Barbara London Calling

Welcome to Barbara London Calling! In the series introduction, host Barbara London explains why she created the series and how she sees media art as the furthest reaching, most innovative art of our time. Stay tuned for more episodes featuring new conversations with artists from around the world.

For the first episode of "Barbara London Calling," host Barbara London speaks with Anri Sala, an internationally acclaimed artist from Tirana, Albania. Born in 1974, Sala eloquently orchestrates sound in space, with a keen focus on the underlying politics of contemporary life. Incorporating what he calls “a distrust of language,” his multimedia installations investigate the role of language and memory in our social and political histories.

In the second episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Zina Saro-Wiwa, an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, photography, sculpture, sound and, sometimes, food. As an artist, Zina has said she wants to expand the meanings of African-ness and, ultimately, to decolonize the idea of self. Born in Nigeria, Zina grew up in the UK and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she brought with her a love for Nollywood movies from Nigeria's fertile film industry.

For the third episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Hong Kong–based artist Samson Young, one of the most talented artists investigating sound as art. Samson works in a broad range of disciplines: music composition, performance, installation, sound, video, drawing, and design. His artwork is elegant yet razor-sharp, and sometimes political in nature, as he addresses the vicissitudes of language and history.

In the fourth episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Paul Pfeiffer, the American artist well known for utilizing sophisticated digital technologies to scrutinize the role mass media plays in shaping contemporary consciousness. Born in Honolulu, Paul now lives and works in New York, where he investigates the relationship between sporting events, racial politics, and what he calls "spectacle and spectatorship."

In the fifth episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Cao Fei, a Beijing-based artist interested in how the virtual world contradicts and coincides with reality. Working across film, digital media, photography, sculpture, installation and performance, her starting point is China and how people—especially young people—navigate the rapidly changing social and technological landscape.

In the sixth episode of "Barbara London Calling," host Barbara London speaks with Rachel Rossin, a Brooklyn-based artist investigating the boundaries between reality, hyper-reality and the imaginary. Born in 1987, Rachel grew up in South Florida, where she lived in the shadow of hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters. This sense of anxiety—a kind of dread for nature’s ferocious side—still colors Rachel’s work. By age 8, Rachel was already painting and writing computer code, and she ev...

In the seventh episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, two London-based artists and collaborators with a background in installation art and the moving image. Music has always played an important role in their work, culminating in their 2014 feature film, "20,000 Days on Earth," a musical docudrama starring the iconic singer/songwriter Nick Cave. Iain and Jane began their fruitful collaboration as students at Goldsmiths in London, where they saw ...

In the eighth episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Jana Winderen, a Norwegian artist who straddles the fields of art, music and science. Her work encourages us not just to hear, but to listen, as she explores the aural dimensions of faraway landscapes. Winderen travels to the ends of the Earth, often alone, where she records nearly imperceptible sounds using an arsenal of sophisticated recording gear. She might drop a microphone inside the crevice of a gigantic glacier or ...

In the ninth episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade. Living in Recife on the eastern coast of Brazil, Jonathas works across video and photography, with an interest in how language can render truths as well as untruths, and how that same language can liberate or marginalize its subjects.

In the tenth episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with artist Bani Haykal. Born in 1985 and based in Singapore, Bani straddles the world of language, art and music, as he picks apart the nuances of our technology-filled lives. His work explores the power of commonalities across different languages—but also the deeper power of incongruencies across those same languages.

In the eleventh episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Brooklyn-based artist Marina Rosenfeld. As a composer, Marina orchestrated a performance art piece called "Shear Frost Orchestra," which featured 17 women each playing an electric guitar using nothing but bottles of nail polish. Sitting in a line, the women were directed to play their guitars in a series of choreographed actions: drop, hop, drone, scratch, and "A" for anything. Marina is currently artist in residence at ...

For the twelfth episode of "Barbara London Calling," Barbara speaks with Didem Pekün, a Turkish–British artist now based in Berlin. Didem's lyrical video installations interrogate ideas of identity, displacement and statelessness, as she "changes languages, changes SIM cards, changes cities" in what she calls a "perpetual effort to reach and keep my people close to me."

Season finale! For the thirteenth episode of "Barbara London Calling"—the final episode of Season 1—Barbara changes things up. After 12 conversations with artists, for this special episode she speaks with a curator: namely, Chrissie Iles, a leading authority on contemporary art and the moving image. As the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Chrissie is helping to build new spaces and platforms for artists to continue their exploration of technology and c...

It's Barbara London Calling 2.0! In the trailer Season 2, curator and author Barbara London lays out her vision for another 12 conversations with artists from all over the world, each working at the forefront of technology and creativity.

In the season premiere of Barbara London Calling 2.0, Barbara speaks with boundary-breaking artist Auriea Harvey. An internet art pioneer, Auriea was a member of the legendary collective hell.com. She speaks with Barbara about the early days of internet art, the role of video games and augmented reality, and how NFTs combine her twin passions for digital art and sculpture.

In the second episode of Season 2.0, Barbara speaks with software-savvy artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, whose immersive installations have been seen in the Venice Biennale and in the Berlin megaclub Berghain. Jakob tells Barbara about his first forays into Unreal Engine, plus the sights and sounds—and smells—he discovered in his adventurous field recordings.

The third episode of Season 2.0 features a conversation with artist Lorraine O'Grady, whose monumental career was recently showcased at the Brooklyn Museum in her first-ever retrospective, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And.” Revisiting her trenchant performances and artwork from the past 60 years, Lorraine speaks with Barbara about changing dynamics in the art world and the struggles she faced trying to reveal the art world to itself.

In the fourth episode of "Barbara London Calling" 2.0, Barbara speaks with Australian artist Tracey Moffat. A true innovator, Tracey began her career as an experimental filmmaker; she has since shown all over the world, including at the Venice Biennale. Her unflinching artwork is a mix of childhood memories, popular culture, history, film, television, literature and dreams, as she uses fiction to comment on her own personal history and on serious issues of social history and the volatile poli...

In the fifth episode of "Barbara London Calling" 2.0, Barbara speaks with Amar Kanwar, an Indian artist whose masterful films and multimedia work explore the politics of power, violence and justice. Born in 1964 in New Delhi, where he is still based, Amar was a researcher for occupational health and safety in the coal mining belt of central India. He turned to art making in 1990, with work that weaves together critical issues of indigenous rights, gender, religious fundamentalism and ecology.