EMPIRE LINES

Contemporary artist Karanjit Panesar recasts stories of migrant labourers from Punjab working in British industrial foundries, exploring constructs of memory, and national myths in metal, through his film installation, Furnace Fruit (2024). Karanjit Panesar: Furnace Fruit runs at Leeds Art Gallery until 15 June 2025, the second Collections in Dialogue co-commission between Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library in London. Find more from Bradford Industrial Museum through Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture. For more about artifice and film, hear Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum at their exhibition, It Will End in Tears (2024), at the Barbican in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6e9a8b8725e8864bc4950f259ea89310 And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum-barbican For more about Ibrahim Mahama’s 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives to reconstruct railway lines, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist’s episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 For more about Pakistani and South Asian diasporic communities in Birmingham, and domestic labour in the Midlands and ‘Black Country’, listen to artist Osman Yousefzada on Queer Feet (2023) at Charleston in Firle: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6ca95c67d24936cff9d2d478f4450cf2 And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/osman-yousefzada-at-charleston-in-firle PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠ And Twitter: ⁠⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Tanoa Sasraku unearths complex relations with British landscapes and natural resources, connecting environments from the north coast of Scotland to South West England, and flagging colonial extractivism in Ghana, through their series of Terratypes (2022-Now). Tanoa Sasraku’s Terratypes (2022-Now) capture specific sites across Britain. Constructed from layers of newsprint paper, and foraged natural pigments, these ‘ultimate drawings’ are hybrids of painting, collage, sculpture, architecture, and textiles that embody plural experiences of identity and place. With their inclusion in a group exhibition at Exeter, Tanoa delves into their creative journey from Plymouth to the Isle of Skye, and their particular relationship with their father’s practice in fashion design. We explore patterns, from tartan to Asafo flags, assertions of Fante identity and independence in British colonial Ghana and Africa. Tanoa’s expanded (and expansive) practice is rooted in the physicality of natural water and landscapes. We explore their interest in colour, the likes of Joseph Albers and Richard Smith in Abstract Expressionism and action painting. Tanoa details how their drawings are ‘direct photographs’ of the environment or data stores, objects grounded in the present, but appearing as 'future-past hybrids'. Drawing on sci-fi films like Interstellar, we explore their engagement with deep time and space, alongside personal narratives of romantic love and loss. Tanoa’s work challenges conventional institutions, making radical interventions in how art is collected, displayed, and conserved. They discuss the generalisation of ‘Blackness’ and anti-Black racism, experiences of working with curators in different contexts, and education at Goldsmiths and Royal Academy Schools in London. From their studio in Glasgow, we return to England’s capital as the location of their forthcoming solo exhibition, connecting both imperial cities, and the rise and fall of extractive industries like oil in Scotland. Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 23 February 2025. Tituba, Who Protects Us? runs at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until 1 May 2025. A major solo exhibition of Tanoa’s work opens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in October 2025. For more about Invasion Ecology (2023), co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, listen to the episodes with the exhibition’s artists: - Ingrid Pollard, on expanded photography, Blacknesses, and British identities, in Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4 - Hanna Tuulikki, on selkies, Scottish folklore, and performance, in Avi Alarm (2023): pod.link/1533637675/episode/21264f8343e5da35bca2b24e672a2018 You can also read about Hanna’s installation, ⁠under forest cover (2021)⁠, at City Art Centre in Edinburgh: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-local And hear about Fern Leigh Albert’s activist photographic practice, now on display at RAMM. - Ashish Ghadiali - whose film Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), from the series Cinematics of Gaia and Magic (2023-Now), also features at RAMM - in the episode from Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3 For more about Ibrahim Mahama’s 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist’s episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artists Nalini Malani and Anita Dube, and curator Shanay Jhaveri, journey through two decades of cultural and political change in South Asia, from Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the State of Emergency in 1975, to the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998, in the 2024 exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India. Titled after Sudipta Kaviraj’s 1991 text, this landmark group exhibition in London explores the ways artists articulated this period of transitions. Beyond the focus on the moment of independence and Partition of British India in 1947 - often reflecting Western/European-centric interests in South Asia - the works consider the challenges of instituting democracy and modernity in a late 20th century and post-colonial society. Its curator, Shanay Jhaveri, talks about the diversity and plurality of works on display, and how working and travelling across borders has shaped his own practice. Nalini Malani unpacks her video installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), addressing nuclear competition with Pakistan and China, and the deteriorating environment globally, to Gaza and Palestine today. We discuss violence and forced displacement, drawing on the literature of Saadat Hasan Manto, and their own lived experiences, born in Karachi, and practicing in Bombay (now Mumbai). Nalini details encounters with Marxist and subaltern thinking as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting Noam Chomsky, Alain Resnias, and Chris Marker, and, before then, in India’s many film and cine-clubs, showing communist, Soviet Russian, and Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European (CESEE) cinema. Nalini shares their collaborations with Vivan Sundaram, and connects their theatrical animations with ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ kalighat reverse glass paintings, as modernist forms. First training as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube was a leading member of the Radical Group in Baroda (now Vadodara). She continues to organise globally and locally, from residencies with the Triangle Network and KHOJ Studios, to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, of which she was the first woman to curate. Anita details the work of contemporary women like Gogi Saroj Pal and Sheela Gowda, plus the public reaction in New Delhi to her ambiguous, bodily installations, exploring religion, spirituality, and craft in popular culture. We discuss access, gendered architecture, and the brutalist context of this display. ⁠The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. ⁠Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970⁠, and the ⁠Darbar Festival⁠, ran during the exhibition in 2024. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Nalani Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood runs at Tate Modern in London through 2025. Hear more from Nalini Malani in the EMPIRE LINES episode from My Reality is Different (2022) at the Holburne Museum in Bath, and with curator Priyesh Mistry, on The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and Nalini Malani (2022) at the National Gallery in London. You can also read my article in gowithYamo. For more about artists Bhupen Khakar, Nilima Sheikh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Arpita Singh, and Imran Qureshi, listen to curator Hammad Nasar on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009), and read into the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and The Box in Plymouth, in my article in gowithYamo. About Imran Qureshi, hear artist Maha Ahmed on Where Worlds Meet (2023) at Leighton House in London, and read about the exhibition in my article in recessed.space. About Partition, hear Sonal Khullar on Bani Abidi’s Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum (2016/2018). PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, contemporary artist Sara Shamma paints experiences of conflict, modern slavery, and hopes for postwar reconstruction, travelling between Syria, Lebanon, and London, in their series, World Civil War Portraits (2015). *Content Warning* Syria has a ‘young’ or ‘short’ art history, in Western/European terms. The country’s first galleries and art schools appeared in the 1960s, offering little contemporary arts education or practice. Working within - and rebelling against - these institutions, Damascus-born artist Sara Shamma taught themselves to paint ‘as an Old/Dutch Master’, referencing the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens in their large-scale, expressive, portraits. In their 2023 exhibition, Bold Spirits, Sara’s figurative paintings were displayed in conversation with these figures, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. And now, 25 years after graduating, the artist returns to the National Museum of Damascus with a survey spanning their personal and artistic journey through Lebanon and the UK in the twelve years since the start of the civil war. ‘I decided to keep one or two paintings from each project, to exhibit them all in Syria when the time was right,’ says Sara. ‘Now, it’s time for them to come home.’ In this conversation from 2023, when Sara was still living in London, the artist describes their decades of migrations between Dulwich and Damascus. Sara first left Syria for work, in 2000, with exhibitions in Britain as part of the the BP Portrait Prize, and a British Council partnership with Coventry, a city admired as a model for postwar reconstruction. In 2016, Sara relocated to London on an Exceptional Talent Visa but, during this period, continued to travel to their homeland frequently, working from their studio in the city, and engaging with wider Arab art communities. Through global exhibitions, Sara is now one of Syria’s most internationally recognised artists. We touch on Syria’s changing position, as part of the Ottoman Empire and a French Mandate, during the 20th century, and the permeable borders that permitted their refuge in the years of President Bashar al-Assad’s violent regime. Sara describes their interest in biology, visiting butchers and mortuaries during their studies, and ‘surrealist eye’ on everyday life. We discuss Sara’s research into modern slavery, trafficking, and rape cultures, speaking with women during their time as artist-in-residence with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London (KCL). Sara explains how they translate oral testimonies and traumatic experiences through their artistic practice, and why music is their universal language, travelling from Sufi Asia, to the blues of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. This episode was recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Manthia Diawara and Billy Gerard Frank online, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ Sara Shamma: Bold Spirits ran at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 25 February 2024. Sara Shamma: Echoes of 12 Years runs at the National Museum of Damascus until 31 January 2025. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Artist and curator Amilcar Packer unpacks ideas of decolonisation and anti-colonialism in education, thinking through the works of Ailton Krenak, a leading activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement. Born in Santiago de Chile, and based in São Paulo, Brazil since the 1980s, artist and curator Amilcar Packer locates his life and work ‘between’ the Pacific and Atlantic. An organiser and participant in Episode 11: To End The World As We Know It, five days of revolutionary art, discussions and performances at Tramway in Glasgow, run by Edinburgh-based collective, Arika, he shares some personal connections between South America and Scotland. Amilcar details the work of Ailton Krenak, a leading anti-colonial activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement, who joins the programme along with transnational thinkers like Denise Ferreira da Silva, Geni Núñez, and Françoise Vergès. We discuss his practice in popular culture, including literature and radio, and environmental activism. Amilcar describes Ailton as ‘one of the knots in a net’ of entangled counterpolitical and liberation movements, sharing the struggles of Brazil’s Black and maroon communities, descendants of escaped African slaves, and many peoples of the Amazon forest and river. As one of many contemporary thinkers in the programme, Ailton’s work provokes conversations about history, and time as a colonial, imperial, and capitalist construct. We explore his engagement with the pluriverse or multiverse, and possibility of jumping between alternative worlds. We also discuss the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities in different contexts, from the reclamation of the Americas as Turtle Island, to Karrabing Film Collective from Arson Bay, Darwin, Australia, and their presentation of The Ancestral Present - connecting with Ailton’s 2022 book, Ancestral Future. Challenging the monoculture of Western/European thought - and simplistic understandings of religion and spirituality, sexuality, and gender, which often lack relevance or utility with respect to indigenous worldviews - Amilcar talks about cosmology, and the constructive force of ‘tensions’. We discuss the ‘human archive’ of violence and brutality, and ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Palestine, and over the definition of land rights. Amilcar shares where assimilation, making indigenous people Brazilians, has been used to ensure indigenous people lose their relations with their land, which makes it easier to dispossess. We consider whether the decolonisation of institutions like museums or universities is possible, and active forms of resistance. Exploring a plurality of approaches to study, learning, and education, Amilcar shares the ideas of Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, and the importance of multiplicity, in constructing and realising other ways of being with the world and each other. Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, presented by Arika, ran at Tramway in Glasgow and online through November 2024. The full programme, including the conversation with Ailton Krenak, is available online. Hear more about Françoise Vergès with Professor Paul Gilroy, recorded live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠ For more about the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities, hear artist and curator Tony Albert in the EMPIRE LINES episode about Story, Place (2023) at Frieze London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/f1c35ebd23ea579c7741305bba2e6c4e And for more about Afro-Brazilian cultures, hear writer and musician Kalaf Epalanga on kizomba and kuduro music, in the episode on Whites Can Dance Too (2023), recorded at Africa Writes 2023 at the British Library in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/0a7191316798c30ed1494e5fb2c3e798 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Curator Jo-Lene Ong walks through historic marketplaces across Taiwan, Paris, Devon, London, and Manchester, exchanging island mentality for more archipelagic thinking, via Steph Huang’s sculptural installation, I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024). Through works combining sculpture, sound, and film, contemporary artist Steph Huang explores mass production, consumption, and waste. She often focusses on the transcultural and historical dimensions of food industries, and the implications of such markets on our natural environment. Roaming the street markets of cities in Taiwan, where she was born, and London, where she lives and works, she also draws from their vernacular architectures, and different local cultures. Steph’s first exhibition at Tate Britain in London sits near the river Thames, a boat ride away from Billingsgate, the UK’s largest inland fish