EMPIRE LINES

Curator Najlaa El-Ageli explores how Colonel Muammar Gaddafi colonised Libya’s character and identity from the 1960s to its post-Arab Spring present, and how contemporary artists play with the totalitarian props he used to perform and enact control. During the 20th century, Libya became the main stage for much social change across the ‘Middle East’ and North Africa, including anti-colonial resistance. Armed with his Third International Theory, and strong words against Western imperialism, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi truly sought total power, control, and mass surveillance of his public - to become King of his own ‘United States of Africa’. Still today, ten years after the Arab Spring and Gaddafi’s death, the legacy of the leader and his dictatorship continues to shape national identities. Najlaa El-Ageli, curator of Totalitarian Props, points out his signature sunglasses, headgear, and use of the colour green, contrasting the leader’s ‘performance’ - or pantomime - with lived experiences of his authoritarian regime. Beyond Libya, we look to the British colonisation of Egypt, and the ideals embodied by solidarity movements like pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism. Through the work of Tewa Barnosa, El-Ageli’s details the role of humour in social coping - and what it was like to curate an exhibition with the younger artist, creating an exhibition which spans generations and diasporas. Totalitarian Props runs at The Africa Centre in London until 19 July 2023, as part of Shubbak Festival 2023. WITH: Najlaa El-Ageli, architect, curator, and founder of Noon Arts. Projects. She is the co-curator of Totalitarian Props. ART: ‘Silent Protests, Tewa Barnosa (2023)’. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

6 Jul 202310min

Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum, unpacks how the artist encountered Japan in Europe, and how woodblock prints shaped his perspectives in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, an ‘artist’s colony’ on the outskirts of Paris. Unlike other post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh never travelled outside of Europe. He didn’t need to; for him, the idea of ‘exotic’ places was often enough to inspire his vivid practice. van Gogh found ‘foreign’ inspirations in cities like Paris and London. His paintings were displayed at the same time as the Paris Universal Exhibition (1889) and as an avid collector of Japanese prints, he also attended the city’s new Asian art exhibitions. Exposure to artists like Katsushika Hokusai shaped his perspectives on his own local environment, his elongated forms, and his surprising use of the colour blue. But it was in the countryside - and the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise - where Vincent van Gogh realised these various influences in their most vivid visual forms. Here, he spent just 74 days before his death, but produced a painting per day - and was close to the global recognition he gets today. Following their landmark Van Gogh and Japan (2018), Van Gogh Museum curator Nienke Bakker talks about their new exhibition, the first ‘serious’ study of the end of his life, how Vincent’s landscapes combined both local and global images, plus the often unequal relationship between rural and urban spaces. Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months runs at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until 3 September 2023, and then the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, until 4 February 2024. For more, read my article in The New European: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-exhibition-that-re-frames-van-goghs-last-days/ WITH: Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She is a curator of Van Gogh in Auvers. ART: ‘Old Vineyard with Peasant Woman, Vincent van Gogh (1890)’. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

28 Jun 202315min

Curator Isabella Maidment steps into Hurvin Anderson’s studio and barbershop, a point of cultural connection between Birmingham and the Caribbean, reconstructed at the Hepworth Wakefield.Contemporary artist Hurvin Anderson first painted a barbershop in Birmingham in 2006. For more than 15 years, he has returned to and reworked this space, an important social setting, especially for men, in Black British communities. As a second-generation migrant, whose parents migrated from Jamaica, Anderson practiced in the post-Windrush diaspora in 1980s Britain, creating works which connect cultures in Britain and theCaribbean - and Life Between Islands.As Salon Paintings, the first complete exhibition of theBarbershop series, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield, curator Isabella Maidment talks about Anderson’s surreal use of mirrors and layers, why he thinks of the barbershop like an impressionist cafe, and how this particularly regional setting can travel and translate across the country and Europe.Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings and Hurvin Anderson Curates runs at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire until 5 November 2023, then at the Hastings Contemporary in East Sussex, and the Kistefos Museum, Norway, into 2024.For more, you can read my article inrecessed.space:https://recessed.space/00107-Hurvin-Anderson-salon-paintingPart of EMPIRE LINES' Windrush Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush's arrival in the UK from the West Indies. Listen to the other episode from Indo + Caribbean: The creation of a culture at the Museum of London Docklands: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/c475cec4c78ad87b9cf73326b823cb8cWITH: Isabella Maidment, Senior Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield. She is a co-curator of Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings.ART: ‘Is it OK to Be Black?, Hurvin Anderson (2015)’.PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter:twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram:instagram.com/empirelinespodcastSupport EMPIRE LINES on Patreon:patreon.com/empirelines

