EMPIRE LINES

Conceptual photographer Hrair Sarkissian moves between Syria, Armenia, and Turkey, capturing present absences in personal and political histories in the 20th and 21st centuries.Hrair Sarkissian uses photography, installation, moving image, and sound to reflect on social issues, often silenced or obscured from view. Born and raised in Syria, the grandson of refugees of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, much of his work explores the lived experiences of intergenerational trauma, with respect to individuals and diverse diasporic communities.Sweet & Sour (2021-2022), a three-channel video installation currently on view at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, reflects on memory and storytelling. Hrair discusses the significance of the Maruta Mountain in Armenian culture, and shares images of his ancestral home of Khantsorig, a village in the Sassoun region of present-day Turkey. We also explore the role of emotion and subjectivity in his practice, contrasting his approach to series like Last Seen (2018-2021) with the more detached, extractive approaches typical of photojournalism.Hrair explains his early training at his father's photographic studio in Damascus, and the role of Armenians in the development of studio photography in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. With Sea of Trees (2025), we move between Hrair's exhibition environments to the volcanic Aokigahara forest on Mount Fuji, discussing how different cultural narratives and contexts have inspired his artistic practice. We look towards new works in production for an international art festival in Japan, and suggest of the long-term creative relationships within his own career that also connect times, places, and migrations - returning to Wolverhampton with Deathscape (2021), an audio installation for British Art Show 9 in 2021.Hrair Sarkissian: Other Pains is at Wolverhampton Art Gallery until 22 June 2025. You can hear the artist in conversation at the gallery on Saturday 14 June.Finding My Blue Sky, curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, is at Lisson Gallery in London until 26 July 2025.The Aichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, curated by Hoor Al-Qasimi, opens in Japan on 13 September 2025.For more about Mahmoud Darwish, read about Miloš Trakilović's installation 564 Tracks (Not a Love Song Is Usually a Love Song) (2024) at KW Institute in Berlin, in the New Internationalist: newint.org/art/2025/spotlight-milos-trakilovicFor more about diasporic communities in Lebanon and Syria, listen to Sara Shamma's live episode on World Civil War Portraits (2015) with Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, and the National Museum of Damascus, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6c9af892a1a8e1450c2cc4b73f226835For more about studio photography in Palestine through the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate, hear curator Rachel Dedman's EMPIRE LINES episode about an UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s)⁠: pod.link/1533637675/episode/92c34d07be80fe43a8e328705a7d80cbAnd read into the exhibition, Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery, at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Whitworth in Manchester, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/textiles-in-cambridge-palestinian-embroidery-at-kettles-yardPRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠⁠Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Billy Gerard Frank explores the deep connections between Grenada, Scotland, and England, following the life and legacies of Ottobah Cugoano in their film, Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019).This episode was recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Manthia Diawara and Sara Shamma ⁠online⁠, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: ⁠instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ⁠Billy Gerard Frank: Palimpsest is at Paxton House in Berwickshire until 31 October 2025.PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Curator Sukanya Rajaratnam and biographer Jon Ott weld together African American culture and 20th century Western/European modernism, through Richard Hunt's 1956 sculpture, Hero's Head.Born on the South Side of Chicago, sculptor Richard Hunt (1935-2023) was immersed in the city's culture, politics, and architecture. At the major exhibition, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, which travelled from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1953, he engaged with the works of artists Julio González, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși - encounters with Western/European modernism, that ‘catalysed' his use of metal, as the medium of his time and place.Hero's Head (1956), one of Richard's earliest mature works, was the first among many artistic responses dedicated to the legacy of Emmett Till. The previous year, Hunt joined over 100,000 mourners in attendance of the open-casket visitation of Till, a 14-year-old African American boy whose brutal lynching in Mississippi marked a seismic moment in national history. Modestly scaled to the dimensions of a human head, and delicately resting on a stainless-steel plinth, the welded steel sculpture preserves the image of Till's mutilated face. Composed of scrap metal parts, with dapples of burnished gold, it reflects the artist's use of found objects, and interest in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, which characterise his later works.With the first major European exhibition, and posthumous retrospective, of Richard's work at White Cube in London, curators Sukanya Rajaratnam and Jon Ott delve into the artist's prolific career. We critically discuss their diasporic engagement with cultural heritage; Richard collected over one thousand works of 'African art', referenced in sculptures like Dogonese (1985), and soon travelled to the continent for exhibitions like 10 Negro Artists from the US in Dakar, Senegal (1965). Jon details the reception of Richard's work, and engagement with the natural environment, connecting the ‘red soil' of Africa to agricultural plantations worked by Black slaves in southern America. We look at their work in a concurrent group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which retraces the presence and influence of Black artists in Paris, and considers the city as a ‘mobile site', highlighting the back-and-forth exchanges between artists, media, and movements like abstract expressionism. Shared forms are found in the works of French painters, Wangechi Mutu's Afrofuturist bronzes, and Richard's contemporaries practicing in France, Spain, Italy, and England.Plus, LeRonn P. Brooks, Curator at the Getty Research Institute, details Richard's ongoing legacies in public sculpture, and commemorations of those central to the Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Hobart Taylor Jr., and Jesse Owens.Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis is at White Cube Bermondsey in London until 29 June 2025.Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 – 2000 is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until 30 June 2025.Listen to Sylvia Snowden at White Cube Paris, in the EMPIRE LINES episode on M Street (1978-1997).Hear more about Wangechi Mutu's This second dreamer (2017), with Ekow Eshun, curator of the touring exhibition, The Time is Always Now (2024).For more about Dogonese and ‘African masks' from Mali, listen to ⁠Manthia Diawara⁠, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠.For more about ‘Negro Arts' exhibitions in Dakar, Senegal, read about Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds at the Serpentine in London.For more about Black Southern Assemblage, hear Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London, on the Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend (20th Century-Now).

