EMPIRE LINES

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 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.

WITH: Zineb Sedira, Paris and London-based artist, who also works in Algeria. Working across 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.

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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 global 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 1901 anti-imperial satire, Pio connects these local and global histories. With works spanning engraving, sculpture, and jewellery, 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 - often marginalised, ignored, or forgotten. With an etching of Prince Giolo or the ‘Painted Prince’, a 17th century slave depicted by John Savage, Pio outlines why his practice is anchored around the body. We also look at two reconstructed tiaras, which 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 his work alongside others, like the Filipino American artist and art historian Carlos Villa, plus the politics, collections, and textiles of Pacita Abad, his aunt. He details his use of monumental media like marble and bronze, ‘the material of history’. Pio explains his approach to ‘diasporic objects’, not things, but travelling ‘networks of relationships’, which challenge binaries between the East and West, and historic and contemporary experiences - thus locating himself within Oxford’s 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 in Llandudno, for Artes Mundi 10 in Wales.

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

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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 1990, 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. Read more in my article for Tate Research: tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/hyundai-tate-research-centre-transnational/we-are-eagles-outi-pieski-and-maree-clarke

- 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.

On Sonia Ferlov Mancoba, hear Cobra Museum curators Winnie Sze and Pim Arts on We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948.

On long exposures, hear photographer Hélène Amouzou and curator Bindi Vora on Voyages (2023).

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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).

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 in Arawa, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. Taloi is the curator of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania: Latai Taumoepeau, Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta at Ocean Space, Venice (2024), and 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.

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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.

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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, India (1850-Now)’.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines