduit experts) and lağımcı (diggers) were crucial in the transfer of knowledge, their skills often redirected for the imperial mines or military. Beyond the shallows, the pipeline politics of water supply reveals how power flowed within empires, exposing the Ottomans on - or under - the ground.
PRESENTER: Dr. Deniz Karakaş, visiting scholar in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University.
ART: Uzun Kemer Ottoman Aqueduct Bridge, Mimar Sinan (c. 1560s).
IMAGE: ‘The Aqueduct of Uzun Kemer near Belgrade Forest'.
SOUNDS: Daniel Birch.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
For the construction history of the Canal du Midi, see Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil sounds out stories of migration between post-colonial Kerala and the Arab Gulf from the 1960s, through S. A. Jameel's Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song).
'For the perusal of my most respected dear husband, your wife says with much love, assalaam'. Dubai Kathu Pattu is a letter song to a migrant labourer in the Arab Gulf, from his wife at home in India. By the late 1970s, 200,000 such migrants had left behind the post-colonial scarcities in Kerala, seeking cash from the crude oil industries of the Gulf. Jameel's ode obeys the strict formula of the Mappila tradition. Yet it speaks to Asia's 'cassette revolution', a time of transformation where tapes, telephones, and informal migrant networks challenged state-dominated cultural and gendered norms.
PRESENTER: Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, assistant professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, India.
ART: Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song) // S. A. Jameel (1977).
IMAGE: ‘Keralan Migrant Listening to Tapes, 1980s'.
SOUNDS: S. Ambili.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Manuela Gressani checks out the Asian cultural and intellectual roots of gameplay, through an Indian Elephant Chess Piece from the late 17th to early 18th century.
Chaturanga was first played in 6th century India, a tabletop testing ground for court politicians' imperial tactics. Successive conquests carried the game across continents, leaving distinctly Persian and Chinese imprints, before arriving in Europe as chess. Adapted for local tastes and hierarchies, ivory was swapped with stone and jade, and elephants for bishops and castles. Still, shrunk down to the size of a tabletop board, the Indian Raja, the Persian Shah, the Chinese General, and the European King and Queen, all possessed the same agency as in their respective settings.
Picking up these pieces challenges our tendency to associate chess with western intellect and popularity, exposing the layers of European imperialist and orientalist bias that blur our understanding of Asian histories. Beyond a simple game, chessboards, pieces, and rules, are historically socially significant symbols, revealing the complexities of pre-modern global interactions outwith Europe - and the great debt we owe them.
You can also read Manuela's full article on the Indian Elephant Chess Piece in Things That Talk, a project exploring humanities through the life of objects.
PRESENTER: Manuela Gressani, History of Art MA graduate from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in the art of the Safavid Empire in the 15th and 16th century.
ART: Indian Elephant Chess Piece (c. 17th-18th Century).
IMAGE: ‘Chess Piece, Bishop'.
SOUNDS: Karpov not Kasparov.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Lou Roper explores the uncharted history of enslaved Africans in England's 17th century colonies, via Philip Lea and John Seller's A New Map of the Island of Barbados.
In 1686, Lea and Sellers meticulously mapped the tooth-shaped Caribbean island of Barbados, England's central and wealthiest colony. Great detail was given to ‘every parish, plantation, watermill, windmill, and cattlemill…with the name of the present possessor’. Yet they wholly excluded the island’s most important element - the population of enslaved people of African descent. Peeling back the layers of the New Map uncovers how England's early empire was a private enterprise, with contemporary echoes down to Conservative MP Richard Drax. It also reveals how England's colonies were interdependent and detached from metropolitan involvement by design - and why seemingly distinct, competitive empires often overlapped and fuelled each other.
PRESENTER: Dr. Lou Roper, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York. He is the co-General Editor of The Journal of Early American History.
ART: A New Map of the Island of Barbados, Philip Lea and John Seller (1686).
IMAGE: ‘A new map of the Island of Barbadoes'.