In this special episode, historian Corinne Fowler joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Ingrid Pollard, linking rural British landscapes, buildings, and houses, to global histories of transatlantic slavery, through their book, Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (2024).Though integral to national identity in Britain, the countryside is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings together rural life and colonial rule, through ten country walks with various companions. These journeys combine local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. They also highlight how the British Empire transformed rural lives, whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, presenting both opportunity and exploitation.Corinne explains how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances, and dispossession in England. They highlight how these histories, usually considered separately, persist in the lives of their descendants and our landscapes today. We explore the two-way flows of colonial plant cultures, as evident in WIlliam Wordsworth's 19th century poems about daffodils, as contemporary works of literature by Chinua Achebe and Grace Nichols.Contemporary artist - and walking companion - Ingrid Pollard shares their research into ferns, seeds, and magic, across Northumberland, the Lake District, and South West England, Ingrid details histories of lacemaking in Devon and Cornwall, and we explore representations of ‘African' and Caribbean flowers in art. Bringing together Ingrid and Corinne's works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also explore their previous collaborations including the project, Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reimagined. Plus, Corinne questions ‘cancel culture' in the British media and academia, drawing on their experiences as Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online. You can pre-order the paperback, released on 1 May 2025. This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, 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, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024.The wider programme featured anti-colonial talks and workshops with exhibiting artists, writers, researchers, and gardeners, reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals, and landscapes. For more information, follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Radical Ecology⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Southcombe Barn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on social media, and visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition⁠⁠⁠⁠.Watch the full video conversation online, via Radical Ecology: https://vimeo.com/995929731And find all the links in the first Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8cyHX2I28You 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.PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Karanjit Panesar recasts stories of migrant labourers from Punjab working in British industrial foundries, exploring constructs of memory, and national myths in metal, through his film installation, Furnace Fruit (2024). Karanjit Panesar: Furnace Fruit runs at Leeds Art Gallery until 15 June 2025, the second Collections in Dialogue co-commission between Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library in London. Find more from Bradford Industrial Museum through Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture. For more about artifice and film, hear Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum at their exhibition, It Will End in Tears (2024), at the Barbican in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6e9a8b8725e8864bc4950f259ea89310 And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum-barbican For more about Ibrahim Mahama's 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives to reconstruct railway lines, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist's episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 For more about Pakistani and South Asian diasporic communities in Birmingham, and domestic labour in the Midlands and ‘Black Country', listen to artist Osman Yousefzada on Queer Feet (2023) at Charleston in Firle: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6ca95c67d24936cff9d2d478f4450cf2 And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/osman-yousefzada-at-charleston-in-firle 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 Tanoa Sasraku unearths complex relations with British landscapes and natural resources, connecting environments from the north coast of Scotland to South West England, and flagging colonial extractivism in Ghana, through their series of Terratypes (2022-Now). Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 23 February 2025. Tituba, Who Protects Us? runs at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until 1 May 2025. A major solo exhibition of Tanoa's work opens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in October 2025. For more about Invasion Ecology (2023), co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, listen to the episodes with the exhibition's artists: - Ingrid Pollard, on expanded photography, Blacknesses, and British identities, in Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4 - Hanna Tuulikki, on selkies, Scottish folklore, and performance, in Avi Alarm (2023): pod.link/1533637675/episode/21264f8343e5da35bca2b24e672a2018 You can also read about Hanna's installation, ⁠under forest cover (2021)⁠, at City Art Centre in Edinburgh: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-local And hear about Fern Leigh Albert's activist photographic practice, now on display at RAMM. - Ashish Ghadiali - whose film Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), from the series Cinematics of Gaia and Magic (2023-Now), also features at RAMM - in the episode from Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3 For more about Ibrahim Mahama's 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist's episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 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 artists Nalini Malani and Anita Dube, and curator Shanay Jhaveri, journey through two decades of cultural and political change in South Asia, from Indira Gandhi's declaration of the State of Emergency in 1975, to the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998, in the 2024 exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India. ⁠The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. ⁠Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970⁠, and the ⁠Darbar Festival⁠, ran during the exhibition in 2024. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Nalani Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood runs at Tate Modern in London through 2025. Hear more from Nalini Malani in the EMPIRE LINES episode from My Reality is Different (2022), at the Holburne Museum in Bath: pod.link/1533637675/episode/74b0d8cf8b99c15ab9c2d3a97733c8ed And hear curator Priyesh Mistry, on The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and Nalini Malani (2022), at the National Gallery in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/f62cca1703b42347ce0ade0129cedd9b You can also read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review For more about artists Bhupen Khakar, Nilima Sheikh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Arpita Singh, and Imran Qureshi, listen to curator Hammad Nasar on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009): pod.link/1533637675/episode/f6e05083a7ee933e33f15628b5f0f209 And read into the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and The Box in Plymouth, in my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/small-and-mighty-south-asian-miniature-painting-and-britain-1600-to-now-at-mk-gallery For more about Imran Qureshi, listen to artist Maha Ahmed on Where Worlds Meet (2023) at Leighton House in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/fef9477c4ce4adafc2a2dc82fbad82ab And read about the exhibition, in my article in recessed.space: recessed.space/00156-Maha-Ahmed-Leighton-House For other artists working with film and video at the Sorbonne, in Paris, listen to Nil Yalter on ⁠Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now)⁠, at Ab-Anbar Gallery during London Gallery Weekend 2023: pod.link/1533637675/episode/36b8c7d8d613b78262e54e38ac62e70f For more about the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, listen to artist Hanna Tuulikki's EMPIRE LINES episode about Avi-Alarm (2023), from Invasion Ecology: pod.link/1533637675/episode/21264f8343e5da35bca2b24e672a2018 On modernism in southern India, listen to curator Jana Manuelpillai, on The Madras College of Arts and Crafts, India (1850-Now) at the Brunei Gallery in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2885988ec7b37403681e2338c3acc104 And for more works from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art collection, read my article on Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65 at the Barbican in London in Artmag: artmag.co.uk/postwar-modern-building-out-of-the-bombsite/ PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, contemporary artist Sara Shamma paints experiences of conflict, modern slavery, and hopes for postwar reconstruction, travelling between Syria, Lebanon, and London, in their series, World Civil War Portraits (2015). *Content Warning* Syria has a ‘young' or ‘short' art history, in Western/European terms. The country's first galleries and art schools appeared in the 1960s, offering little contemporary arts education or practice. Working within - and rebelling against - these institutions, Damascus-born artist Sara Shamma taught themselves to paint ‘as an Old/Dutch Master', referencing the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens in their large-scale, expressive, portraits. In their 2023 exhibition, Bold Spirits, Sara's figurative paintings were displayed in conversation with these figures, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. And now, 25 years after graduating, the artist returns to the National Museum of Damascus with a survey spanning their personal and artistic journeys through Lebanon and the UK in the twelve years since the start of the civil war. ‘I decided to keep one or two paintings from each project, to exhibit them all in Syria when the time was right,' says Sara. ‘Now, it's time for them to come home.' In this conversation from 2023, when Sara was still living in London, the artist describes her decades of migrations between Dulwich and Damascus. Sara first left Syria for work, in 2000, with exhibitions in Britain as part of the the BP Portrait Prize, and a British Council partnership with Coventry, a city she admires as a model for postwar reconstruction. In 2016, she relocated to London on an Exceptional Talent Visa but, during this period, she continued to travel to her homeland frequently, working from her studio in the city, and engaging with wider Arab art communities. Through global exhibitions, Sara is now one of Syria's most internationally recognised artists. We touch on Syria's changing position, as part of the Ottoman Empire and a French Mandate, during the 20th century, and the permeable borders that permitted her refuge in the years of President Bashar al-Assad's violent regime. Sara describes her interest in biology, visiting butchers and mortuaries during her studies, and their ‘surrealist eye' on everyday life. We discuss her research into modern slavery, trafficking, and rape cultures, speaking with women during their time as artist-in-residence with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London (KCL). Sara explains how she translates oral testimonies and traumatic experiences through her artistic practice, and why music is her universal language, travellling from Sufi Asia, to the blues of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. This episode was recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Manthia Diawara and Billy Gerard Frank online, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ Sara Shamma: Bold Spirits ran at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 25 February 2024. Sara Shamma: Echoes of 12 Years runs at the National Museum of Damascus until 31 January 2025. 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 curator Amilcar Packer unpacks ideas of decolonisation and anti-colonialism in education, thinking through the works of Ailton Krenak, a leading activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement. Born in Santiago de Chile, and based in São Paulo, Brazil since the 1980s, artist and curator Amilcar Packer locates his life and work ‘between' the Pacific and Atlantic. An organiser and participant in Episode 11: To End The World As We Know It, five days of revolutionary art, discussions and performances at Tramway in Glasgow, run by Edinburgh-based collective, Arika, he explains the personal connections between South America and Scotland. Amilcar shares the work of Ailton Krenak, a leading anti-colonial activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement, who joins the programme along with transnational thinkers like Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Geni Núñez, and Françoise Vergès. We discuss his practice in popular culture, including literature and radio, and environmental activism, ‘one of the knots in a net' of entangled liberation movements. Drawing on these contemporary thinkers, Amilcar talks about time as a colonial, imperial, and capitalist construct. We consider the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities in different contexts, from the reclamation of the Americas as Turtle Island, to Karrabing Film Collective from Arson Bay, Darwin, Australia, and their presentation of The Ancestral Present - connecting with Ailton's 2022 book, Ancestral Futures. Challenging the monoculture of Western/European thought - and simplistic understandings of religion and spirituality, sexuality, and gender, which often lack relevance or utility with respect to indigenous worldviews.- Amilcar instead talks about cosmology. We discuss the ‘human archive' of violence and brutality, and ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Palestine, and over the definition of land rights. Amilcar shares where assimilation, making indigenous people Brazilians, has been used to ensure indigenous people lose their relations with their land, which makes it easier to dispossess. We consider whether the decolonisation of institutions like museums or universities is possible, and consider a plurality of approaches to study, learning, and education. Referencing thinkers like Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, we discuss the importance of multiplicity - of constructing and realising other ways of being with the world and each other. Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, presented by Arika, ran at Tramway in Glasgow and online through November 2024. The full programme, including the conversation with Ailton Krenak, is available online. Hear more about Françoise Vergès with Professor Paul Gilroy, recorded live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠ For more about the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities, hear artist and curator Tony Albert in the EMPIRE LINES episode about Story, Place (2023) at Frieze London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/f1c35ebd23ea579c7741305bba2e6c4e 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 Jo-Lene Ong walks through historic marketplaces across Taiwan, Paris, Devon, London, and Manchester, exchanging island mentality for more archipelagic thinking, via Steph Huang's sculptural installation, I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024). Through works combining sculpture, sound, and film, contemporary artist Steph Huang explores mass production, consumption, and waste. She often focusses on the transcultural and historical dimensions of food industries, and the implications of such markets on our natural environment. Roaming the street markets of cities in Taiwan, where she was born, and London, where she lives and works, she also draws from their vernacular architectures, and different local cultures. Steph's first exhibition at Tate Britain in London sits near the river Thames, a boat ride away from Billingsgate, the UK's largest inland fish market; and in Manchester, at its historic Market Buildings, once part of the Victorian Smithfield Fish Market. Curator Jo-Lene Ong connects sculptural works like I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024), with the Situationist International's practice of the dérive, repurposing objects collected through exploration. We situate her interest in wonder and playful approach to media with the likes of Haegue Yang, currently on view at the Hayward Gallery in London, and Rasheed Araeen, entwining the roles of cook and artist. We look at the traces of maritime trades and food industries on our everyday lives, and our relationship with ocean ecosystems, highlighting the legacies of colonialism in contemporary capitalism and climate crises. From esea contemporary's previous exhibitions of artists like Jane Jin Kaisen, Jo-Lene moves towards her particular interest in transmission, and more ‘watery ways of being' beyond borders, referencing Astrida Neimanis' hydrofeminism (2017) and looking to Sharjah Biennale 16 in 2025. We discuss ‘island travel' and ‘archipelagic thinking' as central to Steph's artistic, and Jo-Lene's curatorial, practices. Jo-Lene shares how her relationship with identity has been shaped by working in different contexts, from Malaysia, to Amsterdam, and the UK. We discuss the relative in/visibility of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) identities in these different places - histories of Indonesia and the Dutch East Indies, and Malaysia, a British colony between the 1820s and 1957 - as well as the overlaps between Hokkein and Taiwanese languages, as variants or dialects of Chinese. Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun runs at esea contemporary in Manchester until 8 December 2024. The exhibition is part of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award (MTSA)'s National Touring Programme, first exhibited at Standpoint in London in 2024. The exhibition will tour to Cross Lane Projects in Kendal in March 2025. An exhibition book of the same number launches at esea contemporary on 30 November 2024. Art Now: Steph Huang: See, See, Sea runs at Tate Britain in London until 5 January 2025. For more about archipelagos and 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 For more from esea contemporary, hear Musquiqui Chihying, a recent artist-in-residence, on Too Loud a Dust (2023) at Tabula Rasa Gallery during London Gallery Weekend in 2023: pod.link/1533637675/episode/29b9e85442a30e487d8a7905356541dd 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 Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and curator Diego Chocano, slip between places and times, reconstructing the landscape of Botswana in the centre of the city of London, through their filmic installation, It Will End in Tears (2024). Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's practice spans landscapes and media, encompassing painting, installation, and animation. Their drawings take the form of narrative landscapes, that seem simultaneously futuristic and ancient, playing with conventions of linear time. Referencing Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Pan's Labyrinth, a film by Guillermo del Toro, they often draw from literature, theatre, and sci-fi films - particularly in their slippery representations of people and places. Born in Botswana, and having worked in the US, Canada, South Africa, and the Netherlands, Pamela describes how her work has been shaped by these different contexts. They detail their transformative residency with tutor Arturo Lindsay in the rainforest in Panama, a Central American and Caribbean country on the coast, and how this inspired their representations of volcanic, subterranean, and cosmological environments. Seeing the landscape as ‘another character' in their their works, Pamela challenges the binary of landscape and figurative painting, and Western/European art historical conventions. Though It Will End in Tears is Pamela's first major UK solo exhibition, it is not their first in the city of London; we discuss their relationship with spaces across the capital, and its colonial histories. Curator Diego Chocano highlights how Pamela has both challenged and embraced conventions of Western/European art history, in their artistic and educational practices. We discuss the artist's academic approach, and ‘research' approach to art, which has inspired interdisciplinary collaborations including in the field of science, with theoretical physicist Dr. James Sylvester Gates. He details the artist's interest in performance and artifice, drawing on film noir, wooden theatre sets, and the figure of the femme fatale for this body of work. We discuss how Pamela's self-constructed alter ego, Asme, enables the artist more freedom of creative expression, and the ability to resist categorisation by identity, biography, or subjectivity. ⁠Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. Find out more about Leo Robinson, and Édouard Glissant's ideas of ‘trembling', at the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE: instagram.com/p/DAtbDyUIHzl/?next=%2F&img_index=3 Hear Barbican curator Florence Ostende on Carrie Mae Weems' series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996): 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 For more from the Curve, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx's Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/1792f53fa27b8e2ece289b53dd62b2b7 And find out more about ancient Adinkra symbology and geometric structures in the episode about El Anatsui's Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta (2024) at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2e464e75c847d9d19cfa4dc46ea33338 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 Sylvia Snowden figures different approaches to expressionism, layering Western European and African American art histories, through their paintings of M Street, in Washington DC (1978-1997). Inside the White Cube: Sylvia Snowden runs at White Cube Paris until 16 November 2024. For more about Sylvia Snowden, read about their exhibitions with Edel Assanti during Frieze London in 2022, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/frieze-2022-retrospective For more about Chaïm Soutine read about ‍Soutine: Kossoff at Hastings Contemporary, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/a-perfect-match-chaim-soutine-meets-leon-kossoff For more about Oskar Kokoschka, read about A Rebel from Vienna at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and Guggenheim Bilbao, in The Quietus: thequietus.com/culture/art/skar-kokoschka-a-rebel-from-vienna-guggenheim-bilbao-review/ 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, writer Jessica J. Lee joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Iman Datoo to explore the languages of ‘natural' history and invasive species, through their book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (2024). Bringing together memoir, history, and scientific research, writer Jessica J. Lee considers how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they cross borders. Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica often draws on her own lived experiences to observe our world in motion, and close connections between seemingly distant places - sometimes, with shared tastes for seaweed. Dispersals, their latest book of linked essays, journeys further still, exploring migrations, displacements, and the entanglements of the plant and human worlds - and the language we use to describe them. Jessica shares some of their influences and references, like Richard Mabey's Weeds and the works of Mary Douglas, to expose our historic human and anthropocentric understanding of plant life. We discuss how our everyday words and phrases are often borrowed from citizenship law, and see how beings are mis/represented in the media, from giant hogweed in Victorian England, to wakame kelp, Japanese knotweed, and eucalyptus plants today. Drawing on their work across the South West of England, Iman Datoo shares their research into soils, potatoes, and tea. Bringing together Iman and Jessica's works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also delve into the history of botanical illustrations and mapping as tools of colonialism - here reimagined by contemporary artists. This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, 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, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024. Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online. Watch the full video online, via Radical Ecology: vimeo.com/995973173 Find all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C9hjlxrIcgo 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, artist Kedisha Coakley joins EMPIRE LINES live at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, connecting their work from Jamaican and Black diasporic communities across the UK, with their research into sculptor Ronald Moody, uncovering shared interests in Ancient Egypt, indigenous Caribbean cultures, and questions of restitution. Born in Brixton, and based in Sheffield, Kedisha Coakley's practice spans sculpture, glassmaking, and wallpaper printed with blocks of braided hair. Commissioned for an exhibition about Ronald Moody, one of the most significant artists working in 20th century Britain, their new installation is set between his large-scale figurative wood sculptures from the 1930s, and post-war experimentations with concrete and resin casting. From Kedisha's bronze afro-combs influenced by historic Taino cultures, we journey from objects held in the British Museum, to mahogany relief sculptures by major influences like Edna Manley. With audio transcripts, we discuss Moody's BBC radio broadcasts for Calling the West Indies produced by Una Marson, particularly ‘What is called Primitive Art?' (1949). Kedisha shares Moody's interest in primitivism, present in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and ‘oriental' Chinese cultural forms, as well as Gothic and Renaissance works from Western/Europe. We look at photographs from Kedisha's studio, exploring ‘African masks' in the work of European modernists like Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, and the often marginalised role of religion and spirituality in Black and diasporic art practices. Kedisha also details her wider practice in ‘Horticultural Appropriation', working with breadfruit, flowers, plants, and the natural environment, connecting with Moody's description of Jamaica's Blue Mountains and sea. We consider Moody's place in British art history, drawing from his contemporaries Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, and Elizabeth Frink, as well as the group known as the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), of which Moody was a founding member.. As a self-described ‘mature student', we look at Kedisha's pursuit of independent, adult education, the role of market cultures and fashion, and the work of women taking care of history. This episode was recorded live at Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life, an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, in October 2024. The exhibition runs until 3 November 2024: hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/kedisha-coakley-and-empire-lines-live-podcast-recording/ Hear more about Kedisha's work around ‘Horticultural Appropriation' with Ashish Ghadiali, curator of Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3 For more about the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), listen to curator Rose Sinclair in the episode on Althea McNish's Batchelor Girl's Room (1966/2022), recreated at the William Morris Gallery in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/953b78149a969255d6106fb60c16982b On post-war ‘British' art and sculpture, read about Egon Altdorf: Reaching for the Light at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/postwar-modernism-egon-altdorf-at-the-henry-moore-institute Hear from artist Yinka Shonibare, in the episode on Decolonised Structures (Queen Victoria (2022-2023) at the Serpentine in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/01fffb739a1bd9f84f930ce41ee31676 On the globalisation of ‘African' masks, listen to curator Osei Bonsu on Edson Chagas' photographic series, Tipo Passe (2014-2023), in the episode about Ndidi Dike's A History of A City in a Box (2019) at Tate Modern in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410 And for more about 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

In this special episode, Fozia Ismail and Ayan Cilmi from the feminist art collective Dhaqan Collective join EMPIRE LINES live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, alongside artists Kaajal Modi and Sovay Berriman, and environmental humanities lecturer Jim Scown, to discuss Somali cultural heritage in the face of climate crises. In the last few decades, Somali nomadic lives have been endangered by environmental degradation, civil war, and displacement. Created in 1960 from a former British protectorate and an Italian colony, the country collapsed into 30 years of conflict following the overthrow of the military regime of President Siad Barre in 1991. Working with diasporic communities in Bristol, the Dhaqan Collective seek to find ways of building imaginative futures that support Somali people both in the UK and in East Africa. They use everyday materials, from cassette tapes and camel meats, to milk teas, foods, and textiles, to create spaces of community and healing that centre the range of experiences across generations. Dhaqan discuss their ‘creative ecology' of work, travelling to contexts from the Southbank Centre in London, to the Isle of Portland in Dorset. We connect with Kaajal Modi, whose practice of ‘embodied listening' intersperses field recordings from British waterways with migration stories and reflections from marginalised communities. Based in Cornwall, Sovay Berriman mines the politics of place embedded in their work, relating to Cornish nationalisms, and working-class identities. We discuss different perceptions of women, mothers, and elders, crossing from Kaajal's particular Ugandan Asian community, to conventional arts institutions, exploring questions of collection and restitution. Plus, Jim Scown shares his research at the intersections of soils, science, and literature. This episode was recorded live at Interweaving Threads of Migration and Climate Justice - a weekend of talks and events at the Eden Project in Cornwall, exploring the power of audio and oral storytelling in cultural preservation - in September 2024: edenproject.com/visit/whats-on/interweaving-threads-of-migration-and-climate-justice Both Dhaqan Collective's House of Weaving Songs, and Kaajal Modi's Songs of the Water, will travel to Journeys Festival 2024 in Leicester from from 11 October 2024, supported by Art Reach and Counterpoints Arts. For more about b-side Festival 2024, read my article about Mohammad Barrangi in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/mohammad-barrangi-b-side-festival Listen back to the talk from Reclaim Festival 2024 with Serge Attukweh Clottey on the EMPIRE LINES podcast, in the episode on Noko Y3 Dzen (There's Something in the World (2018-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c And catch up on Instagram: instagram.com/p/C3pslhaI_P7/?igsh=bnJ1b2dsNHE5czk1 Find out more about Acts of Gathering with 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 Hear Professor Paul Gilroy live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠ And for more cassette tapes, hear Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil sound out migration between post-colonial Kerala and the Arab Gulf, through S. A. Jameel's Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song) (1977): pod.link/1533637675/episode/417429b5c504842ddbd3c82b07f7b0f8

Artist and sculptor Permindar Kaur moves between the Black British Arts Movement, the Young British Artists (YBAs), and Barcelona in the 1990s, exploring the ambiguities of Indian and South Asian cultural identities, Nothing is Fixed is an idea that has grown from ⁠Permindar Kaur's 2022 exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield⁠. For their latest, in Southampton, the artist brings together the public and the private, transforming the various gallery spaces into bedrooms of a home. Beds, chairs, tables, and teddy bears - ambiguous, often unsettling, domestic objects - populate the space, as well as never-before-shown works on paper, which underline the role of drawing in their sculptural practice. Born in Britain to Sikh parents of Indian heritage, Permindar is often exhibited in the context of the Black British Arts Movement, showing with leading members of Blk Art Group like Eddie Chambers. The artist also describes their wider interactions with the ⁠YBAs, exhibitions in Japan, and influences from their formative years of practice in Barcelona, Spain, Canada, and Sweden. We discuss encounters with artists like Mona Hatoum and Eva Hesse, Helen Chadwick and Félix González-Torres, and more surrealist storytellers like Leonora Carrington and Paula Rego, alongside the material-focussed practices of Arte Povera. We trouble the category of ‘British Asian artists', exploring Permindar's work with and within particular Indian and Punjabi diasporic communities in Nottingham, Sheffield, and Glasgow, in Scotland. With series like Turbans, Permindar describes how their practice has changed over time, navigating questions of identity, representation, and the binary of non-/Western/European art practices. They share their research on a site-specific public sculpture for Southampton's yearly Mela Festival, a long-established event which represents, rather than ‘reclaims' space for, different South Asian cultures - and lifelong learning, from younger artists. Permindar Kaur: Nothing is Fixed ran at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until September 2024, closing with the launch of an exhibition book of the same name, supported by Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. Sculpture in the Park is on view at Compton Verney in Warwickshire until 2027. Kaur also presented work in A Spirit Inside, an exhibition of works from the Women's Art Collection and the Ingram Collection, at Compton Verney until September 2024. Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 opens in venues across Plymouth on 28 September 2024, and travels to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London from 15 January 2025. For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo. Hear curator Griselda Pollock, from ⁠Medium and Memory (2023)⁠ at HackelBury Fine Art in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/37a51e9fab056d7b747f09f6020aa37e Read into Jasleen Kaur's practice, and the Turner Prize 2024, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/jasleen-kaur-interview And other artists connected to Glasgow, including Alia Syed (instagram.com/p/C--wHJsoFp6/?img_index=1), and ⁠Ingrid Pollard, in the episode from Carbon Slowly Turning (2022)⁠ at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Tate Liverpool, and Invasion Ecology (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/4d74beaf7489c837185a37d397819fb8. For more about toys and unsettling ‘children's stories', hear Sequoia Danielle Barnes on Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby (2024) at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2b43d4e0319d49a76895b8750ade36f8 And listen out for more from Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 - coming soon. 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 Tessa Giblin deconstructs El Anatsui's monumental, sculptural textiles, unravelling the ties that still bind post-colonial Ghana, Nigeria, and Scotland in the 21st century., via Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta (2024). El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta runs at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 29 September 2024. For more about Otobong Nkanga and The Recent at Talbot Rice Gallery, read this article about Edinburgh's Environmental Exhibitions in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-global Hear artist Ibrahim Mahama on Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024) at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh: pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 And Serge Attukwei Clottey on his family's internal migration from Jamestown/Usshertown in British Accra, Ghana, to coastal La (Labadi), Afrogallonism, and his collaborative practice, uplifting his community with upcycled plastic waste, through Noko Y3 Dzen (There's Something in the World) (2018–Now) at the Eden Project in Cornwall: pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c Listen to curator Osei Bonsu, curator of the Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon and A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, at Tate Modern in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410 And hear Chris Spring, former curator of the British Museum's collections from eastern and southern Africa, on ‘African' textiles and Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx by Araminta de Clermont (2010)⁠ at the British Museum in London. pod.link/1533637675/episode/a32298611ba95c955aba254a4ef996dd 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 Ibrahim Mahama ‘time travels' between British colonial and independent Ghana, tracing railway lines across African and European countries in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 20th century. Ibrahim Mahama is well-known for his large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the local effects of colonialism, migration, and global economics. Working in Tamale, Kumasi, and Accra, Ghana, he often works with found materials, collected from abandoned places of pre- and post-independence production. Spanning what was then known as the Gold Coast, the Sekondi Locomotive Workshop was built by the British in 1923, to extract and transport resources like cocoa and minerals, the foundations of European colonial wealth and contemporary capitalism. With charcoal and ink drawings, sculptures and film, Ibrahim connects the histories, legacies, and labourers of this now disused railway back to the UK - layering them atop Waverley, one of the nation's busiest train stations, for his first exhibition in Scotland. With Ibrahim's jute sack textile installations, we discuss shared practices of reuse, repurpose, and recycle with El Anatsui, an inspiration from an older generation who is also exhibiting for the first time in the city of Edinburgh. He shares photographs, personal letters, stamps from his archive, highlighting the respect shown to West African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), especially socialist Yugoslavia. Using train carriages as sculptures, galleries, and classrooms back in Tamale, Ibrahim reconstructs Ghana's colonial past to build its future, reversing flows of trade and migration to Africa. We discuss the potential and ‘charge' within these materials which, like bodies, carry lived experience and knowledge, and the complex relationship with lasting architectures and ‘rural cosmopolitanism' in societies today. Ibrahim also shares his collaborations across African and diasporic communities, with craftspeople, weavers, and makers at his Red Clay Studio in northern Ghana, to artists like Anya Paintsil in Manchester. Ibrahim Mahama: Songs about Roses runs at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh until 6 October 2024. A book launch and artist talk takes place on the penultimate day of the exhibition (the day before the exhibition closes). A Spell of Good Things opens at White Cube New York on 5 September 2024. Parliament of Ghosts (2019) continues online via the Whitworth, theVOV, and Vortic Art. And Purple Hibiscus, part of Unravel: The Power & Politics of Textiles in Art, was installed at the Barbican in London through summer 2024. Hear artist Serge Attukwei Clottey live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, on his family's internal migration from Jamestown/Usshertown in British Accra, Ghana, to coastal La (Labadi), Afrogallonism, and his collaborative practice, uplifting his community with upcycled plastic waste, through Noko Y3 Dzen (There's Something in the World) (2018–Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c 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 academic Sequoia Danielle Barnes redresses the ugly side of kitsch and ‘cute' toy cultures, telling histories of trickster rabbits from Peter Rabbit to Bugs Bunny, appropriated from Black Southern American folklore from the 16th century to now. With ceramics, fabrics, and super sticky slugs, Sequoia Danielle Barnes' new installation is an Afro-surrealist retelling of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, a folktale developed by her enslaved ancestors after being ripped from Africa and displaced in Alabama, in the United States - the place she grew up before pursuing her practice in ‘transatlantic' institutions. Here, stories about figures like Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima, often first told as a means of action guidance for outsmarting slavemasters, were mainstreamed into 20th century pop art and cultures. Sequoia's exhibition takes its title from the 1946 film, Song of the South, a nostalgic representation of the antebellum, pre-Confederate South, revealing how ‘cuteness' masks anti-Black racist tropes and propaganda. We discuss how popular consumption of Western/European films, TV adverts, and commercials can perpetuate forms of oppression and marginalisation, including racialisation, infantilism, violence, and the cannibalisation of enslaved peoples. Sequoia tells of her interest in ‘Tellytubby lore', how children's cartoons and animations can sustain critical traditions of surrealism, and why younger people more readily engage with her work than adults. From her creepy and uncanny collectibles, we discuss why major institutions protect and preserve golliwogs, golly, and ‘piccaninny' dolls, and Sequoia's ‘Black radical art practice' in spaces like CCA Glasgow, Fruitmarket, and the National Museum of Scotland. Sequoia shares her subversive influences from the Black diaspora, including Faith Ringgold, Betye Saars, Robert Colescott,and Eddie Chambers. With Theaster Gates, Patrick Kelly, Joe Casely-Hayford,, we explore Afrofuturism, and find entanglements in their own practice, between works with textiles, fashion, and pottery. Beneath the dark humour and sweet surfaces of their works, Sequoia speaks of connections between contemporary consumption and capitalism, and historic sugar cane plantations. exposing how legacies of colonialism, slavery, and global trade still shape society today. Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything Is Satisfactual runs at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop until 28 August 2024. The exhibition is part of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2024, which continues in Scotland until 25 August 2024. For more about Black Southern Assemblage, hear Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London, on the Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend (20th Century-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cab2757a707f76d6b5e85dbe1b62993 Read about Sonia Boyce's Feeling Her Way (2022), her Golden Lion-winning British Pavilion (2022), at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition And read about Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2023, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/edinburgh-art-festivals-reckoning-with-the-citys-colonial-legacies EDITOR: Alex Rees. 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 Beatriz Milhazes collages arabesques from Baroque Portugal and Brazil's many indigenous communities, tracing religious and natural patterns in Roman Catholicism, Islamic architectures, and the islands of Japan, through Casa de Maria (1992). Known for her colourful, large-scale abstract paintings, Beatriz Milhazes' practice reflects how Brazilian culture has long ‘assimilated' plural influences, particularly the effects of Portuguese and Spanish colonial rule between the 17th and 19th centuries. Arches, doors, stained glass windows, and burnished golds, drawn from churches across South America, recur as motifs in works spanning forty years. Beatriz layers ruffles and rosettes, precursors to the circles in her more recent paintings, from royal Hispanic costumes, and textiles found in city markets and Carnival parades. Her studio overlooks Rio de Janeiro's botanical garden, another construct of colonial rule, and environment which inspires her creations. For the artist, flowers are both ‘natural' and ‘plastic' bodies - like the water, and ‘salty sea breeze' which connects her home in Brazil and the coastal cities of Britain, where her work is currently on display. Beatriz outlines the centrality of nature in popular and indigenous cultural production, and interest in ornamental ‘body drawings' by women in the Kadiwéu tribe. She shares how she adapts the concept of collage to painting on canvas, calling on Western/European modernism, geometric abstraction, and ‘scientific research' into colour for her exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2024. From a kimono in the collection of the V&A, a diplomatic gift from the emperor of Japan, Beatriz travels to her Yellow Flower Dream (2018) for the 'Art House Project' on Inujima - an island in the country's Seto Island Sea, also recreated in Kensington, at Japan House London. We touch on more histories of migration in São Paulo, home to Japan's largest diasporic community, and the ‘union' of cultural, economic, and ecological regeneration taking place across continents today. Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias runs at Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 29 September 2024. For more, you can read my article from the first exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate in 2023, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/colour-and-abstraction-beatriz-milhazes-at-margates-turner-contemporary For more from Tate St Ives in Cornwall, hear curator Morad Montazami on the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987). For more from Japan House London, hear curator Hashimoto Mari on Hasegawa Akira's Antique French Military Uniform with Kumihimo (2021), and read about WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts (2023), in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/wave-currents-in-japanese-graphic-arts-at-japan-house-london 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 Hanna Tuulikki connects plantation landscapes in Finland, Scotland, and across the South West of England, making kin across species and with birds, via Avi-Alarm (2023). ⁠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. IMAGES: Jassy Earl. 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 Ekow Eshun reframes the Black figure in historic and contemporary art, surveying its presences, absences, and representations in Western/European art history, the African diaspora, and beyond, via The Time is Always Now (2024). In 1956, the American author James Baldwin wrote: ‘There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.' Heeding Baldwin's urgent call, Ekow Eshun's new exhibition brings together 22 leading contemporary African diasporic artists from the UK and the US, whose practices emphasise the Black figure through mediums such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. These figurative artists and artworks address difficult histories like slavery, colonialism, and racism and, at the same time, speak to contemporary experiences of Blackness from their own personal perspectives. Ekow explains how artists like Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, and Thomas J. Price acknowledge the paradox of race, and the increased cultural visibility and representation of lived experiences. Beyond celebration, though, The Time Is Always Now follow the consequences of these artists' practices, and what is at stake in depicting the Black figure today. We discuss the plurality of perspectives on view, and how fragmented, collage-like works by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Lorna Simpson, and Titus Kaphar reconsider W.E.B. Du Bois' understanding of ‘double consciousness' (1897) as a burden, to a 21st century vantage point. Ekow shares the real people depicted in Michael Armitage's surrealistic, religious scenes, whilst connecting works with shared motifs from Godfried Donkor's boxers, to Denzil Forrester and Chris Ofili's dancing forms. We talk about how how history is not just in the past, and how we might think more ‘historically from the present'. Plus, we consider the real life relationships in works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Jordan Casteel, - and those shared between artists like Henry Taylor and Noah Davis - shifting the gaze from one of looking at, to looking with, Black figures. Starting at the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure travels to The Box in Plymouth from 28 June to 29 September 2024. It will then tour to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and North Carolina Museum of Art in the US into 2025. And as promised, some news - this episode announces my appointment as Contemporary Art Curator at The Box in Plymouth. Join me there in conversation with Ekow on Saturday 29 June, and with Hettie Judah, curator and writer of Acts of Creation with exhibiting artists Barbara Walker, Claudette Johnson, and Wangechi Mutu, on Saturday 20 July. You can also join a Bitesize Tour on selected Wednesdays during the exhibition. And you can hear this episode, and more from the artists, on the Bloomberg Connects app by searching ‘The Box Plymouth'. EMPIRE LINES will continue on a fortnightly basis. For more about Claudette Johnson, hear curator (and exhibition text-contributor!) Dorothy Price on And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Listen to Lubaina Himid on Lost Threads (2021, 2023) at the Holburne Museum in Bath. Hear curator Isabella Maidment on Hurvin Anderson's Barbershop series (2006-2023) at the Hepworth Wakefield. Read about that show, and their work in Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, in recessed.space. Hear Kimathi Donkor on John Singer Sargent's Madame X (1883-1884) and Study of Mme Gautreau (1884) at Tate Britain in London. 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 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. Central to Maheke's 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 works 'staged' in previous exhibitions at South London Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate Modern, highlighting how the ‘new' drawings, prints, book illustrations, and paintings on display here 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 my white audience' - drawing on his lifelong admiration for the French-born ice skater, Surya Bonaly. We discuss Paul's 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 the Baltic Triennale in Estonia, to Johanneburg, South Africa - and, drawing on collaborations with family members and 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, 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 has work in the ⁠Drawing Biennal 2024⁠, which runs at the Drawing Room in London until 3 July 2024. For another of Paul's collaborators, listen to Barby Asante's Declaration of Independence (2023), performed as 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, listen to Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f And for more about 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/?img_index=1 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 at the 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 contemporary 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. From her documentary, Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004), to her more recent works on Chillpiq, we discuss the cultural importance of water in this double landlocked country; the Aral Sea, now the Aral Desert, was one of the world's largest lakes until the Soviet government steadily diverted its water sources, reducing it to 10% of its original size. Her most recent film focusses on Al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an 8th century textile dyer and alchemist who became a ‘protosocialist' political revolutionary in now-Iran. We consider the syncretism of religions and faiths including Islam, Zoroastrianism and Mazdakism, Buddhism, and Christianity, as evidence of cosmopolitan coexistence within empires, and how this figure was appropriated in 20th century communist propaganda. Saodat shares her interests in oriental classical music, and improvision within maqam and raga, as living archives ‘deadened' by notation, alongside archaeology, and the number 40. We discuss her collaborative practice with Davra Collective at 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 explains 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. For more about Zoroastrianism, listen to Dr. Talinn Grigor on Persian Revival architecture, and Parsi patronage in India, via the Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Bombay (Mumbai) (1881). 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. 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 London Gallery Weekend 2023, with ⁠Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now)⁠. 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 canonised 17th, 18th, and 19th century artists like Diego Velázquez, focussing on Yinka's engagement with Pablo Picasso, 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 impact of colonisation on the environment. As a self-described ‘post-colonial hybrid', Yinka details his diasporic social practices, including his Guest Project experimental space in Hackney, and G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria, and collaborations with young artists and researchers like Leo Robinson, Péjú Oshin, and Alayo Akinkubye. Yinka Shonibare: 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. And on the globalisation of ‘African' masks, listen to 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 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. 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 (with some of Zineb's ‘tribe') 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 another artist inspired by the port city of Venice, tune in to Nusra Latif Qureshi's 2009 work, Did You Come Here To Find History?, with curator Hammad Nasar. WITH: Zineb Sedira, Paris and London-based artist, who also works in Algeria. Working between the media of 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 world 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 anti-imperial satire, ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness' (1901), Pio connects both local and global histories. With works across drawing, text, and sculpture, 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 - with histories often marginalised, ignored, or forgotten. He shares why his works often focus on the body, and how two tiaras, here reproduced in bronze, 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 alongside other artists, like Carlos Villa, and the political practice of Pacita Abad, a textile artist and his aunt. He talks about the ‘diasporic' objects in this display, his interest in jewellery, and use of media from bronze, to ‘monumental' marble. Finally, Pio suggests how objects are not things, but travelling ‘networks of relationships', challenging binaries of East and West, and historic and contemporary experiences, and locating himself within the 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: - Ashmolean NOW: Flora Yukhnovich and Daniel Crews-Chubbs, at the Ashmolean Museum. - 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 1988, 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. For more about Sonia Ferlov Mancoba, hear curators Winnie Sze (SEE) and Pim Arts, curators at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, on We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948. 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. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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. ART: ‘Noko Y3 Dzen (There's Something in the World) (2018–Now)'. 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 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). Named for its town, 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, Panguna, in Arawa, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. This year, Taloi is the curator of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania at Ocean Space, Venice, and the 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. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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 (1850-Now)'. IMAGE: Installation View. 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

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. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast 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 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 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 Matthews. 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 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 100. 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 100. For more on Nil Yalter, hear the artist on Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now) at Ab-Anbar Gallery (@ab_anbar) 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/1306563558063271936 And 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 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 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/1306563558063271936 And 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.

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/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines