EMPIRE LINES

Curator Isabella Maidment steps into Hurvin Anderson’s studio and barbershop, a point of cultural connection between Birmingham and the Caribbean, reconstructed at the Hepworth Wakefield.

Contemporary artist Hurvin Anderson first painted a barbershop in Birmingham in 2006. For more than 15 years, he has returned to and reworked this space, an important social setting, especially for men, in Black British communities. As a second-generation migrant, whose parents migrated from Jamaica, Anderson practiced in the post-Windrush diaspora in 1980s Britain, creating works which connect cultures in Britain and theCaribbean - and Life Between Islands.As Salon Paintings, the first complete exhibition of theBarbershop series, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield, curator Isabella Maidment talks about Anderson’s surreal use of mirrors and layers, why he thinks of the barbershop like an impressionist cafe, and how this particularly regional setting can travel and translate across the country and Europe.

Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings and Hurvin Anderson Curates runs at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire until 5 November 2023, then at the Hastings Contemporary in East Sussex, and the Kistefos Museum, Norway, into 2024.

For more, you can read my article inrecessed.space:https://recessed.space/00107-Hurvin-Anderson-salon-painting

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Windrush Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush's arrival in the UK from the West Indies. Listen to the other episode from Indo + Caribbean: The creation of a culture at the Museum of London Docklands: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/c475cec4c78ad87b9cf73326b823cb8c

WITH: Isabella Maidment, Senior Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield. She is a co-curator of Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings.

ART: ‘Is it OK to Be Black?, Hurvin Anderson (2015)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Curators Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble unwrap the underrepresented history of Indian indenture in the British Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries, through Richard Fung’s 2012 documentary film, Dal Puri Diaspora. Plus, artist Salina Jane, and Chandani Persaud, tuck into contemporary Indo-Caribbean and Trinidadian food and culture in London today.

In Dal Puri Diaspora, filmmaker Richard Fung travels from Toronto to Trinidad, and Guyana to India, tracing the migrations - and many variations - of a dish often called Caribbean or West Indian roti. After the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British and Dutch Caribbean plantation owners still required cheap labour and, having successfully petitioned the British government, recruited indentured workers from India. Over 450,000 men and women would make the five month journey by boat, working for three to five years in return for transport, a minimal wage and some basic provisions, until the scheme’s end in 1917. Yet whilst 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Windrush migrations, these stories of Caribbean migration remain comparatively overlooked in British histories.

Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble, curators of Indo + Caribbean, explore the reasons why workers decided to leave India, and how we can curate complex histories of opportunity, restriction, and resistance. They share personal experiences informed by caste, gender, and women’s agency, and how museums might use AI to fill the gaps in the archive. Artist Salina Jane highlights how Indo-Caribbeans connect with their heritage today, sharing sugar cane and cocoa drawn from her own growing allotment, and Kew Gardens in South London. Plus, Chandani Persaud looks at the evolution of food and labour in the local community - from suppression to celebration and commercialisation in Western cultures - highlighting how colonialism still shapes tastes and identities.

Indo + Caribbean: The creation of a culture runs at the Museum of London Docklands in London until 19 November 2023.

For more on Trinidad, hear Gérard Besson’s EMPIRE LINES on The Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), Trinidad (c. 1902-1910): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/8d33407d49e5d371cb5d4827088d896c

WITH: Shereen Lafhaj, Curator at the Museum of London, and Makiya Davis-Bramble, Curator at Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. They are the co-curators of Indo + Caribbean. Salina Jane, a British artist of Indo-Caribbean descent making art about the experience of her family's journey from India through indentured labour to Guyana. Chandani Persaud, founder of Indo-Caribbean London.

ART: ‘Dal Puri Diaspora, Richard Fung (2012)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Artist Musquiqui Chihying brushes up the history of displaying sick and strong Asian bodies, from the Formosa Hamlet or human zoo at the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, to COVID-19, both connected to their own contemporary exhibition in London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery.

Musquiqui Chihying’s multimedia installation, ‘Too Loud a Dust’, delves into two events from 1910: the construction of t he Formosa Hamlet by the Japanese Empire at the Japanese-British Exhibition in London, and the publication of ‘Diseases of China’ by the British missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell. With soil ‘stolen’ from the Japanese Garden, which remains in White City today, and dust from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, he considers how indigenous Korean and Ainu Japanese bodies were represented then and now, and how transparent glass has been used to separate - and - other viewers and subjects.

Musquiqui Chihying: Too Loud A Dust runs at the Tabula Rasa Gallery in London until 29 June 2023. This episode was recorded at London Gallery Weekend 2023.

WITH: Musquiqui Chihying, contemporary visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation, and contemporary social culture in the Global South.

ART: ‘Too Loud a Dust, Musquiqui Chihying (2023)'.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Tate Modern curator Nabila Abdel Nabi plants European abstract art in transnational networks of spirituality and theosophy, through Hilma af Klint’s 1908 series or cycle, The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple.

Abstract artists Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian never met. But in their respective environments of Sweden and the Netherlands, both invented new languages of visual art as rooted in nature at the turn of the 20th century. Departing from traditional landscapes - with a touch of Vincent Van Gogh - they embarked on radical and ethereal painting series, connecting humans as a part of. not separate to, ecology.

Nabila Abdel Nabi, a curator of Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Forms of Life, explores how showing these artists in conversation defies their typical depiction as solitary artists who worked alone. We see Klint and Mondrian as active participants in global communities, with works that speak to scientific debates around Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the spiritual and philosophical movement, theosophy. Rethinking ‘control’ and ‘rationality’ - as stereotypes of abstract art, and concepts used to exclude women artists from history - Abdel Nabi underlines af Klint and Mondrian’s intuitive practices, and how both used abstraction not to defy nature, but to think through it.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life runs at the Tate Modern in London until 3 September 2023.

For more, read my article in The New European: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/does-food-have-any-place-in-an-art-gallery/

For more on theosophy, hear Jessica Albrecht’s EMPIRE LINES on the 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cf022e2ac70910d0741747e59f2f6f2

For more on Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern, listen to Carine Harmand, Keith Shiri, and Richard Gray on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/bc78f4df16a50055611d88aa812c7bfb

WITH: Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and a curator of Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life.

ART: ‘The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint (1908)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, weaves together the histories of Black artists who stayed in Southern America during the Great Migration, like the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

Black artists based in the American South have always forged unique artistic practices - as multigenerational as multimedia in form. Using found and ‘reclaimed’ materials, these sculptures, paintings, drawings, and quilts speak to their makers’ individual ingenuity - and the enslavement, Jim Crow-era segregation, and institutionalised racism which continues to colour America’s past and present.

Geographically isolated, but well-connected within communities, artists like Thornton Dial, Estelle Witherspoon, and the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers have challenged conventions about the education and display of art - perhaps why they’ve been overlooked in the canons of art history. Now, though, they are often placed in conversation with abstract expressionism, for their use of bold colours and geometric patterns, which combine African American textile traditions and modernist art and design.

As a landmark exhibition opens in London, ‘activist curator’ Raina Lampkins-Felder shares why so many artists stayed on their lands, and why last names like Lockett, Bendolph, and Pettway crop up time and again. We travel from plantations and kitchen tables, to yard shows, typically Southern sculpture parks, where artists self-represent and directly communicate with their publics. We hear about the women at the fore of the first Black-owned businesses in the US, the Freedom Quilting Bee and local churches working with the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how contemporary housetop textiles continue to ‘bend and break’ traditions today.

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South runs at the Royal Academy in London until 18 June 2023.

WITH: Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is the curator of Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.

ART: Quilts by the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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We return to Nalini Malani’s immersive installation My Reality is Different as it iterates in London, where curator Priyesh Mistry draws out the colonial and classical connections between the contemporary artist’s animation chamber, and the permanent collections of the National Gallery.

Born in British India in 1946, the year before Partition, contemporary artist Nalini Malani has always focussed on both ‘fractures’ and continuity. From paintings to animations, her ambitious practice has always challenged conventions - none more so than her new installation, in which she ‘desecrates’ well known works of art with her iPad, drawing out overlooked details, and immersing the viewer in her own perspectives.

As My Reality is Different moves from the Holburne Museum in Bath to London, curator Priyesh Mistry explains how Malani’s ‘endless paintings’ speak to historical continuities,

Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the National Gallery in London until 11 June 2023.

For more, listen to the artist Nalini Malani on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/74b0d8cf8b99c15ab9c2d3a97733c8ed

And read my article in gowithYamo:

WITH: Priyesh Mistry, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London, and a curator of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different.

ART: ‘The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Winnie Sze and Pim Arts, curators at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, carve out the connections between Dutch, Danish, and South African artists like Ernest Mancoba, and see how African masks and sculptures, encountered in European museums, shaped abstract-surrealism in the 20th century.

Cobra - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam - were three cities at the core of a pan-European political art movement, calling for freedom and common humanity in the wake of World War II. Drawing on cubism, expressionism, and surrealism, they shared Pablo Picasso’s attraction to African masks and sculpture. Yet, they worked between abstract and figurative art, some seeking to escape the exotification, othering, and orientalism of movements past.

Born in British-colonial South Africa in 1904, Ernest Mancoba didn’t ‘come into contact’ with African sculpture as art until he travelled to ethnographic and colonial museums in Paris and London. Along with artists like Sonia Ferlov and Egill Jacobsen, he became a leading figure in collaborative movements like Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), based in Denmark. Winnie Sze and Pim Arts curate two of three exhibitions celebrating 75 years of the Cobra art movement (1948-1951), which focus on Scandinavia. They detail the differences between African and Western sculpture, how Danish artists used satire and Degenerate Art in acts of resistance against the Nazi Empire, and why Denmark has been othered in the history of avant-garde art.

The three exhibitions of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art run at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands until 14 May 2023. For more, you can also read my review of Cobra 75 in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/a-triptych-of-danish-modernism-cobra-and-degenerate-art-in-denmark.

WITH: Pim Arts, curator of We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948. Winnie Sze, curator of Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov. Both exhibitions are part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art.

ART: Works from ‘We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948’.

IMAGE: Peter Tijhuis.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Design Museum curator Rachel Hajek makes sense of Ai Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects, from ancient Chinese porcelain to Lego bricks, and how the contemporary artist’s fascination with the history of making is itself making history.

One of the world’s most well-known living artists and activists, Ai Weiwei works across disciplines, from film and sculpture, to collection, curation, and archealogical excavation. But Making Sense is his first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and how traditional crafts and artefacts can help us re/consider what we value today. One of Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects features over 200,000 hand-crafted porcelain spouts from Song dynasty China, their sheer quantity a testament to the scale of mass-production in Asia, many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

Curator Rachel Hajek digs into Weiwei’s practice and politics, exploring tensions between the minor and the monumental, construction and destruction, and past and present. Plus, how the artist reimagines ‘Western masterpieces’ like Claude Monet’s Waterlilies with LEGO. to articulate his relationships with his father, a poet subjugated during the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese state today.

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum in London until 30 July 2023.

For more, read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/making-sense-ai-weiwei-at-the-design-museum

WITH: Rachel Hajek, Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, and a curator of Making Sense.

ART: ‘Spouts, Ai Weiwei (2023)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells, curators at the Freud Museum London, dig into the Austrian’s collection of ancient objects, and how archaeology shaped his approach to psychoanalysis in the 20th century.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) simultaneously pioneered both psychoanalysis and global antiquity.  Fascinated by classical cultures, he collected objects across space and time, from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, finding interconnections across the Mediterranean and Middle East. Freud challenged historical precedents - posing Moses as an Egyptian, not a Jew - but he also appropriated classical history to legitimate his practice, and reckon with ideas like the Oedipus Complex.

But above all, Freud saw the mind and conscious as ‘an archaeological site’. Likewise, Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells dig into his study to find the objects for Freud’s Antiquity, unearthing his complex position as both a product and critic of 19th century imperialism. They share how Freud challenged the Western ownership of both historical objects and knowledge, the parallels between individual and human history, why his writings reflect the Nazification of Europe before World War II, and how the violence of empire continues to impact our present.

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire runs at the Freud Museum London until 16 July 2023.

For more on Freud’s Asian objects, listen to Professor Craig Clunas, curator of Freud and China, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/44861b4a5e6a32380693ec6622210890

WITH: Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London (UCL). Daniel Orrells, Professor of Classics and Centre Director for Queer@Kings at King’s College London (KCL). They are co-curators are Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire.

ART: ‘Red-Figure Hydria, Greece (380-360BCE)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Could the state of state-lessness mean a more continental, inclusive sense of belonging? The contemporary Southeast and East Asian artists of the collective Kakilang certainly think so. Challenging their conflation as ‘Chinese’, their joint exhibition in London spans the historical migration routes of Vietnamese refugees, to audio maps of Taiwan, and post-Tsunami Japan - regions rarely considered by Western audiences, and rarely from local perspectives. Yet these diverse artworks really speak to similarities, rather than distinct identities, between Asian countries, connecting built and natural environments across the continent. Take Law Yuk-Mui’s 2021 video ‘River Atlas’, which follows the flows of rivers with the same name in Hong Kong and India, two former colonies in the British Empire.sh

Curator Ling Tan reveals how photographic art can refocus our attention from the coloniser/colonised relationship, onto common experiences between artists in Asia, in diasporas, and in the UK. They also speak of the role of language for the 46 million people who use Hokkien, and why their captions read in traditional Mandarin, not the simplified form common in China. Drawing on their own practice as an artist, we see how comforting foods could break down the stereotype of Asian countries as environmentally destructive - and why the exhibition combines new scaffolding and neo-Gothic architecture, to reconstruct shared colonial pasts.

State-less 無國界 runs at Two Temple Place in London until 9 April 2023. (You’ll find all the links in the episode notes.)

WITH: Ling Tan, curator of State-less 無國界. They are an artist and the Associate Artistic Director of Kakilang (formerly Chinese Arts Now, CAN), an annual festival which celebrates the work of artists from across the wide spectrum of East and Southeast Asian heritages.

ART: ‘River Atlas, Law Yuk-Mui (2021)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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