Dr. Peter Good traces the flows of Persian wine culture through precolonial India into Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, via the Queen Anne Wine Bottle from Shiraz.

No other alcoholic drink has inspired - or intoxicated - our imaginations quite like wine. Long considered the perfect gift from visitors, this striking sapphire blue bottle from Shiraz was presented to the English Queen Anne in 1708 - one of many bought and sold by the English from Persia, now Iran. Perhaps surprisingly common, this artefact of the Safavid Empire's multimillion pound wine industry reveals early modern Europe's obsession with Persian wine, from its mythical properties as an elixir of life, to the courtly manners of its taste and consumption. But it also speaks to attitudes towards non-European and Islamic powers before the rise of formal empires in the Indian Ocean. Far from imposing their 'superior' culture upon local powers, European elites adopted and mimicked the practices of their Asian counterparts, from cultivating grapevines and vineyards, to the paradisic Persian gardens of the English East India Company. Since swallowed into existing European tastes, the Queen Anne bottle brings Iran's unique viticulture to light, forcing us to reconsider our privileging of Western wines in popular culture and museum collections today.

PRESENTER: Dr. Peter Good, Lecturer in Early Modern Europe and the Islamic World at the University of Kent. He specialises on cross-cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Europeans and Asian states in the Indian Ocean. He is the author of The East India Company in Persia: Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022.

ART: Queen Anne Wine Bottle, Shiraz (1708).

IMAGE: 'Saddle Flask - Type II PC-078 Queen Anne Flask'. 

SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the Turner Contemporary in Margate, for their latest exhibition Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning. Artist Ingrid Pollard explores her career of photographing Black experiences, beyond the city and urban environment, to the English countryside.

Since the 1980s, artist Ingrid Pollard has explored how identities of Britishness and Blackness are socially constructed, through history and the rural landscape. Drawing on British and Caribbean photographic archives, her works cross boundaries in photography, sculpture, film and sound, confronting complex, often racist histories. She discusses how pre-Windrush propaganda films inspired works like Bow Down and Very Low -123 (2021), her influences from Maya Angelou to Muhammad Ali, and exposing those Black experiences often 'hidden in plain sight'.

Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning runs at the Turner Contemporary in Margate until 25 September 2022.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Malangatana Ngwenya and Althea McNish.

PRESENTER: Ingrid Pollard, Guyanese-born British artist, photographer, and researcher. She uses portraiture and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs like Britishness, race, and sexuality. She was Stuart Hall Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex (2018), and has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2022.

ART: Self Evident, Ingrid Pollard (1992).

IMAGE: 'Self Evident'.

SOUNDS: Water Features.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the William Morris Gallery, in London, for their latest exhibition Althea McNish: Colour is Mine. Co-curator Rose Sinclair unwrap McNish's bold textile designs, and Caribbean and British colonial connections, through her infamous Batchelor Girl's room installation

Althea McNish was one of the UK’s most innovative textile artists. Born in Trinidad, she moved to the UK in 1950, and became the first designer of Caribbean descent to achieve international recognition. Her bestselling wallpapers, interior designs, furnishing and fashion fabrics were commissioned by the likes of Liberty, Dior, and Hull Traders. Co-curator Rose Sinclair talks about meeting the artist, who was both a 'Citizen of the World' and part of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and McNish's transformative impact as a Black woman defining British design.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Malangatana Ngwenya and Ingrid Pollard.

PRESENTER: Rose Sinclair, co-curator of Colour is Mine, and Lecturer in Design Education at Goldsmiths University.

ART: Batchelor Girl's Room, Althea McNish/Studio Nyali (1966/2022).

IMAGE: 'Althea McNish: Colour is Mine'.

SOUNDS: The Up Beat.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the Tate Modern, in London, for their latest exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders. Returning to EMPIRE LINES, Richard Gray joins curator Carine Harmand to explore the works of Mozambican artist, Malangatana Ngwenya. Plus, curator Keith Shiri unveils Malangatana's restored mural at the all-new Africa Centre in London.

White gnashing teeth, wide eyes, and clawed hands of humans and animals dominate Malangatana’s Untitled (1967). Otherwise titled How Long Will This Go On?, the overwhelming oil work is a horrifying visualisation of the violence endured by his native Mozambique, as it struggled for independence from Portugal's Estado Novo until 1975.

A prominent political figure, Malangatana joined the Mozambique liberation movement FRELIMO in 1964, and was imprisoned by the Portuguese secret police. Neither a propagandist nor a 'pamphleteer', his works nevertheless embody his own politics and biography, from his artist's block after prison, to his efforts to memorialise the 'Mozambican personality'. Practicing in both colonial and post-colonial Mozambique, he straddled empire lines across Africa, contesting the notion of Europeanisation as civilisation.

Set against the exhibition and sounds of Mozambique musicians, curator Carine Harmand and Richard Gray reveal the two way flows between European modernism and Africanist art, and how the artist appropriated and benefitted from surrealism's international network. Plus, film curator Keith Shiri shares his experiences with the artist at the recent reopening of the Africa Centre.

Surrealism Beyond Borders runs at the Tate Modern in London until 29 August 2022.

The Africa Centre in London reopened on 9 June 2022.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Althea McNish and Ingrid Pollard.

PRESENTERS: Carine Harmand, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and of Surrealism Beyond Borders. Richard Gray, postgraduate research student at SOAS University of London. He was the co-curator of Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution at the Brunei Gallery, and formerly a 'cooperante internacionalista' (internationalist co-worker), contracted as a teacher by the Mozambican government in the late 1970s. Keith Shiri, film curator, founder, and director of Africa at the Pictures, the London African Film Festival, and the Africa Media Centre at the University of Westminster. He is the curator of the Icons of the Africa Centre Series at The Africa Centre, and is a BFI London Film Festival Programme Advisor.

ART: Untitled, Malangatana Ngwenya (1967).

IMAGE: 'Untitled'. 

SOUNDS: Adlina Tatana // Alda Ngwenya, Vasco Sambo.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Sonal Khullar sounds out how the Long Partition shapes Indian and Pakistani identities, through Bani Abidi's 2016 audio installation, Memorial to Lost Words.

Memorial to Lost Words has been seen and heard across Edinburgh, Berlin, Sharjah, and Chicago. But its installation at Lahore Museum in Pakistan, as part of the city’s inaugural Lahore Biennale in 2018, marked a kind of homecoming. Bani Abidi’s eight-channel soundscape recalls over a million Indian soldiers who served in the British Indian Army during World War I, through Punjabi music, an oversized statue of Queen Victoria, and the English-translated letters of those who never returned home. A counter-monument, it remembers ordinary civilians and soldiers, rather than the generals and rulers celebrated by architects like Edwin Lutyens. It also exposes the lingering imperial legacies of literature, like Rudyard Kiping's Kim and the Zam-Zammah, and how museum collections, like people, were partitioned between post-colonial India and Pakistan.

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Nalini Iyer.

PRESENTER: Dr. Sonal Khullar, W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations (2015) and completing a book manuscript The Art of Dislocation on conflict, collaboration, and contemporary art from South Asia.

ART: Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum, Bani Abidi (2016/2018)

IMAGE: 'Memorial to Lost Words'.

SOUNDS: Bani Abidi, Saad Sultan, Ali Aftab Saeed, Harsakhian.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Nalini Iyer rereads South Indian and diasporic experiences of Partition, through Balachandra Rajan's 1958 novel, The Dark Dancer.

Born in British India but educated at Cambridge University, V. S. Krishnan finally returns to his home country on the eve of its independence in 1947. But after many years cut off from his family and culture, this South Indian civil servant has become a typical colonial product - the 'brown-skinned Englishman' and bureaucrat idealised by the likes of Lord Macauley. Krishnan's relationships with women reveal other Indias - of Gandhian independence and Hindu nationalism - that he has never known. Witnessing the bewilderment and gendered violence of the Long Partition through the eyes of the civil servant, writer Balachandra Rajan explores how the colonial experience caused existential identity crises. Drawing from his indirect experience, Rajan's novel platforms the perspectives of those diasporic South Indians, seemingly unaffected by the civil conflict, and how Britain too was irrevocably changed by the imperial experience.

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Sonal Khullar.

PRESENTER: Dr. Nalini Iyer, Professor of English at Seattle University and Editor-in-Chief of South Asian Review.

ART: The Dark Dancer, Balachandra Rajan (1958).

IMAGE: 'Balachandra Rajan'.

SOUNDS: G. Las.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Piotr Puchalski depicts interwar Poland's imperial aspirations, through the Maritime and Colonial League's 1938 poster, Colonial Days: We Demand Colonies For Poland.

Facing economic crises and the onset of World War II, Poland looked to Africa as a source of material wealth, potential place of alternative appeasement, and site of refuge for its Jewish population. With their abundance of 'exotic' fruits and peoples, propaganda posters advertised Poland's Colonial Days events in April 1938, improving public awareness of places like Cameroon, Madagascar, and Liberia, and bolstering national support for elites' ever-shifting visions for colonialism. Colouring Eastern European perceptions of Africa, this poster highlights how colonialism was a truly global phenomenon, attracting the interest of powers without colonies of their own. Today, Poland is more often considered a victim of imperial exploitation – most famously by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - than a historic empire or colonial power. But Colonial Days reveals persistent Polish cultural and socioeconomic insecurities, and how European political and artistic trends, from racial pseudoscience to modernism, were moulded by colonial interactions.

PRESENTER: Dr. Piotr Puchalski, Assistant Professor of Modern History at the Pedagogical University of Kraków. He specialises in the history of Poland, colonial empires, international relations, and contemporary tourism. He is the author of Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939, published by Routledge in 2022.

ART: Colonial Days: We Demand Colonies For Poland Poster, Maritime and Colonial League (1938).

IMAGE: 'Colonial Days Poster'.

SOUNDS: Gary War.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Hooda Shawa rewrites the fairytales in England's 18th century country houses, exposing the Indian and Palestinian foundations of Derbyshire's Kedleston Hall.

Nestled amidst acres of rolling hills, Derbyshire's Kedleston Hall boasts artistic masterpieces, Peacock dresses, and even an 'Eastern Museum' - all furnished from a fairytale. But this neo-classical mansion has a darker past, as the ancestral home of the English Curzon family, including Lord Curzon, who served as the Viceroy of India (1899-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-1924) in the British Mandate in Palestine. Now part of the National Trust's Colonial Countryside Project, Kedleston Hall speaks to the hidden connections between historic slavery and plantation ownership, and contemporary wealth and political power - including the collapse of India's textile industry, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement today. In the wake of her own childhood experiences, Hooda Shawa explores what Kedleston Hall means for her own British Kuwaiti heritage and, beyond the Raj, what Palestine's lesser-known occupation reveals about its continued struggle for independence now.

PRESENTER: Hooda Shawa Qaddumi, Founder and Managing Director of TAQA: Toward Achieving Quality in Art, a Kuwait-based company that produces and promotes independent cultural and artistic initiatives. They write for projects including 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object.

ART: Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (18th Century).

IMAGE: 'Kedleston Hall'. 

SOUNDS: Ergo Phizmiz.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Stephanie Porras carves out the Chinese connection between Spain's colonies in Mexico City and Manila in the Philippines, in a 17th century ivory statue of St. Michael the Archangel.

With gently curving wings, the figure of St. Michael the Archangel has stood watch over Mexico City, the former Spanish colony of New Spain, since the 17th century. But this particular statue was actually produced far across the Pacific, in the smaller Spanish colony of the Philippines by Chinese or 'Sangley' sculptors, themselves immigrants to the archipelago. Whilst initially produced to furnish Catholic churches for the recently converted, such statues were quickly appropriated by those seeking to monetise mass production in Asia. Carved from African imported ivory, and modelled on artworks from the Spanish Flanders, this St. Michael from Manila embodies the intertwining of devotional and transpacific trading networks within the global Spanish empire. Rather than cultural hybrids, these statues challenge the very concept of 'Chineseness', highlighting how artists appropriated imperial Spain's territorial and mercantile ambitions for their own ends.

PRESENTER: Dr. Stephanie Porras, Associate Professor and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University. She is the author of The First Viral Images, published by Pennsylvania State Press in 2023.

ART: Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Basilica of Guadalupe (17th Century).

IMAGE: 'Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Chinese Hispano-Philippine Carvers'.

SOUNDS: The Anchorites.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Michele Lamprakos reconstructs the imperial flows of Islamic and Byzantine architecture from 8th century Spain, through the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, or the Mezquita.

A strange, hybrid building dominates the southern Spanish city of Córdoba. Part mosque, part cathedral, the Mezquita was first constructed by the early Islamic Umayyad dynasty - then seized, 'purified,' and consecrated as a Christian church in the 13th century. This infamous Christianised mosque, complete with crucero, epitomised the imperial 'Christian universe' of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg dynasty's victory over Islam. Still, much of the Islamic fabric was politically preserved – and even reconstructed - in testament to Spain's long history of religious rivalry and reconciliation. Tracing these unending cycles of Christianisation and re-Islamification reveals Spain's neoimperial ambitions in northern Africa, and how the Mezquita remained a political tool through the 20th century Republican General Franco to today.

PRESENTER: Dr. Michele Lamprakos, Associate Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland-College Park.

ART: The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba (8th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Mezquita, Cornelia Steffens'.

SOUNDS: Gnawledge.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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