SOUNDS: Tuk Band.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Sonia Ocaña Ruiz illuminates New Spain at the continental crossroads of colonialism, Catholicism, and Japanese culture from the 16th century, through a Mexican Enconchado of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Mexico City was beating heart of the Spanish Empire in the 16th century, connecting the continents of Asia and the Americas. Exclusively produced in 'New Spain', mother-of-pearl paintings, or enconchados, embody the artistic and religious standards imposed by imperial Europe. But their shimmering façades also reveal how cross-continental flows of goods and peoples informed a uniquely New Spanish cultural identity - perhaps none more so than Japanese lacquers. Few enconchados still survive today. This vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe is a rare final testament to how Mexican and Asian artists received and resisted European cultural hegemony, and how colonial territories were often more cosmopolitan than their imperial cores.
PRESENTER: Dr. Sonia Ocaña Ruiz, professor of history at Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco. She is a member of Japón y España: Relaciones a Través del Arte.
ART: Mexican Enconchado of the Virgin of Guadalupe (c. 1700s).
IMAGE: ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe'.
SOUNDS: Manuel de Sumaya.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Patrícia Martins Marcos maps out Portugal’s designs for imperial civilisation in the 18th century, through Carlos Julião’s Four Ports Panorama.
From urban slaves to street peddlers, the Four Ports Panorama charts the diverse peoples of the Portuguese Empire on a universal path to civilisation, via clothing and Catholicism. Administrators and military men like Carlos Julião used the visual language of mapping to enforce assimilation within an exclusive Portuguese identity. But such maps reflect their makers’ selective sight, revealing how Portugal really occupied a precarious, peripheral position by the 1780s. The Four Ports Panorama exposes the faulty design at empire’s core - that abstract ambitions could only ever be concretised in violence and resistance.
PRESENTER: Patrícia Martins Marcos, doctoral candidate in History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, Visiting Scholar at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Associate Editor at the History of Anthropology Review. She specialises in the history of race, medicine, and visual culture in Portuguese colonialism.
ART: Four Ports Panorama, Carlos Julião (c. 1780s).
IMAGE: ‘Four Ports Panorama’.
SOUNDS: Stealing Orchestra and Rafael Dionísio.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Mallika Leuzinger pictures post-colonial Indian perspectives, through Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy’s European photographs published in the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1959 and 1960.
In 1959, the Indian twin sisters Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy embarked on a six month tour across London, Paris, and Geneva. Keen amateur photographers, and members of the transnational United Provinces Photographic Association, they arrived with their cameras slung over their saris, pointed to capture new places, people, and perceptions for audiences back home. Reversing the dynamics of colonial subjectivity, their street photographs reframed what it meant to photograph and be photographed for pre and post-independence India. But they also exposed the enduring connections of these metropoles and former colonies, revealing how class and colonialism determined domestic expectations of Europe, and left them surprised and disappointed by the realities they viewed through their lenses.
PRESENTER: Dr Mallika Leuzinger, Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University, and Visiting Researcher in Gender and Media Studies for the South Asian Region at Humboldt University, Berlin.
ART: European Photographs in the Illustrated Weekly of India, Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy (1959-1960).
IMAGE: ‘A Negro Orator in Hyde Park’, Manobina Roy (c. 1960).
SOUNDS: Les Cartes Postales Sonores.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Talinn Grigor sets light to the interimperial identities in 19th century Parsi architecture, through the Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple, Bombay.
Building Bombay was at the forefront of the religious, philanthropic, and political agenda of the Parsis, India’s Persian Zoroastrian ethnoreligious minority. Thousands of buildings like the Vatcha Adaran were commissioned in the ‘Persian Revival’, as the Parsis portrayed themselves as heirs of the ancient Persian Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires. But wealthy patrons also drew from European Gothic Revivalism to solidify their privileged position in the contemporary British Raj. Both foundational and forward-facing, the Vatcha Adaran’s architectural ambivalence reflects the Parsis’ efforts to interpret these particular - often conflicting - interimperial identities.