market; and in Manchester, at its historic Market Buildings, once part of the Victorian Smithfield Fish Market. Curator Jo-Lene Ong connects sculptural works like I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024), with the Situationist International’s practice of the dérive, repurposing objects collected through exploration. We situate her interest in wonder and playful approach to media with the likes of Haegue Yang, currently on view at the Hayward Gallery in London, and Rasheed Araeen, entwining the roles of cook and artist. We look at the traces of maritime trades and food industries on our everyday lives, and our relationship with ocean ecosystems, highlighting the legacies of colonialism in contemporary capitalism and climate crises. From esea contemporary’s previous exhibitions of artists like Jane Jin Kaisen, Jo-Lene moves towards her particular interest in transmission, and more ‘watery ways of being’ beyond borders, referencing Astrida Neimanis’ hydrofeminism (2017) and looking to Sharjah Biennale 16 in 2025. We discuss ‘island travel’ and ‘archipelagic thinking’ as central to Steph’s artistic, and Jo-Lene’s curatorial, practices. Jo-Lene shares how her relationship with identity has been shaped by working in different contexts, from Malaysia, to Amsterdam, and the UK. We discuss the relative in/visibility of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) identities in these different places - histories of Indonesia and the Dutch East Indies, and Malaysia, a British colony between the 1820s and 1957 - as well as the overlaps between Hokkein and Taiwanese languages, as variants or dialects of Chinese. Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun runs at esea contemporary in Manchester until 8 December 2024. The exhibition is part of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award (MTSA)’s National Touring Programme, first exhibited at Standpoint in London in 2024. The exhibition will tour to Cross Lane Projects in Kendal in March 2025. An exhibition book of the same number launches at esea contemporary on 30 November 2024. Art Now: Steph Huang: See, See, Sea runs at Tate Britain in London until 5 January 2025. For more about archipelagos and Édouard Glissant, listen to ⁠Manthia Diawara⁠, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, and artist ⁠Billy Gerard Frank on Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019)⁠, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠: ⁠instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ⁠ For more from esea contemporary, hear Musquiqui Chihying, a recent artist-in-residence, on Too Loud a Dust (2023) at Tabula Rasa Gallery during London Gallery Weekend in 2023: pod.link/1533637675/episode/29b9e85442a30e487d8a7905356541dd PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and curator Diego Chocano, slip between places and times, reconstructing the landscape of Botswana in the centre of the city of London, through their filmic installation, It Will End in Tears (2024). Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s practice spans landscapes and media, encompassing painting, installation, and animation. Their drawings take the form of narrative landscapes, that seem simultaneously futuristic and ancient, playing with conventions of linear time. Pamela often draws from literature, theatre, and science fiction - with references from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, to Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth - particularly in their slippery representations of people and places.Born in Botswana, and practicing in the US, Canada, South Africa, and the Netherlands, Pamela describes how their work has been shaped by these different contexts. They detail their transformative residency with Arturo Lindsay in the rainforest in Panama, a coastal Central American and Caribbean country, which has shaped their representations of volcanic, subterranean, and cosmological environments. Seeing the landscape as ‘another character’ in their their works, Pamela challenges the binary of landscape and figurative painting, and Western/European art historical conventions. Though It Will End in Tears (2024) is Pamela’s first major UK solo exhibition, it is not their first in the city of London; we discuss their relationship with spaces across the capital, and its colonial histories. Curator Diego Chocano highlights how Pamela has both challenged and embraced conventions of Western/European art history. We discuss the artist’s academic approach, and ‘research’ approach to art, which has inspired interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of science, with theoretical physicist Dr. James Sylvester Gates. He details the artist’s interest in performance and artifice, drawing on film noir, wooden theatre sets, and the figure of the femme fatale for this body of work. We discuss how Pamela’s self-constructed alter ego, Asme, enables the artist more freedom of creative expression, and the ability to resist categorisation by identity, biography, or subjectivity. ⁠Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. For more, you can read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum-barbican Find out more about Leo Robinson, and Édouard Glissant’s ideas of ‘trembling’, at the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE: instagram.com/p/DAtbDyUIHzl/?next=%2F&img_index=3 Hear Barbican curator Florence Ostende on Carrie Mae Weems’ series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996): pod.link/1533637675/episode/b4e1a077367a0636c47dee51bcbbd3da And curator Alice Wilke on Carrie Mae Weems’ Africa Series (1993), at the Kunstmuseum Basel: pod.link/1533637675/episode/d63af25b239253878ec68180cd8e5880 For more from the Curve, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/1792f53fa27b8e2ece289b53dd62b2b7 And find out more about ancient Adinkra symbology and geometric structures in the episode about El Anatsui’s Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta (2024) at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2e464e75c847d9d19cfa4dc46ea33338 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Sylvia Snowden figures different approaches to expressionism, layering Western European and African American art histories, through their paintings of M Street, in Washington DC (1978-1997). In 1962, the young artist Sylvia Snowden spent a summer in France on a student tour led by her teacher, the watercolourist Loïs Mailou Jones. They visited museums such as the Louvre, the Musée de l'Orangerie, and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, where they likely first experienced the work of expressionist artist Chaïm Soutine. His gestural brushwork and use of impasto soon ‘saturated’ into her own treatment of paint, on her return to the United States. Today, Sylvia’s work is often ‘read’ in the context of abstract expressionism, placed in conversation with artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Karel Appel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Pablo Picasso. Though art historical references to such figures are present, they are never made directly, and are found deeper, in the thick layers of acrylic paint and oil pastel that build up their works. Perhaps, like the well-travelled Jones, Sylvia would prefer to be known as ‘an American painter with no labels’. With her first exhibition in Paris, Sylvia shares how she has literally built up her practice over the past six decades, at times tending towards abstraction, and others, more figurative works. We talk about other 20th century migrants to the French city, including Beaufort Delaney and James Baldwin, both associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and Vincent van Gogh. Sylvia talks about the M Street series, named after the place in Washington DC where she has lived and worked since the late 1970s. Sylvia talks about the ‘turning’ of the predominantly African American neighbourhood, which experienced both ‘white flight’ and gentrification. She also details how her representations of men’s and women’s bodies speak to our universal, shared humanity, not individual forms. Sylvia details how she started painting as a ‘social commentator’, and how she sees the choice of art as a ‘responsibility’. She talks about her time at Howard University, learning with artists such as Alex Katz, James A Porter, and David Driskell, the latter widely known for establishing African American Art as a field of study in its own right. Drawing on her own teaching, we discuss the distance between painting, and talking about painting, in art history and the media, as well as access to education for young Black students today, and her interest pluralising Western/European art histories of movements like impressionism and cubism. Challenging binary understandings of artistic practice, she describes the role of intuition in artistic production, a ‘combination of emotion and intellect’ or ‘thought and feeling’, that is often ignored in Western/European cultures. Seen for the first time on the gallery walls, Sylvia describes her triptych of her mother, a professor of English Literature who studied William Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon, sharing how her practice is also like writing - and the next chapter in her work. Inside the White Cube: Sylvia Snowden runs at White Cube Paris until 16 November 2024. For more about Sylvia Snowden, read about their exhibitions with Edel Assanti during Frieze London in 2022, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/frieze-2022-retrospective For more about Chaïm Soutine read about ‍Soutine: Kossoff at Hastings Contemporary, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/a-perfect-match-chaim-soutine-meets-leon-kossoff For more about Oskar Kokoschka, read about A Rebel from Vienna at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and Guggenheim Bilbao, in The Quietus: thequietus.com/culture/art/skar-kokoschka-a-rebel-from-vienna-guggenheim-bilbao-review/ PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, writer Jessica J. Lee joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Iman Datoo to explore the languages of ‘natural’ history and invasive species, through their book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (2024). Bringing together memoir, history, and scientific research, writer Jessica J. Lee considers how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they cross borders. Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica often draws on her own lived experiences to observe our world in motion, and close connections between seemingly distant places - sometimes, with shared tastes for seaweed. Dispersals, their latest book of linked essays, journeys further still, exploring migrations, displacements, and the entanglements of the plant and human worlds - and the language we use to describe them. Jessica shares some of their influences and references, like Richard Mabey’s Weeds and the works of Mary Douglas, to expose our historic human and anthropocentric understanding of plant life. We discuss how our everyday words and phrases are often borrowed from citizenship law, and see how beings are mis/represented in the media, from giant hogweed in Victorian England, to wakame kelp, Japanese knotweed, and eucalyptus plants today. Drawing on their work across the South West of England, Iman Datoo shares their research into soils, potatoes, and tea. Bringing together Iman and Jessica’s works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also delve into the history of botanical illustrations and mapping as tools of colonialism - here reimagined by contemporary artists. This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024. Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online. Watch the full video online, via Radical Ecology: vimeo.com/995973173 Find all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C9hjlxrIcgo PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, artist Kedisha Coakley joins EMPIRE LINES live at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, connecting their work from Jamaican and Black diasporic communities across the UK, with their research into sculptor Ronald Moody, uncovering shared interests in Ancient Egypt, indigenous Caribbean cultures, and questions of restitution. Born in Brixton, and based in Sheffield, Kedisha Coakley’s practice spans sculpture, glassmaking, and wallpaper printed with blocks of braided hair. Commissioned for an exhibition about Ronald Moody, one of the most significant artists working in 20th century Britain, their new installation is set between his large-scale figurative wood sculptures from the 1930s, and post-war experimentations with concrete and resin casting. From Kedisha’s bronze afro-combs influenced by historic Taino cultures, we journey from objects held in the British Museum, to mahogany relief sculptures by major influences like Edna Manley. With audio transcripts, we discuss Moody’s BBC radio broadcasts for Calling the West Indies produced by Una Marson, particularly ‘What is called Primitive Art?’ (1949). Kedisha shares Moody’s interest in primitivism, present in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and ‘oriental’ Chinese cultural forms, as well as Gothic and Renaissance works from Western/Europe. We look at photographs from Kedisha’s studio, exploring ‘African masks’ in the work of European modernists like Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, and the often marginalised role of religion and spirituality in Black and diasporic art practices. Kedisha also details her wider practice in ‘Horticultural Appropriation’, working with breadfruit, flowers, plants, and the natural environment, connecting with Moody’s description of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains and sea. We consider Moody’s place in British art history, drawing from his contemporaries Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, and Elizabeth Frink, as well as the group known as the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), of which Moody was a founding member.. As a self-described ‘mature student’, we look at Kedisha’s pursuit of independent, adult education, the role of market cultures and fashion, and the work of women taking care of history. This episode was recorded live at Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life, an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, in October 2024. The exhibition runs until 3 November 2024: hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/kedisha-coakley-and-empire-lines-live-podcast-recording/ Hear more about Kedisha’s work around ‘Horticultural Appropriation’ with Ashish Ghadiali, curator of Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3 For more about the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), listen to curator Rose Sinclair in the episode on Althea McNish’s Batchelor Girl’s Room (1966/2022), recreated at the William Morris Gallery in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/953b78149a969255d6106fb60c16982b On post-war ‘British’ art and sculpture, read about Egon Altdorf: Reaching for the Light at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/postwar-modernism-egon-altdorf-at-the-henry-moore-institute Hear from artist Yinka Shonibare, in the episode on Decolonised Structures (Queen Victoria (2022-2023) at the Serpentine in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/01fffb739a1bd9f84f930ce41ee31676 On the globalisation of ‘African’ masks, listen to curator Osei Bonsu on Edson Chagas’ photographic series, Tipo Passe (2014-2023), in the episode about Ndidi Dike’s A History of A City in a Box (2019) at Tate Modern in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410 And for more about Édouard Glissant, listen to ⁠Manthia Diawara⁠, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, and artist ⁠Billy Gerard Frank on Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019)⁠, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠: ⁠instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ⁠

In this special episode, Fozia Ismail and Ayan Cilmi from the feminist art collective Dhaqan Collective join EMPIRE LINES live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, alongside artists Kaajal Modi and Sovay Berriman, and environmental humanities lecturer Jim Scown, to discuss Somali cultural heritage in the face of climate crises. In the last few decades, Somali nomadic lives have been endangered by environmental degradation, civil war, and displacement. Created in 1960 from a former British protectorate and an Italian colony, the country collapsed into 30 years of conflict following the overthrow of the military regime of President Siad Barre in 1991. Working with diasporic communities in Bristol, the Dhaqan Collective seek to find ways of building imaginative futures that support Somali people both in the UK and in East Africa. They use everyday materials, from cassette tapes and camel meats, to milk teas, foods, and textiles, to create spaces of community and healing that centre the range of experiences across generations. Dhaqan discuss their ‘creative ecology’ of work, travelling to contexts from the Southbank Centre in London, to the Isle of Portland in Dorset. We connect with Kaajal Modi, whose practice of ‘embodied listening’ intersperses field recordings from British waterways with migration stories and reflections from marginalised communities. Based in Cornwall, Sovay Berriman mines the politics of place embedded in their work, relating to Cornish nationalisms, and working-class identities. We discuss different perceptions of women, mothers, and elders, crossing from Kaajal’s particular Ugandan Asian community, to conventional arts institutions, exploring questions of collection and restitution. Plus, Jim Scown shares his research at the intersections of soils, science, and literature. This episode was recorded live at Interweaving Threads of Migration and Climate Justice - a weekend of talks and events at the Eden Project in Cornwall, exploring the power of audio and oral storytelling in cultural preservation - in September 2024: edenproject.com/visit/whats-on/interweaving-threads-of-migration-and-climate-justice Both Dhaqan Collective’s House of Weaving Songs, and Kaajal Modi’s Songs of the Water, will travel to Journeys Festival 2024 in Leicester from from 11 October 2024, supported by Art Reach and Counterpoints Arts. For more about b-side Festival 2024, read my article about Mohammad Barrangi in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/mohammad-barrangi-b-side-festival Listen back to the talk from Reclaim Festival 2024 with Serge Attukweh Clottey on the EMPIRE LINES podcast, in the episode on Noko Y3 Dzen (There’s Something in the World (2018-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c And catch up on Instagram: instagram.com/p/C3pslhaI_P7/?igsh=bnJ1b2dsNHE5czk1 Find out more about Acts of Gathering with 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 Hear Professor Paul Gilroy live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠ And for more cassette tapes, hear Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil sound out migration between post-colonial Kerala and the Arab Gulf, through S. A. Jameel's Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song) (1977): pod.link/1533637675/episode/417429b5c504842ddbd3c82b07f7b0f8 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Artist and sculptor Permindar Kaur moves between the Black British Arts Movement, the Young British Artists (YBAs), and Barcelona in the 1990s, exploring the ambiguities of Indian and South Asian cultural identities, Nothing is Fixed is an idea that has grown from ⁠Permindar Kaur’s 2022 exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield⁠. For their latest, in Southampton, the artist brings together the public and the private, transforming the various gallery spaces into bedrooms of a home. Beds, chairs, tables, and teddy bears - ambiguous, often unsettling, domestic objects - populate the space, as well as never-before-shown works on paper, which underline the role of drawing in their sculptural practice. Born in Britain to Sikh parents of Indian heritage, Permindar is often exhibited in the context of the Black British Arts Movement, showing with leading members of Blk Art Group like Eddie Chambers. The artist also describes their wider interactions with the ⁠YBAs, exhibitions in Japan, and influences from their formative years of practice in Barcelona, Spain, Canada, and Sweden. We discuss encounters with artists like Mona Hatoum and Eva Hesse, Helen Chadwick and Félix González-Torres, and more surrealist storytellers like Leonora Carrington and Paula Rego, alongside the material-focussed practices of Arte Povera. We trouble the category of ‘British Asian artists’, exploring Permindar’s work with and within particular Indian and Punjabi diasporic communities in Nottingham, Sheffield, and Glasgow, in Scotland. With series like Turbans, Permindar describes how their practice has changed over time, navigating questions of identity, representation, and the binary of non-/Western/European art practices. They share their research on a site-specific public sculpture for Southampton’s yearly Mela Festival, a long-established event which represents, rather than ‘reclaims’ space for, different South Asian cultures - and lifelong learning, from younger artists. Permindar Kaur: Nothing is Fixed ran at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until September 2024, closing with the launch of an exhibition book of the same name, supported by Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. Sculpture in the Park is on view at Compton Verney in Warwickshire until 2027. Kaur also presented work in A Spirit Inside, an exhibition of works from the Women’s Art Collection and the Ingram Collection, at Compton Verney until September 2024. Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 opens in venues across Plymouth on 28 September 2024, and travels to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London from 15 January 2025. For more, you can read my article in gowithYamo. Hear curator Griselda Pollock, from ⁠Medium and Memory (2023)⁠ at HackelBury Fine Art in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/37a51e9fab056d7b747f09f6020aa37e Read into Jasleen Kaur’s practice, and the Turner Prize 2024, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/jasleen-kaur-interview And other artists connected to Glasgow, including Alia Syed (instagram.com/p/C--wHJsoFp6/?img_index=1), and ⁠Ingrid Pollard, in the episode from Carbon Slowly Turning (2022)⁠ at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Tate Liverpool, and Invasion Ecology (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/4d74beaf7489c837185a37d397819fb8. For more about toys and unsettling ‘children’s stories’, hear Sequoia Danielle Barnes on Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby (2024) at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2b43d4e0319d49a76895b8750ade36f8 And listen out for more from Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024 - coming soon. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Curator Tessa Giblin deconstructs El Anatsui’s monumental, sculptural textiles, unravelling the ties that still bind post-colonial Ghana, Nigeria, and Scotland in the 21st century. Born in 1944, between the German and British colonial periods of the Gold Coast (1821-1957), El Anatsui has engaged critically with the impact of colonialism across Africa. He is well-known for his large-scale, sculptural wall hangings made by stitching-together of thousands of aluminium metal bottle tops; whisky, gin, and brandy were alcohols introduced into Ghana and Nigeria during the 15th century as ‘trade spirits’, first exchanged for gold, then enslaved people, becoming the second highest import into Africa after textiles. The artist, like his work, is considered a ‘product’ of their time. Despite major displays at the Tate Modern, Royal Academy, and British Museum in London, which have made him a ‘household name’, there was yet to be a significant exploration of his practice in the UK - until now. Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta covers five decades of El Anatsui’s work, starting with the place of the exhibition itself, the University of Edinburgh's Old College building. Curator Tessa Giblin talks about working with the artist to shape his 'nomadic' installations, uncovering historic and contemporary connections. We discuss El’s childhood memories of making, and the indelible memory of Scotland’s role in the colonial project, with the export of organised religion and Christian missionaries. Tessa describes tapestries like Woman’s Cloth (1999-2002), inspired by Kente fabrics, the weaving traditions of fisherpeople, and the yellow clay or earth of the natural environment. From these ‘topographical’ works, we discuss his early works in wood, carving out or mapping the straight-line borders imposed upon Africa. Tessa shares how El recreates ‘traditional’ Adinkra symbols, to highlight both the loss of cultural identity, and work of artists in telling new, transnational stories. From the artist’s watery works at the Guggenheim Bilbao, we make connections with the city’s own volcanic landscape, revealing their intergenerational work with climate crises - and younger contemporary artists. El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta runs at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 29 September 2024. For more about Otobong Nkanga and The Recent at Talbot Rice Gallery, read this article about Edinburgh’s Environmental Exhibitions in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-global Hear artist Ibrahim Mahama on Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024) at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, also part of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2024: pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 And Serge Attukwei Clottey on his family’s internal migration from Jamestown/Usshertown in British Accra, Ghana, to coastal La (Labadi), Afrogallonism, and his collaborative practice, uplifting his community with upcycled plastic waste, through Noko Y3 Dzen (There’s Something in the World) (2018–Now) at the Eden Project in Cornwall: pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c Listen to curator Osei Bonsu, curator of the Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon and A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, at Tate Modern in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/386dbf4fcb2704a632270e0471be8410 And hear Chris Spring, former curator of the British Museum's collections from eastern and southern Africa, on ‘African’ textiles and Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx by Araminta de Clermont (2010)⁠ at the British Museum in London. pod.link/1533637675/episode/a32298611ba95c955aba254a4ef996dd PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Artist Ibrahim Mahama ‘time travels’ between British colonial and independent Ghana, tracing railway lines across African and European countries in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 20th century. Ibrahim Mahama is well-known for his large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the local effects of colonialism, migration, and global economics. Working in Tamale, Kumasi, and Accra, Ghana, he often works with found materials, collected from abandoned places of pre- and post-independence production. Spanning what was then known as the Gold Coast, the Sekondi Locomotive Workshop was built by the British in 1923, to extract and transport resources like cocoa and minerals, the foundations of European colonial wealth and contemporary capitalism. With charcoal and ink drawings, sculptures and film, Ibrahim connects the histories, legacies, and labourers of this now disused railway back to the UK - layering them atop Waverley, one of the nation’s busiest train stations, for his first exhibition in Scotland. With Ibrahim’s jute sack textile installations, we discuss shared practices of reuse, repurpose, and recycle with El Anatsui, an inspiration from an older generation who is also exhibiting for the first time in the city of Edinburgh. He shares photographs, personal letters, stamps from his archive, highlighting the respect shown to West African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), especially socialist Yugoslavia. Using train carriages as sculptures, galleries, and classrooms back in Tamale, Ibrahim reconstructs Ghana’s colonial past to build its future, reversing flows of trade and migration to Africa. We discuss the potential and ‘charge’ within these materials which, like bodies, carry lived experience and knowledge, and the complex relationship with lasting architectures and ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ in societies today. Ibrahim also shares his collaborations across African and diasporic communities, with craftspeople, weavers, and makers at his Red Clay Studio in northern Ghana, to artists like Anya Paintsil in Manchester. Ibrahim Mahama: Songs about Roses runs at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh until 6 October 2024. A book launch and artist talk takes place on the penultimate day of the exhibition (the day before the exhibition closes). A Spell of Good Things opens at White Cube New York on 5 September 2024. Parliament of Ghosts (2019) continues online via the Whitworth, theVOV, and Vortic Art. And Purple Hibiscus, part of Unravel: The Power & Politics of Textiles in Art, was installed at the Barbican in London through summer 2024. Hear artist Serge Attukwei Clottey live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, on his family’s internal migration from Jamestown/Usshertown in British Accra, Ghana, to coastal La (Labadi), Afrogallonism, and his collaborative practice, uplifting his community with upcycled plastic waste, through Noko Y3 Dzen (There’s Something in the World) (2018–Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Artist and academic Sequoia Danielle Barnes redresses the ugly side of kitsch and ‘cute’ toy cultures, telling histories of trickster rabbits from Peter Rabbit to Bugs Bunny, appropriated from Black Southern American folklore from the 16th century to now. With ceramics, fabrics, and super sticky slugs, Sequoia Danielle Barnes’ new installation is an Afro-surrealist retelling of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, a folktale developed by her enslaved ancestors after being ripped from Africa and displaced in Alabama, in the United States - the place she grew up before pursuing her practice in ‘transatlantic’ institutions. Here, stories about figures like Uncle Remus, Uncle Ben, and Aunt Jemima, often first told as a means of action guidance for outsmarting slavemasters, were mainstreamed into 20th century pop art and cultures. Sequoia’s exhibition takes its title from the 1946 film, Song of the South, a nostalgic representation of the antebellum, pre-Confederate South, revealing how ‘cuteness’ masks anti-Black racist tropes and propaganda. We discuss how popular consumption of Western/European films, TV adverts, and commercials can perpetuate forms of oppression and marginalisation, including racialisation, infantilism, violence, and the cannibalisation of enslaved peoples. Sequoia tells of her interest in ‘Tellytubby lore’, how children’s cartoons and animations can sustain critical traditions of surrealism, and why younger people more readily engage with her work than adults. From her creepy and uncanny collectibles, we discuss why major institutions protect and preserve golliwogs, golly, and ‘piccaninny’ dolls, and Sequoia’s ‘Black radical art practice’ in spaces like CCA Glasgow, Fruitmarket, and the National Museum of Scotland. Sequoia shares her subversive influences from the Black diaspora, including Faith Ringgold, Betye Saars, Robert Colescott,and Eddie Chambers. With Theaster Gates, Patrick Kelly, Joe Casely-Hayford,, we explore Afrofuturism, and find entanglements in their own practice, between works with textiles, fashion, and pottery. Beneath the dark humour and sweet surfaces of their works, Sequoia speaks of connections between contemporary consumption and capitalism, and historic sugar cane plantations. exposing how legacies of colonialism, slavery, and global trade still shape society today. Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything Is Satisfactual runs at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop until 28 August 2024. The exhibition is part of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2024, which continues in Scotland until 25 August 2024. For more about Black Southern Assemblage, hear Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London, on the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend (20th Century-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cab2757a707f76d6b5e85dbe1b62993 Read about Sonia Boyce’s Feeling Her Way (2022), her Golden Lion-winning British Pavilion (2022), at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/feeling-her-way-sonia-boyces-noisy-exhibition And read about Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2023, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/edinburgh-art-festivals-reckoning-with-the-citys-colonial-legacies EDITOR: Alex Rees. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes collages arabesques from Baroque Portugal and Brazil’s many indigenous communities, tracing religious and natural patterns in Roman Catholicism, Islamic architectures, and the islands of Japan, through Casa de Maria (1992). Known for her colourful, large-scale abstract paintings, Beatriz Milhazes’ practice reflects how Brazilian culture has long ‘assimilated’ plural influences, particularly the effects of Portuguese and Spanish colonial rule between the 17th and 19th centuries. Arches, doors, stained glass windows, and burnished golds, drawn from churches across South America, recur as motifs in works spanning forty years. Beatriz layers ruffles and rosettes, precursors to the circles in her more recent paintings, from royal Hispanic costumes, and textiles found in city markets and Carnival parades. Her studio overlooks Rio de Janeiro’s botanical garden, another construct of colonial rule, and environment which inspires her creations. For the artist, flowers are both ‘natural’ and ‘plastic’ bodies - like the water, and ‘salty sea breeze’ which connects her home in Brazil and the coastal cities of Britain, where her work is currently on display. Beatriz outlines the centrality of nature in popular and indigenous cultural production, and interest in ornamental ‘body drawings’ by women in the Kadiwéu tribe. She shares how she adapts the concept of collage to painting on canvas, calling on Western/European modernism, geometric abstraction, and ‘scientific research’ into colour for her exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2024. From a kimono in the collection of the V&A, a diplomatic gift from the emperor of Japan, Beatriz travels to her Yellow Flower Dream (2018) for the 'Art House Project' on Inujima - an island in the country’s Seto Island Sea, also recreated in Kensington, at Japan House London. We touch on more histories of migration in São Paulo, home to Japan’s largest diasporic community, and the ‘union’ of cultural, economic, and ecological regeneration taking place across continents today. Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias runs at Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 29 September 2024. For more, you can read my article from the first exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate in 2023, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/colour-and-abstraction-beatriz-milhazes-at-margates-turner-contemporary For more from Tate St Ives in Cornwall, hear curator Morad Montazami on the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987). For more from Japan House London, hear curator Hashimoto Mari on Hasegawa Akira’s Antique French Military Uniform with Kumihimo (2021), and read about WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts (2023), in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/wave-currents-in-japanese-graphic-arts-at-japan-house-london PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Artist Hanna Tuulikki connects plantation landscapes in Finland, Scotland, and across the South West of England, making kin across species and with birds. Glasgow-based artist, composer, and performer Hanna Tuulikki considers ‘reworlding’ in times of planetary crisis. Avi-Alarm (2023), a collection of augmented reality filters for social media, transforms the faces of user-participants into hybrid human-avian beings. Each one recalls a critically-endangered bird in the British Isles archipelago – the capercaillie, curlew, lapwing, mistle thrush, and puffin. Their alarm calls signal danger, a form of communication that crosses species boundaries, and can save many recipients of different species simultaneously. This altruistic behaviour challenges Darwinian evolutionary theory, the idea of ‘natural selection’ or 'survival of the fittest' or that also underpins capitalism. Standing amongst the silver birch trees at Southcombe, Hanna details her practice across environments, from Helsinki in Finland, to Scotland. We discuss works both inspired by and critical of romanticised representations of natural landscapes, contrasting the 'wilderness' with the reality of Finland’s monoculture plantations, and their role in establishing Finnish independence from Sweden in 1917. Hanna details how national identities and ideas of masculinity are constructed through folklore and traditions. Through the practice of mimesis or imitation, and participatory performance, we explore how they've made ‘more-than-human’ kin with other animals like deer, cows, and seals. Hanna shares their work for British Art Show 9, which travelled from COP26 in Glasgow to Plymouth, addressing contemporary eco-anxiety or grief over biodiversity loss. We discuss their recent work with bats, connecting between rave and electronic music, and echolocation, as a model for ecological coexistence - and find another link between Scotland and the South West, at Buckfast Abbey. ⁠Invasion Ecology⁠ is co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor. It is a season of contemporary land art across South West England in summer 2024, questioning what we mean by ‘native’ and what it means to belong. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, runs from 1 June to 10 August 2024. The wider programme includes anti-colonial talks and workshops with exhibiting artists, writers, researchers, and gardeners, reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals, and landscapes. For other 'invasive species' in the Gardens, join EMPIRE LINES in conversation with Iman Datoo and Jessica J. Lee, author of Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging, on 30 July 2024. For more information, follow ⁠Radical Ecology⁠ and ⁠Southcombe Barn⁠ on social media, and visit: radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition. You can also listen to the ⁠EMPIRE LINES x Invasion Ecology Spotify playlist⁠, for episodes with Paul Gilroy, Lubaina Himid, Johny Pitts, and Imani Jacqueline Brown, plus partners from the University of Exeter, KARST, CAST, and the Eden Project in Cornwall. Read about under forest cover (2021) in Deep Rooted at City Art Centre in Edinburgh, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-localHear about another performance at Glasgow International, with Paul Maheke's Taboo Durag (2021) at MOSTYN in Wales. And listen to Ingrid Pollard’s episode from Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, marking their participation in Invasion Ecology (2024). IMAGES: Jassy Earl, Amber Amare. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Curator Ekow Eshun reframes the Black figure in historic and contemporary art, surveying its presences, absences, and representations in Western/European art history, the African diaspora, and beyond, via The Time is Always Now (2024). In 1956, the American author James Baldwin wrote: ‘There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.’ Heeding Baldwin’s urgent call, Ekow Eshun’s new exhibition brings together 22 leading contemporary African diasporic artists from the UK and the US, whose practices emphasise the Black figure through mediums such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. These figurative artists and artworks address difficult histories like slavery, colonialism, and racism and, at the same time, speak to contemporary experiences of Blackness from their own personal perspectives. Ekow explains how artists like Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, and Thomas J. Price acknowledge the paradox of race, and the increased cultural visibility and representation of lived experiences. Beyond celebration, though, The Time Is Always Now follow the consequences of these artists’ practices, and what is at stake in depicting the Black figure today. We discuss the plurality of perspectives on view, and how fragmented, collage-like works by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Lorna Simpson, and Titus Kaphar reconsider W.E.B. Du Bois’ understanding of ‘double consciousness’ (1897) as a burden, to a 21st century vantage point. Ekow shares the real people depicted in Michael Armitage’s surrealistic, religious scenes, whilst connecting works with shared motifs from Godfried Donkor’s boxers, to Denzil Forrester and Chris Ofili’s dancing forms. We talk about how how history is not just in the past, and how we might think more ‘historically from the present’. Plus, we consider the real life relationships in works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Jordan Casteel - and those shared between artists like Henry Taylor and Noah Davis - shifting the gaze from one of looking at, to looking with, Black figures. Starting at the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure travels to The Box in Plymouth from 28 June to 29 September 2024. It will then tour to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and North Carolina Museum of Art in the US into 2025. Join me at The Box in Plymouth in conversation with Ekow on Saturday 29 June. And as promised, some news - EMPIRE LINES will go on, returning to a fortnightly basis. For more about Claudette Johnson, hear curator (and exhibition text-contributor!) Dorothy Price on And I Have My Own Business in This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Listen to Lubaina Himid on Lost Threads (2021, 2023) at the Holburne Museum in Bath. Hear curator Isabella Maidment on Hurvin Anderson’s Barbershop series (2006-2023) at the Hepworth Wakefield. Read about that show, and their work in Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, in recessed.space. Hear Kimathi Donkor on John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883-1884) and Study of Mme Gautreau (1884) at Tate Britain in London. For more about Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point series, hear curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery on Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (2023) at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. And on W.E.B. Du Bois, hear Professor Paul Gilroy live in conversation with EMPIRE LINES at the Black Atlantic Symposium (2023) in Plymouth, marking the 30th anniversary of his formative text. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary and performance artist Paul Maheke moves between France, Congo, and Canada, exploring the ‘archive of their body’ through drawing and dance, via Taboo Durag (2021). To Be Blindly Hopeful emerged from the very last sentence of a journal that Paul Maheke kept between August 2020 and June 2021, capturing the turbulence of the COVID pandemic on paper. Central to his practice is a delicate dance between the individual and the collective, personal and broader sociopolitical contexts, echoing the sentiment expressed by bell hooks, who reminds us that ‘the space of our lack is also the space of possibility.’ Currently based in France, Paul shares work ‘staged’ in previous exhibitions at South London Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, and Tate Modern, highlighting how these ‘new’ drawings, prints, book illustrations, and paintings of birds have long formed part of his practice. He explains how performance and dance can be both emancipatory and trapping, with respect to queerness, masculinity, and gender, and the reality of being ‘brown body looked at by a white audience’. Exploring these lived experiences through movement, Paul’s work suggests of Stuart Hall’s thinking about living archives - but the artist also shares his lifelong admiration for the French-born ice skater, Surya Bonaly. We delve into Paul’s plural popular culture and academic Influences like Grace Jones and Félix González-Torres, Audre Lorde and Édouard Glissant, and Bruce Nauman to Paul B. Preciado - not as icons but real, complex people. Finally, Paul highlights how his work changes in its global travels, from Paris, to the Baltic Triennale in Estonia, and Johanneburg, South Africa. He also speaks of his collaborations with family members and the fellow artist Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) for the Congo Biennale in 2021, his personal relationship with arts institutions on the continent, as a diasporic artist. Paul Maheke: To Be Blindly Hopeful runs at MOSTYN in Wales until 29 June 2024. It includes Taboo Durag (2021), produced as a performance to camera for Glasgow International 2021. This episode marks this iteration of Scotland’s biennale festival of contemporary art, which continues until 23 June 2024. Paul has also shown work as part of the Diaspora Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the first to feature an official performance programme co-produced with the Delfina Foundation, and in the Drawing Biennal 2024, which runs at the Drawing Room in London until 3 July 2024. Hear another of Paul’s collaborators, Barby Asante, on Declaration of Independence (2023), part of Art on the Underground in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/aa2803b68933ab974ca584cf6a18479c For another exhibition from MOSTYN, hear artist and curator Taloi Havini on Habitat (2017) and Artes Mundi 10: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e30bd079e3b389a1d7e68f5e2937a797 For more about bell hooks, hear Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f And on Édouard Glissant, listen to Manthia Diawara, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, and artist Billy Gerard Frank on Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019), part of PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, EMPIRE LINES returns to Ingrid Pollard’s 2022 exhibition, Carbon Slowly Turning, the first major survey of her career photographing Black experiences beyond the city and urban environments, in the English countryside. It marks the artist’s participation in Invasion Ecology, a season of contemporary land art across South West England in summer 2024, questioning what we mean by ‘native’ and what it means to belong. Since the 1980s, artist Ingrid Pollard has explored how Black and British identities are socially constructed, often through historical representations of the rural landscape. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, Ingrid draws on English and Caribbean photographic archives, with works crossing the borders of printmaking, sculpture, audio, and video installations. Their practice confronts complex colonial histories, and their legacies in our contemporary lived experiences, especially concerning race, sexuality, and identity. Curated by the artist and Gilane Tawadros, Carbon Slowly Turning led to Pollard’s shortlisting for the Turner Prize 2022. From its iteration at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, Ingrid exposes the pre-Windrush propaganda films beneath works like Bow Down and Very Low -123 (2021), her plural influences from Maya Angelou to Muhammad Ali, and playing on popular culture with works in the Self Evident series (1992). As a Stuart Hall Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex, and with a PhD-by-publication, the artist discusses the role of research in her media-based practice. Finally, Ingrid opens her archive of depictions of African figures 'hidden in plain sight' in English towns and villages - from classical portraiture, to ‘Black Boy’ pub signs. Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning ran at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Tate Liverpool, throughout 2022. The exhibition was supported by the Freelands Foundation and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the episode first released as part of EMPIRE LINES at 50. Invasion Ecology is co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, runs from 1 June to 10 August 2024. The wider programme includes anti-colonial talks and workshops with exhibiting artists, writers, researchers, and gardeners, reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals, and landscapes. Ingrid will join EMPIRE LINES in conversation with Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, and author of Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (2024), on 18 July 2024. For more information, follow ⁠⁠Radical Ecology⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Southcombe Barn⁠⁠ on social media, and visit: ⁠radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition⁠. You can also listen to the ⁠⁠EMPIRE LINES x Invasion Ecology Spotify playlist⁠⁠, for episodes with Paul Gilroy, Lubaina Himid, Johny Pitts, and Imani Jacqueline Brown, plus partners from the University of Exeter, KARST, CAST, and the Eden Project in Cornwall. Ingrid Pollard’s Three Drops of Blood (2022), commissioned by talking on corners (Dr Ella S. Mills and Lorna Rose), also explores representations of ferns, botany, and folk traditions in Devon’s historic lace-making industry. First exhibited at Thelma Hubert Gallery in Honiton, it is now part of the permanent collection of The Box in Plymouth, where it will be displayed from 19 October 2024. SOUNDS: no title, Ashish Ghadiali (2024). PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast And Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines