Most Wanted Collective (Special Episode)

Actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament host Talk Art, a podcast dedicated to the world of art featuring exclusive interviews with leading artists, curators &amp; gallerists, and even occasionally their talented friends from other industries like acting, music and journalism. Listen in to explore the magic of art and why it connects us all in such fantastic ways.&nbsp;Follow the official Instagram @TalkArt for images of artworks discussed in each episode and to follow Russell and Robert's latest art adventures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visual Arts

We meet writer Oisín McKenna to discuss his debut novel Evenings and Weekends which is released today!
We discuss Oisín‘s passion for spoken word and performance art and discover his early years inspired by artists like David Hoyle, Penny Arcade, Taylor Mac or Lucy McCormick. We learn how museums like the National Gallery, Dublin improved his life, the impact of his art teacher, and his love of the work of Caravaggio, Doris Salcedo, Oscar Wilde and Wolfgang Tillmans. We explore the relationship between art, class, and sexuality, and how this has inspired his writing.
Oisín makes work about love, money, health and history. He’s interested in the ways that political, economic and social conditions shape how we act, think, and feel at particular places and times. He writes about the mundane details of people’s daily lives in order to tell a bigger story about the world.
“I still don't know that many writers but I know a lot of artists. Most of the conversations I have about artistic processes are with visual artists rather than writers, and I feel my process is more influenced by a visual art approach than by a literary one. The book is very concerned with aesthetics, particularly architectural aesthetics, and it pays a lot of attention to the built landscape of post-war Britain - I would say this attention is informed somewhat by a visual arts approach.”
Oisín McKenna was born in Dublin and lives in London. He was awarded the Next Generation Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Evenings and Weekends and it was developed with further funding from Arts Council England. Evenings and Weekends has been awarded a 2022 London Writers Award and in 2017, Oisín was named in the Irish Times as one of the best-spoken word artists in the country. He has written and performed four theatre shows, including ADMIN, an award-winning production at Dublin Fringe 2019, and has written for outlets including the Irish Times on issues such as gentrification and the alienation of Dublin’s youth.
Buy Oisin's new book now https://www.waterstones.com/book/evenings-and-weekends/ois-n-mckenna/9780008604172
 Follow @Ois_McK91 & @4thEstateBooks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oisín McKenna

We meet artist Leilah Babirye to discuss her inspiring multidisciplinary practice, her major solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and new sculptures in the Venice Biennale 2024. 
Transforming everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights, the artist fled her native Uganda to New York in 2015 after being publicly outed in a local newspaper. In spring 2018 Babirye was granted asylum with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.
Composed of debris collected from the streets of New York, Babirye’s sculptures are woven, whittled, welded, burned and burnished. Her choice to use discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is ‘abasiyazi’, meaning sugarcane husk. “It’s rubbish,” explains Babirye, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.” The artist also frequently uses traditional African masks to explore the diversity of LGBTQI identities, assembling them from ceramics, metal and hand-carved wood; lustrous, painterly glazes are juxtaposed with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. In a similar vein, Babirye creates loosely rendered portraits in vivid colours of members from her community. 
Describing her practice, Babirye explains: “Through the act of burning, nailing and assembling, I aim to address the realities of being gay in the context of Uganda and Africa in general. Recently, my working process has been fuelled by a need to find a language to respond to the recent passing of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda.”
For her Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo, Babirye spent the summer of 2023 at YSP making a clan of seven larger-than-life-size figures in wood and five coloured ceramics. Supported by YSP’s technical team, the seven sculptures were carved using a chainsaw and chisels from trees that had reached the end of their life on site. The artist describes being guided by the wood itself, sketching the initial forms directly onto the sectioned tree for carving. Once carved, the figures are refined and their surfaces sanded to highlight the grains of the tree. The sculptures are then burned a deep black, the charring once used to make the works ‘disappear’ but which is now a gesture of celebrating their beauty. Details of the sculptures are treated with a blowtorch before the surfaces are carefully waxed to acknowledge the skin of the piece and the tree from which it came. The final stage is one Babirye calls ‘taking the girls to the salon’, in which found elements complete the sculptures, including bicycle chains, nails and copper from a dismantled boiler, as well as redundant stainless steel teapots.
Follow @BabiryeSculptor and @YSPsculpture
Visit: https://ysp.org.uk/profile/leilah-babirye 
Leilah Babirye: Obumu (Unity) runs at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until Sunday 8th September 2024. https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/leilah-babirye-obumu-unity
Her work is also part of the Venice Biennale 2024
Thanks to YSP, Stephen Friedman Gallery and Gordon Robichaux. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leilah Babirye

New @TalkArt! We meet the PET SHOP BOYS to explore their new album NONETHELESS!!!
Recorded in London’s Kings Cross, we chat to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe about their history as the UK’s most successful pop duo, their mutual love of art, collaborations with artists throughout their 40 year career including Derek Jarman, Eric Watson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and most recently Tim Walker, plus we explore Neil’s interest in the Arts & Crafts movement, and for collecting & living with art. 
This feature-length exclusive episode celebrates today’s release (April 26th 2024) of their incredible new album Nonetheless, via Parlophone Records. This is their 15th studio album, and since releasing their debut single back in 1984 they’ve gone on to sell more than 50 million records worldwide.
‘Nonetheless’ features 10 brand new tracks and is available now digitally and in various physical formats, including CD, black vinyl, clear vinyl, grey vinyl and cassette. Recorded and mixed in London last year, the album is the duo’s first with producer James Ford at his studio in East London. The orchestra and backing vocals were recorded at The Church studio in North London. 
This is one of our favourite PSB albums they’ve made! Be sure to download or buy it now. The album also sees the duo return to Parlophone, the label which released their iconic and massively successful material spanning 1985 – 2012. 


Pet Shop Boys

Talk Art live at the Venice Biennale, presented by Burberry. Recorded at the St Regis Library, we meet leading artist Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA and Tarini Malik, the curator of the British pavilion 2024.
The British Council is delighted to present Listening All Night To The Rain by John Akomfrah at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024.
The exhibition runs from 20 April to 24 November 2024.
Exploring post-colonialism, environmental devastation and the politics of aesthetics, Listening All Night To The Rain is Akomfrah’s boldest and most ambitious commission to date.
The exhibition draws its title from 11th century Chinese writer and artist Su Dongpo’s poetry, which explores the transitory nature of life during a period of political exile. Organised in a series of song-like movements, or ‘cantos’, the exhibition brings together eight interlocking and overlapping multimedia and sound installations into a single and immersive environment that tells stories of migrant diasporas in Britain. It is the result of decades of extensive research by the artist and his team, using historical records to contextualise our experience of the present day.
Listening All Night To The Rain weaves together newly filmed material, archive video footage and still images, with audio and text from international archives and libraries. The exhibition tells global stories through the ‘memories’ of people who represent migrant communities in Britain and examines how multiple geopolitical narratives are reflected in the experiences of diasporic people more broadly.
Each gallery space layers together a specific colour field, influenced by the paintings of American artist Mark Rothko, in order to highlight the ways in which abstraction can represent the fundamental nature of human drama.
Listening All Night To The Rain positions various theories of acoustemology: the study of how the sonic experience mirrors and shapes our cultural realities. Akomfrah draws on an acute acoustic sensitivity influenced by a variety of formative experiences, from protests to club culture in 1970s-80s London. Each of Akomfrah’s ‘cantos’ is accompanied by a specific soundtrack, which layers archival material with field recordings, speeches and popular and devotional music. Extending the sense of hybridity in the filmic collages, Akomfrah’s use of sound encourages us to consider the breadth of cultural identity in Britain more broadly.
Follow @Smoking_Dog_Films, @AkomfrahJohn @TariniMalik, @BritishArts Presented by @Burberry
Thanks @Lisson_Gallery and @LaBiennale
Learn more at Lisson: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/john-akomfrah



 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Akomfrah and Tarini Malik, presented by Burberry

TALK ART EXCLUSIVE! We meet Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA to discuss his forthcoming solo show 'Aerial' at White Cube New York, USA and his epic new 'Time Horizon' public installation of 100 sculptures which is about to open at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK. We explore his entire career across this intimate, highly detailed, feature-length special episode recorded in person at his London studio.
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. Gormley’s work is concerned with the experience of being in the world and an expression of how it feels to be alive. Through a critical engagement with his own physical existence, Gormley identifies art as a place where new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. For him, art can be a place of becoming where, collectively, we can think about our role as creators of the future: ‘I want it to be about life. I want it to be about potential.’
We explore his new works made for ‘Aerial’, an exhibition by Antony Gormley in New York, in which the artist considers sculpture as an instrument for proprioception – the body’s innate capacity to sense and perceive its position, movements and orientation in relation to itself and the environment. The exhibition features two recent developments in Gormley’s practice: one explores physical proximity in mass and scale, where two over-life-size bodies merge as one, while the other endeavours to catalyse space almost without mass.
Whilst 'Time Horizon', one of Antony Gormley’s most spectacular large-scale installations, is currently being shown across the grounds and through the house at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Featuring 100 life-size sculptures, the works are distributed across 300 acres of the park, the furthest away being approximately 1.5 miles on the West Avenue. The cast-iron sculptures, each weighing 620kg and standing at an average of 191cm, are installed at the same datum level to create a single horizontal plane across the landscape. Some works are buried, allowing only a part of the head to be visible, while others are buried to the chest or knees according to the topography. Only occasionally do they stand on the existing surface. Around a quarter of the works are placed on concrete columns that vary from a few centimetres high to rising four meters off the ground.
Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.
Antony Gormley's 'Aerial' runs from 30 April – 15 June 2024 at White Cube New York. ‘Time Horizon’ runs concurrently at Houghton Hall, Norfolk from 21 April – 31 October 2024, the first time the work has been staged in the UK.
Follow @WhiteCube and @HoughtonHall
Visit: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/antony-gormley-new-york-2024 and https://www.houghtonhall.com/antony-gormleys-time-horizon-2/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most Wanted Collective (Special Episode)

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