In Talks With

Danielle Radojcin talks to Sam Lackey, director at the Liverpool Biennial and the UK’s largest festival of contemporary art. The biennial, a festival which happens every two years in a city around the world, and often in disused spaces, is the chance to revitalise the city it’s taking place in. The 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial, curated by ‎Khanyisile Mbongwa, addressed the history of the city of Liverpool and its connections to the slave trade, and acted as a call for  “ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing.” Sam looks back at the highs and lows of this year's fair, and talks about her vision for it moving forward. 

https://www.biennial.com/

@danielleradojcin

Since the 70s, photographer Janette Beckman has documented youth culture in street scenes on both sides of the Atlantic, capturing musicians such as Dr Dre, Pete Townsend and Paul Weller, just before they hit the big time. Captivated by street style, her photojournalism has caught on camera everything from punks and rockers in London to the  gangs of East Los Angeles.

Janette grew up in London and spent time as a youth working for some of the most preeminent music and youth culture magazines of the day, such as Melody Maker and The Face. In the 80s she moved to New York, where she still lives today, and where she made a name for herself documenting the nascent hip hop scene. A career working for major magazine titles and prestigious subjects followed. More recently, she has spent time in Paris photographing the Christian Dior collections as well as documenting Black Lives Matter demonstrations. She exhibits prolifically, has published several books, and recently took part in a talk at Fotografiska celebrating women in hip hop. 

Danielle Radojcin speaks to Janette about her life as an itinerant female documentary photographer, as well as what it was like going to the  Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park after Brian Jones died; her first assignment photographing Siouxsie and the Banshees; and how it feels having her work displayed at The National Portrait Gallery. 

janettebeckman.com

Photo: © Janette Beckman

Logo artwork: Patrick Waugh

The British fashion brand S.S. Daley, designed by Steven Stokey-Daley, makes clothes for men and women that celebrate traditional tropes of English heritage while also playfully subverting embedded ideas around queerness and class. And it's struck a chord: Anna Wintour has given him her approval, Sir Ian McKellen has walked in his show, and Harry Styles has worn his clothes. Steven grew up in Liverpool and studied at the University of Westminster, after which he did internships at Tom Ford and Alexander McQueen. He set up S.S. Daley in 2020, and in 2022 it won the prestigious LVMH prize.  Ahead of his first solo women's show and the relaunch of his retail website,  founder and designer Steven Stokey-Daley speaks to this episode's guest host, the journalist and creative director Simon Chilvers, about being inspired by David Hockney and Kate Bush and how his label fits into today's fashion landscape. 

Photo: Joshua Tarn

Logo: Patrick Waugh

Sound: Warren Borg

Danielle heads to Somerset House in London to speak with Aindrea Emelife, the Nigerian-British curator and art historian. Specialising in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on questions around colonial and decolonial histories in Africa, transnationalism and the politics of representation, her writing includes the book A Brief History of Protest Art, and in 2021, she was appointed to the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm. She is currently Curator of Modern and Contemporary at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), in Edo State, Nigeria. This summer she has curated an exhibition at Somerset House in London called Black Venus, which brings together the work of 18 Black women and non-binary artists to explore the othering, fetishisation and reclamation of narratives around Black femininity. The exhibition examines the complex narratives of Black womanhood through the influences of three perceived archetypes: the Hottentot Venus, the Sable Venus, and the Jezebel, and reframes stereotypical notions of black womanhood through the work of contemporary artists including Sonia Boyce, Carrie Mae Weems, Amber Pinkerton and Lorna Simpson. Aindrea talks about how she became interested in the history of art, and why she felt this was an important theme to address. 

Moki Cherry was a Swedish artist who lived between 1943 and 2009 and who made a name for herself initially through a two-decades long artistic collaboration with her husband, the Jazz musician Don Cherry, and then later as an artist in her own right, developing an expansive and collaborative practice across textile, sculpture, painting, drawing, writing, collage, and video. As a mother -  her children are the musicians Neneh Cherry and Eagle Eye Cherry - she found a way of working her art around running a household, saying, “I survived by taking a creative attitude to daily life and chores." An exhibition of her work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London celebrates Cherry’s exploration of where art and life meet, her collaborative and interdisciplinary practice, and her inventive resolve in the face of gendered challenges working both as an artist and mother.  

ICA director Bengi Ünsal explains why she decided to feature a Moki Cherry show, and Naima Karlsson, Moki’s granddaughter and an archivist and coordinator for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry Archive, delves into their personal relationship, what she was like as a person, her individualistic beliefs and how it all fed into her work.

Further reading:

https://mokicherry.com/

Danielle goes on a studio visit with the artist and fashion designer, Richard Malone. Richard was born in Ireland in 1990. He studied at Central Saint Martins and after graduating became a name to watch on the London fashion scene in the 2010s. His work has been recognised for its sensitivity towards the environment. As well as being awarded the prestigious LVMH Grand Prix scholarship  and Deutsche Bank's Award for Fashion, he has won the Woolmark Prize for creating a fully biodegradable collection. The intervening years have seen his practise become more art-focused and this year he was the winner of The Golden Fleece Award for Visual Art, Ireland’s largest and most prestigious award for contemporary art. As well as his working-class upbringing in Wexford, rural Southeast Ireland, his work explores ideas of queerness,and otherness through sculpture, performance, textiles and installation. For 2023, he created a dance performance for the opening of the Hayward Gallery’s Dear Earth - Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis exhibition, and has a large site-specific piece on display at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Danielle visited Richard at his studio in London to discuss his "radical and optimistic" work.

Further reading: 

Richard Malone on Instagram

Hayward Gallery

Royal Academy of Arts

How can a physical space impact an artist’s work? Danielle travels to Charleston, that famous home in the rolling Sussex hills of South East England, which was home to the Bloomsbury Set during the First and Second World Wars  and which still attracts fans of the works of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell their friends who stayed there, and which continues to be held up as a beacon of artistic and sexual freedom. This summer, the  space plays host  to an exhibition of the artists George and Betty Woodman, a husband and wife team of artists, who, although not contemporaneous with the Bloomsbury Group (Betty lived from 1930 - 2018 and George from  1932 - 2017) nonetheless share in the ideal of embracing  a life filled with creativity in a home away from the hustle and bustle of the city - in George and Betty’s case, leaving New York for their farmhouse in Antella, just outside of Florence in Italy.  To discuss Betty and George, and the impact of their surroundings in which they worked, as well as their daughter, the late photographer Francesca Woodman, Danielle speaks to Lissa McClure, Executive Director of the Woodman Family Foundation, and Emily Hill, Acting Head of Exhibitions at Charleston.

Further reading:

Charleston for more about Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and the wider Bloomsbury Group. 

 The Woodman Family Foundation for more information about Betty Woodman, George Woodman and their daughter, the photographer Francesca Woodman. 

To contact In Talks With host Danielle Radojcin with comments and suggestions, please head to https://www.instagram.com/danielleradojcin/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielleradojcin/

Anthony Caro is a giant of British architecture, who designed the London Millennium Footbridge spanning the Thames between St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate Modern, who worked with Henry Moore, and who, with his vision and restless drive, broke through the stagnation of the art world in post-war Britain. A major exhibition of Anthony Caro’s work is currently on view at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery in Ealing, West London, itself a landmark of the British cultural landscape. Over tea in her her Pitzhanger Manor -adjacent office, the gallery's director, Clare Gough, discusses with host Danielle Radojcin the way the work in the exhibition complements the space around it and opens up new ideas around Caro’s work.

Image: Anthony Caro in his Camden Town studio
Photo by Nicholas Sinclair © The Anthony Caro Centre

“I like to break and remake things.” Calling himself-medium-agnostic, London-based British-Pakistani artist Shezad Dawood interweaves stories, realities and symbolism to create richly layered artworks, spanning painting, textiles, sculpture, film and digital media. The breadth of Dawood's output is quite astounding, and his ability to jump across an omniversal divide is worth the time spent listening to this alone. Dawood currently has a solo exhibition of ambitious new work entitled ‘Night in the Garden of Love’ at Wiels art centre in Brussels. This new body of work is inspired in part by the music, writings and art of the late legendary jazz musician Yusef Lateef, who coined the term auto-physio-psychic music to describe music that comes from the mental, physical and spiritual self, and with whose work Dawood felt an intense connection. Ahead of this exhibition, Danielle visited Dawood at his studio in Hackney, East London, where he showed her his latest work and discussed his extensive vintage textiles collection; his collaboration with the British fashion designer Priya Ahluwalia; his thoughts on NFTs; and how he’s working to support his passion for marine conservation through one of his manifold creative partnerships.