Declaration of Independence, Barby Asante (2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Art on the Underground)

Contemporary artist Barby Asante moves through the London Transport Museum to Stratford Station, coming together with Black women TfL staff to take public space in a collective choral performance, a Declaration of Independence (2023).

In 2023, Transport for London (TfL)’s Art on the Underground invited Barby Asante to present a new iteration of her Declaration of Independence, a participation-based work which draws on West African communing traditions. In collaboration with TfL employees, the ensemble vocalise the contemporary experiences of people of colour, and reactivate oft-static historical documents.

Barby talks about her time in the photography archives at the London Transport Museum, finding images of women of colour at work in different roles, including those employed by London Transport’s direct recruitment in Barbados and the Caribbean in 1956. She details the role of public art, in widening access, and encouraging connections between personal, postcolonial, and migration histories. Plus, Barby shares the many Declarations - many of which are neither written, nor codified - which have influenced her practice, and how the testimonies and collective work has changed on its travels between Berlin, Germany, and Bergen, Norway.

Declaration of Independence performed at Stratford Station in London on 17 September 2023, part of Art on the Underground. The visual artworks remain on display at Stratford, Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Green Underground stations.

WITH: Barby Asante, London-based artist, educator, and researcher. Her practice and research is concerned with the politics of place, space and the ever-present histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism.

ART: ‘Declaration of Independence, Barby Asante (2023)’.

SOUNDS: Declaration of Independence Collective.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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