Suite (212)

This month, Juliet talks to authors Ewa Majewska and Kuba Szreder about how Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) intervened in art and culture following their election victory in December 2015, and what’s changed since Donald Tusk became Prime Minister on a pro-EU, centrist platform in 2023. They discuss PiS’s takeover of state television, appointment of numerous sympathisers within institutions such as Warsaw’s influential Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, and their manipulation of Poland’s complex 20th century history, culminating in the choice of conservative artist Ignacy Czwartos to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2024. They also talk about the protests against PiS’s anti-abortion laws and ‘LGBT-free zones’, Donald Tusk’s efforts to reverse some of these changes, and how left-wing cultural workers can respond to this depressingly familiar dynamic between the centre and the right.

In this edition of Suite (212), Juliet talks to former co-host Tom Overton about his long-awaited biography John Berger: From Life, published by Penguin. They discussed Tom’s encounter with the art critic, novelist, painter and poet Berger at the British Library, where he worked on Berger’s archives, and his approach to writing Berger’s biography. They also talked about how much Berger’s reputation rests on his seminal BBC television series Ways of Seeing (1972); Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G. and his decision to donate half the prize money to the Black Panthers; his ‘romantic Marxism’ and his responses to the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968; Berger’s staunch advocacy for Palestine; his consistent them of the relationship between the living and the dead; Berger’s later work amidst the end of cultural democracy, including his novel about the AIDS crisis, To the Wedding (1995); his works about migration and the peasantry; and the role of technology in Berger’s long life, from the advent of colour television to invention of the iPhone.

References for each programme are available to Patreon subscribers. To support the show for as little as £3 per month, go to https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212.

In our latest Session, Juliet talks to London-based Irish writer Keith Ridgway about his three most recent novels, Hawthorn & Child (2012), A Shock (2021) and Dooneen (2026), recently published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. They discussed the differences between novels and short story collections, and how much they matter; Keith’s fragmentary plots and open-ended use of the ‘detective’ genre; the way Irish ‘experimental’ writers are often read with a national lineage that begins with Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien; the way reformist and radical politics, from the Easter Rising to Corbynism, have been crushed by the British Establishment, and how that comes into Keith’s work; and the pressure on writers not to be pessimistic amidst dark times, and how Keith balances hope and despair in his novels.

In one of our most meta episodes to date, Juliet also asked Keith about his reticence about self-promotion and the obligation for contemporary writers to publicise themselves on social media, and about his scepticism regarding interviews with authors.

A full list of references is available to Suite (212) subscribers. To support us on Patreon for as little as £3 per month, please go to www.patreon.com/c/suite212.

In our latest session, Juliet talks to Kyiv-based filmmaker and writer Oleksiy Radynski about four of his works – his feature-length documentary Infinity According to Florian (202x), his two works about the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s infamous nuclear plant, Chornobyl 22 (2023) and the longer Special Operation (2025), and his docu-fiction Where Russia Ends (2024), using found footage from the Science Film Studio in Kyiv.

They discussed the project to save modernist buildings in Kyiv and the contradictions of the fight to preserve futurist architecture, as well as the experience of working with Soviet artist, musicologist and architect Florian Yuriev; how Oleksiy sourced the CCTV and other footage that made up his two Chornobyl films; the experience of working in Kyiv since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began; and the importance of understanding the nature of Russian colonial expansion and imperialist in the east, and its parallels with the occupation of the Americas.

For a full list of references from this episode, please subscribe via https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212 for as little as £3.50 per month.

In our latest Session, Juliet talks to film director, visual artist and composer Imran Perretta about his new feature film Ish (2025), due to be released in the UK and Ireland on 31 July, as well as his short film the destructors (2020) and his installation A Riot in Three Acts, first exhibited at Somerset House in 2024. They talked about how the works were shaped by Thatcherism and neoliberalism, the War on Terror and the genocide in Gaza, institutional racism and police profiling, as well as how the works combine formal experimentation with deeply personal narratives, bringing in cinematic influences such as Abbas Kiarostami, Steve McQueen and Cristian Mungiu.

Juliet talks to poet and writer Lotte L.S. about Red Herring Press, which Lotte set up in 2020 to print, publish and distribute local writing in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. They discuss what Red Herring Press does; how it grew out of the COVID-19 lockdown; Lotte’s idea of ‘amateurising professionalism’ and the advantages of working outside a literary market; how cheap commercial rents and lack of affordable housing shape the Press, and the town’s arts scene more broadly; the Press’ Creative Writing workshops and publications; their membership model and how other local groups use their space; the town’s relationship with Norwich, a designated UNESCO City of Literature with the National Centre for Writing and the famous Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia; Great Yarmouth’s past as a fishing town, its recent history of deindustrialisation and migration, and how their publications draw on this; and Lotte’s long essay An Economy of Starlings (2024), responding to the election of Rupert Lowe as a Reform MP in 2024, and foundation of the far-right Restore Britain.

To subscribe to Red Herring Press and/or buy their publications, go to https://www.redherringpress.org/

A full list of references is available to Suite (212) subscribers. To support us on Patreon for as little as £3 per month, please go to https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212.

In our latest Session, Juliet talks to William Raban about his five decades in film, and especially his engagement with London, from his time in the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative in the early 1970s to his most recent work in 2020. They discussed William’s origins in the Structural and Materialist movement of the Seventies, and his use of different film formats from 8mm to digital; how he made his feature-length Thames Film (1986), narrated by John Hurt and shown on Channel 4; his A13 (1994) and Island Race (1996), made partly in response to the election of a British National Party councillor on the Isle of Dogs in east London; how authors such as Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot have come into his work; and the difficulty of making films in the wake of the atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere.

A full list of references, with links is available to Patreon subscribers – go to https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212 to subscribe to Suite (212) for as little as £3.50 a month.

In the first of our Sessions for five years, Juliet speaks to artist, filmmaker, performer and art psychotherapist Jill Westwood (b. 1960) about her work in the early 1980s and its rediscovery after it was included in Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 in 2023. They also discussed how Jill’s practice was formed in the Black Country, where she encountered punk as a teenager, at art school in Stourbridge, and then in Sheffield amidst the city’s post-punk music scene, with deindustrialisation, misogyny and the Yorkshire Ripper in the background. We talked about her photography, performances and films, made as a student at the Royal College of Art in London between 1979 and 1984, how her art intersected with the queer and fetish scenes, and her subsequent work as an art psychotherapist in Australia and London. Finally, we talked about how group exhibition, Protect Me from What I Know with Sohrab Hura and Adam Lewis Jacob at Glasgow International, and how people respond to her work decades after its creation.

For a full list of references, as well as links to Juliet’s Frieze article on Jill’s work, please go to https://patreon.com/suite212 and subscribe for as little as £3.50 per month.

Since Labour returned to power in the 2024 UK General Election, announcing their landslide victory with a speech at the Tate Modern, little has been made of their cultural policy. In this free episode, Juliet talks to Dr David Hesmondhalgh – Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the University of Leeds, and the author of Culture, Economy and Politics: The Case of New Labour (2015) and five editions of The Cultural Industries – about Labour’s approach to art and culture, looking at their policies and the ideology behind them.

Looking primarily at England as cultural policy is devolved in the rest of the UK, Juliet and David discussed the move away from Jeremy Corbyn’s arts policies; Labour’s Plan for the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries and the 2024 manifesto; the centrality of local government and education to cultural policy; Margaret Hodge’s review of Arts Council England; the timidity of Labour’s approach and the limits of their idea of ‘creative industries’; how this has differed (or not) from the Conservative and New Labour governments before them; and the need to shift the emphasis from financial returns to the intrinsic social and cultural importance of the arts.

Subscribe to us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212 for £3.50 per month to get a full list of references from this episode, as well as bonus episodes, Juliet’s archived articles, and more.

Suite (212) returns after five years – and true to form, it’s with an episode analysing the current political and cultural climate in the UK and beyond, and why we brought the show back into it. There’s a twist, however, as frequent guest Owen Hatherley asks regular host Juliet Jacques the questions, about why Suite (212) ended in December 2021, what’s changed since, and what the programme might do differently this time around.

Along the way, we talked about the differences between Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski as leaders of political projects and their respective tastes shape them; how the left reacted to the defeats of 2019-24 and the cultural effects of their withdrawal; the decline of the US as a cultural hegemon, and the rise of Chinese and Korean culture in the west; the international far-right attacks on the arts and the parts of society that uphold them; the concept of ‘counter-counterculture’; the impact of developments from the genocide in Gaza to the coming of AI on the arts; the crushing disappointment of Starmer’s Labour and their lack of interest in culture; how ‘stanning’ sells artists short; and some ideas for future episodes, ending with an appeal for our listeners to get involved in shaping its new direction.

To subscribe to Suite (212) for as little as £3.50 per month, please visit https://www.patreon.com/c/suite212.