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Art and commerce, haunted ears, starving artists and the way galleries fetishise madness to make £££. Welcome back, and welcome to our first ever guest (!), the wonderful Alice Procter. Series 2 returns, the UCU strike is finished, and Kasia, Dan and Alice are DEEP in the politics and economics of the museum gift shop, as well as checking in on how that whole 'decolonising the museum' thing is going. Thanks so much to Alice for joining us - check out her excellent podcast Historical Friction and her legendary Uncomfortable Art Tours. If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford
News broke this week that Italy is returning a fragment looted from the Parthenon in Athens to the Greek Government. The piece of marble is part of a carving of a draped figure from the eastern side of the Parthenon's frieze. While the chunk seems small, it's significance in the ongoing global debate about repatriation of stolen artefacts is hard to overstate. Alice Procter is an Australian art historian living in London, a city at the heart of the Parthenon drama. She runs "Uncomfortable Art Tours" at six London cultural institutions and hosts a podcast called The Exhibitionist looking at museum culture. She is also the author of The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it, which came out in 2020.
Art historian, writer and educator Alice Procter embarks on everything that a historian in mainstream establishment shuns. She speaks about colonial loot, whiteness, historical trauma, myths of national identity besides excavating the colonial story of art in museums. Her unofficial and unauthorised Uncomfortable Art Tours initiative has been unpacking colonial narrative since 2017 across some of Britain's leading museums. Her book The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums & why We Need to Talk about it deftly unpacks many of the themes that guide her work and asks crucially ‘…who has the right to hold objects, and to tell their stories? Alice in this conversation with Pramod Kumar KG, art historian and co-founder of Eka Archiving Services deliberates on repatriation and restitution and the need to explore alternative histories of objects, people, and collections. This episode of BIC Talks was originally a live BIC Streams session in collaboration with Eka Archiving Services.
Emerald Fennell is the director and writer of Promising Young Woman, a darkly comic revenge thriller starring Carey Mulligan. The film is nominated for five Academy Awards and six BAFTAs. Emerald is also a successful actress, most recently starring as the then-Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown as well as a cameo in the movie. We hear about what sparked the film, reactions to it and what it’s like to combine direction, writing and acting. The Humboldt Forum in Berlin is currently planning to return its entire collection of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, looted in the late 19th century in the era of European colonial expansion, and Aberdeen University has just announced it is going to be the first UK institution to return its own Benin bronze sculpture to the country. Alice Procter, author of the new book The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in our Museums discusses the significance of these two examples of restitution. One of the most published Chinese poets in English Yang Lian, has won the inaugural Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation along with his long time translator Brian Holton. He talks to Samira Ahmed from his home in exile in Berlin about his prize winning anthology Anniversary Snow as well as how his mother’s sudden death whilst he was being “re-educated” during China’s Cultural Revolution led to him becoming a poet Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May Studio Engineer: Emma Harth
This week, we focus on two books: Aimee Dawson talks to Alice Procter about the debate over contested heritage in the UK and her book The Whole Picture, a strident call for colonial histories to be told in museums. Jori Finkel speaks to Glenn Adamson about Craft: An American History, a radical reappraisal of craft's role in forging American identity. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Ben Luke talks to the critic Michael Peppiatt—curator of an exhibition uniting Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London—about Auerbach's EOW Sleeping IV (1967), in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Comedy as an art form can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece. From toilet humour and sarcasm, to irony and wordplay, artists continue to use comedy within their work today. In this episode, comedian Charlie George explores how artists have used comedy throughout art history and asks 'is it okay to laugh at art?'Hear from artist Abondance Matanda, art historian Alice Procter and assistant curators James Finch, Helen O'Malley and Katy Wan as they chat about their thoughts on comedy in art from Tate's collection.To find out more about the artists and artworks discussed visit tate.org.uk.This episode was a Stance Media production for Tate, produced by Phil Brown, researched by Deborah Shorinde and executive produced Chrystal Genesis.Photo: © Rikard Österlund See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When you go to a museum, do you ever wonder how the objects were acquired? Alice Procter is an Australian art historian who wants us to critique what she terms the 'colonial propaganda' within our museums.
When you go to a museum, do you ever wonder how the objects were acquired? Alice Procter is an Australian art historian who wants us to critique what she terms the 'colonial propaganda' within our museums.
When you go to a museum, do you ever wonder how the objects were acquired? Alice Procter is an Australian art historian who wants us to critique what she terms the 'colonial propaganda' within our museums.
When you go to a museum, do you ever wonder how the objects were acquired? Alice Procter is an Australian art historian who wants us to critique what she terms the 'colonial propaganda' within our museums.
With Subhadra Das, Clémentine Deliss, Tristram Hunt, and Alice Procter. Chaired by Mirjam Brusius. This event was part of the Contested Histories seminar series 2019 and took place on 25 June 2019 at the German Historical Institute London.
In this episode Alice Procter joins Ellie to talk about Joseph Banks' Platypus on display at the British Musuem's Enlightenment Gallery. We discuss Cook's voyages and collections and their reception on his return to London. We also explore uncritical reconstructions of Enlightenment galleries at the British Museum and elsewhere; and how Europeans understood and described Australia in the 1700-1900 period.Alice Procter is an art historian and museum activist. She runs Uncomfortable Art Tours, exploring the representation of colonial collections and legacies of imperialism in national museums.
Quante chance ha Bernie Sanders; si potrà discutere di un nuovo capitalismo? Perché è così importante la varietà etnica e di genere nel giornalismo; come ci si sente a sapere di non essere più europei; i musei inglesi devono restituire il bottino coloniale? L’uomo che costruiva le croci, e César l’aquila imperiale.
Quante chance ha Bernie Sanders; si potrà discutere di un nuovo capitalismo? Perché è così importante la varietà etnica e di genere nel giornalismo; come ci si sente a sapere di non essere più europei; i musei inglesi devono restituire il bottino coloniale? L’uomo che costruiva le croci, e César l’aquila imperiale.
Alice Procter is an art historian who immigrated from Australia, she runs Uncomfortable Art Tours in major British museums examining how we “curate historical trauma and national identity”. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Al Jazeera and even the Daily Mail! You can book tickets for Uncomfortable Art Tours here, or follow The Exhibitionist on Facebook to … Continue reading 04/52 Australia – Alice Procter
Fran Ross was a gifted African-American author who died in 1985. Her novel Oreo, written at the height of the Black Power movement, tells the rollercoaster story of a black-Jewish girl's quest for her white father using Greek myth, slang, Yiddish, puns, made-up words and Ross' own extraordinary imagination. The novel sank without much trace but Man Booker-Prizewinning author Marlon James, who's written the introduction to a new edition, claims its time is now. As the Mercury Prize shortlist is revealed, music journalist Laura Snapes discusses what surprised and delighted her, and what disappointed.Museums and galleries are under increasing pressure to rethink their displays and collections acquired under colonial rule. What does change look like for these institutions and how will it affect the visitor experience? University College London curator Subhadra Das, anthropologist Dr Charlotte Joy and art historian and independent tour guide Alice Procter discuss what exactly decolonising a museum means and what the process entails.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Rebecca ArmstrongMain image: Marlon James. Credit: Jeffrey Skemp.