PRESENTER: Dr. Talinn Grigor, Professor and Chair of the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis. She specialises in 19-20th century art and architectural histories of Iran and Parsi India, through the framework of post-colonial and critical theories. She is the author of The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture, published in July 2021.
ART: Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple, Bombay (1881).
IMAGE: ‘Bai Pirojbai Dadabhoy Maneckji Vatcha Agiary 1881’.
SOUNDS: Pedram Khavarzamini.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Aleksandra Stamenkovic constructs the struggle to unify post-imperial South Slavic identities, through Josip Seissel’s Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937.
The collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the First World War birthed a new European state – the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. National pavilions at international exhibitions, or Expos, became vital platforms to project the state’s internal unity and external strength on the global stage. Yugoslavia’s prize-winning pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937 fused contemporary European and classical aesthetics, projecting a progressively modern culture steeped in diverse, Slavic histories. But it was also an identity-construction site, exposing elites’ struggle to create a new, unified, post-imperial identity.
PRESENTER: Dr. Aleksandra Stamenkovic, Belgrade-based art historian and independent researcher. She specialises in contemporary Serbian and European architectural history.
ART: Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo, Josip Seissel (1937).
IMAGE: ‘International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life, Yugoslavia Pavilion’.
SOUNDS: Paniks.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Dr. Alison Miller depicts the domestic and feminine faces of 19th century Japanese imperialism, in Kobayashi Kiyochika’s Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital (in Hiroshima).
The public-facing imperial family was a modern invention to Meiji Japan (1868-1912). Paparazzid in popular woodblock prints, Empress Shōken appeared in battlefields and blossom groves, symbolising Japan’s shifting political landscape. But beyond propaganda, Illustration of the Empress hints at the interplay between printers, publishers, and popular markets, revealing how the public invested and participated in the national, imperial project. Challenging our masculine and overseas stereotypes, this print unveils how different Japanese women constructed the scaffolding of empire on the home front and with soft power.
PRESENTER: Dr. Alison J. Miller, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She specialises in modern and contemporary Japanese art history, with a focus on representations of gender, women, and the imperial family.
ART: Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital (in Hiroshima), Kobayashi Kiyochika (1895).
IMAGE: ‘Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital [in Hiroshima] (Yasen byōin gyōkō no zu)’.
SOUNDS: Difondo.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Retrospect Journal is joined by Audio Producer Jelena Sofronijevic to unpack their ongoing series, EMPIRE LINES.
EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way flows of Empires through art. From the radical anti-capitalist cartoons of 1920s Southern Africa, to Eastern-inspired azulejos in seventeenth-century Portugal, interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith ‘Empire’.
But what are the ideas underlying EMPIRE LINES? And how do you go about podcasting the past? In this live event, Jelena offers a behind-the-scenes look at the series, along with some of the podcast’s most prolific presenters.
Listening to Empire: Making Podcasts with Producer Jelena Sofronijevic was held and recorded on Thursday 8 April 2021. You can read the full interview on Retrospect Journal.
PRESENTER: Jamie Gemmell, Editor-In-Chief of Retrospect Journal, the University of Edinburgh’s student-led History, Classics, and Archaeology journal. You can find Retrospect on Twitter (@retrospecthca), Facebook and Instagram (@retrospectjournal).
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Historian Gérard Besson uncovers the colonial foundations of Caribbean cosmopolitanism, through the Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), in Trinidad.
Seven magnificent buildings, each unique in design and craftsmanship, overlook Trinidad’s annual Caribbean Carnival along the Queen’s Park Savannah. Amongst them, a Moorish-inspired Corsican manor, a Scottish castle, a New England country house, an Archbishop’s Romanesque palace, and a French colonial complex stand side-by-side. Designed by European architects in the final days of the Trinidad Raj, and built with local materials and labour, the Magnificent Seven were yet the shared spoils of the island’s new cocoa economy. Their extravagance visually reflects Trinidad as the most cosmopolitan – though undervoiced – experiment in British colonialism.
PRESENTER: Gérard Besson, Trinidad-based historian, fiction writer, and author of the ‘Caribbean History Archives’. He is the Chairman and Publisher of Paria Publishing Company Limited, which has produced over 160 titles on the history and culture of Trinidad and Tobago. He holds a Lifetime Achiever Heritage Preservation Award from the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago, and an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies.
ART: The Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), Trinidad (c. 1902-1910).
IMAGE: ‘Killarney (Stollmeyer’s Castle)’.
SOUNDS: Nick Barrett.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
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Dr. Glaire Anderson traces artistic and intellectual interpretations of sovereignty within Islam, through two 10th century bronzes bearing the inscription, al-mulk.
Bronzes bearing the Arabic word for sovereignty, al-mulk, were popular luxuries traded across the medieval Islamic territories. But these two objects - a large basin, and a small bowl – were both discovered far from home at opposite ends of Eurasia, in Inner Mongolia, and southern Spain. Remote yet related, they reveal how cultural hegemony wrestled with adaptation, religion with secularism, and tradition with modernity, exposing a period of transhemispheric modernisation.
PRESENTER: Dr. Glaire Anderson, senior lecturer in Islamic Art and founder of the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections at the University of Edinburgh.
ART: Two Islamic Bronzes with Al-Mulk Inscription (c. 10th Century).
IMAGE: ‘Metalware Bowl (probably High-Tin Bronze) with Al-Mulk Epigraphy’.
SOUNDS: Sherita.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Art critic Laura Gascoigne portrays the connections between British colonial and cultural opportunism, through George Chinnery’s 1840s Self-Portrait, of the Artist in Macau.
George Chinnery (1774-1852) was no oil painting. Escaping piling debts and parental duties, he pursued lucrative portrait markets in India and on the China coast. The Bengali and Macanese landscapes tucked within his final self-portrait hint at his remarkably transnational tale. But beneath Chinnery’s mischievous surface lie the less picturesque realities - of opium, orientalism, and overt exploitation of local populations. As British colonialism offered opportunities to those couldn't make it at home, so too did it often depend on such adventurers and rejects for its very survival.
PRESENTER: Laura Gascoigne, art critic and commentator, and member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
ART: Self-Portrait of the Artist in Macau, George Chinnery (c. 1844).
IMAGE: ‘George Chinnery’.
SOUNDS: Albert Glasser.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Angus Lockyer detonates bids to define imperial Japan’s historical and artistic identities, through Niiro Chunosuke’s 1930s replica of the Kudara Kannon.
6000 miles from home, in the British Museum, stands one of two replicas of a Japanese national treasure. But most visitors pass her by, in search of samurai armour, elegant pottery, and woodblock prints. Though carved in Japan, the original and replicas of the Kudara Kannon tell us much about the archipelago's relationship with the Asian continent and the wider world. Used over the centuries to cement power and identity, the Kudara Kannon shows us how even the proudest empires depend on ideas from elsewhere.
PRESENTER: Dr. Angus Lockyer, Visiting Scholar in the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He formerly taught Japanese, East Asian, and global history at SOAS University of London (2004-2019), and was a Co-Investigator in the SOAS-British Museum research project, Late Hokusai: Thought, Technique, Society.
ART: Replica of the Kudara Kannon, Niiro Chunosuke (1931-1932).
IMAGE: ‘Replica of Bodhisattva Kudara Kwannon figure, made of painted wood’.
SOUNDS: Pauline Oliveros, Miya Masaoka.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Ben Reiss exposes Britain’s colonial gaze, contrasting Edward Atkinson Hornel’s photography and painting, Ceylonese Tea Pickers.
Edward Atkinson (E.A.) Hornel’s Ceylonese Tea Pickers boldly depicts Tamil women working in their ‘natural’ Sri Lankan landscape. But looking at the painting through the lens of Hornel’s original study photographs exposes the distance between the artist’s fantasies and reality. Stitching together different shots, subjects, and sitters, Ceylonese Tea Pickers reflects the colonial mindset of an artist working at the height of the British Empire, with networks across Australia, Glasgow, and numerous colonies.
PRESENTER: Ben Reiss, Morton Photography Project Curator at the National Trust for Scotland, and co-curator of E. A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas.
ART: Ceylonese Tea Pickers, Edward Atkinson Hornel (c. 1907).
IMAGE: ‘Ceylonese Tea Pickers’.
SOUNDS: Trills.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
Read Jelena’s review of E.A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas, showing at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh until 14 March 2021: edinburghmuseums.org.uk/stories/review-ea-hornel-camera-canvas
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Dr. Céline Ventura Teixeira shines light on the fusion of Eastern motifs and European iconography, in a set of azulejos – or decorative tiles - produced for a church altar in 17th century imperial Portugal.
Azulejos – or decorative tiles – were the crowning glory of Portugal’s church altars. Known as ‘ceramic carpets’, they borrowed motifs from Indo-Persian and Oriental textiles, which flooded Lisbon’s markets with the expansion of the Portuguese Empire. More than mere mimics, the Portuguese tile-makers reinterpreted these symbols in line with existing European religious traditions. From pagodas to the camellia Japonica, these tiles fuse Oriental ornaments and European iconography, revealing a global network of associations.
PRESENTER: Dr. Céline Ventura Teixeira, associate professor of Modern Art History at Aix-Marseille Université.
ART: Frontal of a Three-Section Altar, Carmelite Convent in the Coimbra Region (17th Century).
IMAGE: ‘Frontal of a Three-Section Altar’.
SOUNDS: TRG Banks.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Paulina Banas unravels the purported Persian roots of 17th century Polish identities, through the Czartoryski Polonaise Carpet.
Imported from the Safavid Persian Empire, Polonaise carpets were highly prized across the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – so much so that they were often mistaken as Polish-made. But beyond symbols of wealth, these textiles served a particular purpose for the Polish upper-classes, who looked East to consolidate their domestic rule. Weaving together Persian patterns with a Polish coat of arms, the Czartoryski Carpet challenges theories of exotic consumption, exposing transimperial textiles and identities.
PRESENTER: Dr. Paulina Banas, post-doctoral fellow and faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
ART: The Czartoryski Polonaise Carpet (17th Century).
IMAGE: ‘The Czartoryski Carpet, 17th Century’.
SOUNDS: Metastaz.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Henry Dee uncovers the global footprint of radical black activism in 1920s South Africa, through the cartoons of James Christie Scott.
James Christie Scott’s cartoons illuminate black experiences of 1920s colonial capitalism. Commissioned by South Africa’s first major black trade union, his works subvert contemporary ideas of race, and imagine transformative moments of emancipation. ‘Scotty’ is best known today for his towering Black Samson mural. But arguably, his miniatures - his striking cartoons for the widely circulated The Workers’ Herald – had an even bigger global impact.
PRESENTER: Dr. Henry Dee, post-doctoral research fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State.
ART: Cartoons for The Workers’ Herald, James Christie Scott (1920s).
IMAGE: ‘When He Awakes’ in The Workers’ Herald (1926).
SOUNDS: Uhadi.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Akemi Luisa Herráez Vossbrink depicts relations between imperial Spain and the Americas, through Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings, The Tribes of Israel.
From Seville’s most acclaimed religious artist, Francisco de Zurbarán’s portrait series The Tribes of Israel (1640s) depicts the Old Testament patriarch Jacob and his twelve sons. The only such painting series to be found in Europe, de Zurbarán’s works inspired colonial reinterpretations in Peru and Mexico. Produced in Spain, destined for Latin America, and currently housed in the north of England, The Tribes of Israel reflect global artistic exchanges and power dynamics.
PRESENTER: Akemi Luisa Herráez Vossbrink, doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, and Meadows Museum Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow.
ART: The Tribes of Israel (Jacob and his Twelve Sons), Francisco de Zurbarán (1640s).
IMAGE: ‘Joseph, from Jacob and His Twelve Sons’.
SOUNDS: Gnawledge.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Laura Fernández-González explores the circulation of visual trends between imperial Lisbon and India, through the design for the Bengali Colcha with Triumphal Arch of the Flemish.
Numerous Indian colchas, or wall hangings, were made for the orientalist markets of imperial Portugal. But this unique Bengali Colcha depicts a triumphal arch – the same temporary arch designed and erected in Lisbon by a foreign community of Flemish merchants, to welcome the Spanish king Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) into the capital in 1619. The mesmerizing architecture, figures, and flora depicted speak of several coeval artistic traditions, spaces, empires, and cultures.
PRESENTER: Dr. Laura Fernández-González, senior lecturer in Art/Architectural History and Theory at the University of Lincoln.
ART: Bengali Colcha with Triumphal Arch of the Flemish (Mid 17th Century).
IMAGE: ‘Indian, Bengal: Wall Hanging: Triumphal Arch, Mid 17th Century’.
SOUNDS: Sultan.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Alex Bremner navigates London as the powerhouse of British technological imperialism, by looking at Electra House.
Home to the Eastern Telegraph Company, London’s Electra House became the centre of Britain’s global telecommunications empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The regulated mesh of its architecture similarly ensnared global geographies, submitting it to the whims of commercial and imperial prerogative. Electra House persists as an important artefact of corporate and technological empire, and a stark precedent for contemporary geopolitical struggles over 5G broadband.
PRESENTER: Dr. Alex Bremner, professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh.
ART: Electra House, London (1902).
IMAGE: ‘Electra House’ in Electra House: The New Home of the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies (1902).
SOUNDS: Silicon Transmitter.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Emile Chabal navigates the contemporary echoes – and explosions – of French colonialism, through Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine.
Through the dangerous escapades of the young Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, La Haine explicitly depicts life in the French banlieue (‘suburbs’, or ‘projects’) - from aggressive altercations with the police and everyday racism, to social marginality and spatial exclusion. Kassovitz shows France as a damaged, post-colonial nation, unable to fulfil its promise of liberation and integration, echoing the fundamental contradiction at the heart of French colonialism.
PRESENTER: Dr. Emile Chabal, reader in History and former director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History (2016-2020) at the University of Edinburgh.
ART: La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz (1995).
IMAGE: ‘La Haine (1995)’.
SOUNDS: Adrian Beentjes, David Cunliffe, Anthony Donovan, and Hopek Quirin.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Journalist Megan Kenyon explores imperial relations between Britain and Ireland, through George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 play, John Bull’s Other Island.
Ireland was England’s first colony, and the first colonial state to become independent from imperial rule. Yet, with its cutting depiction of Anglo-Irish relations, John Bull’s Other Island famously made the observing English King Edward VII break off the arm of his chair with laughter. George Bernard Shaw depicts Ireland on the precipice of its emergence from conventional British imperial rule, and glimpses at the new forms of commercial imperialism to come.
PRESENTER: Megan Kenyon, journalist.
ART: John Bull’s Other Island, George Bernard Shaw (1904).
IMAGE: ‘George Bernard Shaw’.
SOUNDS: Audio Library.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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Dr. Peter Clericuzio observes complex imperial hierarchies between Mali and France, through the Great Mosque(s) of Djenné.
Population 32,000, Djenné is a small city in Mali, itself one of Africa's less famous countries. Yet, the (third) Great Mosque of Djenné attracted international attention in the twentieth century, extolled as a symbol of the power and diversity of the global French Empire. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the architecture and complicated history of the Great Mosque(s) reveal the nuances of the French colonial enterprise during a stark transitional period.
PRESENTER: Dr. Peter Clericuzio, professor of architectural history and heritage at the University of Edinburgh.
ART: The Great Mosque(s) of Djenné, Mali.
IMAGE: ‘The Great Mosque of Djenné’ in L’Illustration (1911).
SOUNDS: Andrew Oliver Kora Band.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.
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