22 Jun 202311min

Curators Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble unwrap the underrepresented history of Indian indenture in the British Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries, through Richard Fung’s 2012 documentary film, Dal Puri Diaspora. Plus, artist Salina Jane, and Chandani Persaud, tuck into contemporary Indo-Caribbean and Trinidadian food and culture in London today. In Dal Puri Diaspora, filmmaker Richard Fung travels from Toronto to Trinidad, and Guyana to India, tracing the migrations - and many variations - of a dish often called Caribbean or West Indian roti. After the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British and Dutch Caribbean plantation owners still required cheap labour and, having successfully petitioned the British government, recruited indentured workers from India. Over 450,000 men and women would make the five month journey by boat, working for three to five years in return for transport, a minimal wage and some basic provisions, until the scheme’s end in 1917. Yet whilst 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Windrush migrations, these stories of Caribbean migration remain comparatively overlooked in British histories. Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble, curators of Indo + Caribbean, explore the reasons why workers decided to leave India, and how we can curate complex histories of opportunity, restriction, and resistance. They share personal experiences informed by caste, gender, and women’s agency, and how museums might use AI to fill the gaps in the archive. Artist Salina Jane highlights how Indo-Caribbeans connect with their heritage today, sharing sugar cane and cocoa drawn from her own growing allotment, and Kew Gardens in South London. Plus, Chandani Persaud looks at the evolution of food and labour in the local community - from suppression to celebration and commercialisation in Western cultures - highlighting how colonialism still shapes tastes and identities. Indo + Caribbean: The creation of a culture runs at the Museum of London Docklands in London until 19 November 2023. For more on Trinidad, hear Gérard Besson’s EMPIRE LINES on The Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), Trinidad (c. 1902-1910): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/8d33407d49e5d371cb5d4827088d896c Part of EMPIRE LINES' Windrush Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush's arrival in the UK from the West Indies. Listen to the other episode with curator Isabella Maidment on Barbershop, Hurvin Anderson (2006-2023): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/5cfb7ddb525098a8e8da837fcace8068. WITH: Shereen Lafhaj, Curator at the Museum of London, and Makiya Davis-Bramble, Curator at Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. They are the co-curators of Indo + Caribbean. Salina Jane, a British artist of Indo-Caribbean descent making art about the experience of her family's journey from India through indentured labour to Guyana. Chandani Persaud, founder of Indo-Caribbean London. ART: ‘Dal Puri Diaspora, Richard Fung (2012)’. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

15 Jun 202323min

Artist Musquiqui Chihying brushes up the history of displaying sick and strong Asian bodies, from the Formosa Hamlet or human zoo at the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, to COVID-19, both connected to their own contemporary exhibition in London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery. Musquiqui Chihying’s multimedia installation, ‘Too Loud a Dust’, delves into two events from 1910: the construction of t he Formosa Hamlet by the Japanese Empire at the Japanese-British Exhibition in London, and the publication of ‘Diseases of China’ by the British missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell. With soil ‘stolen’ from the Japanese Garden, which remains in White City today, and dust from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, he considers how indigenous Korean and Ainu Japanese bodies were represented then and now, and how transparent glass has been used to separate - and - other viewers and subjects. The artist connects the contemporary and the historic, sharing how archive colonial postcards recalled the Dragonball cards he collected in his home in Taiwan, pan-Asian influences including the Japanese proto-feminist poet, Masano Akiko, and why his research during the COVID pandemic, revealed continued racism and prejudices against Asian people, and contemporary ‘neocolonialism’ between China and Africa. Whilst cleaning a museum may be a necessary task, Chihying describes how dust in display cabinets also carries valuable information, challenging concepts of ‘purity’, and how anthropology and natural history museums ‘function’. Musquiqui Chihying: Too Loud A Dust runs at the Tabula Rasa Gallery in London until 29 June 2023. This episode was recorded at London Gallery Weekend 2023. WITH: Musquiqui Chihying, contemporary visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation, and contemporary social culture in the Global South. ART: ‘Too Loud a Dust, Musquiqui Chihying (2023)'. IMAGE: Installation View. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

8 Jun 202314min

Tate Modern curator Nabila Abdel Nabi plants European abstract art in transnational networks of spirituality and theosophy, through Hilma af Klint’s 1908 series or cycle, The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple. Abstract artists Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian never met. But in their respective environments of Sweden and the Netherlands, both invented new languages of visual art as rooted in nature at the turn of the 20th century. Departing from traditional landscapes - with a touch of Vincent Van Gogh - they embarked on radical and ethereal painting series, connecting humans as a part of. not separate to, ecology. Nabila Abdel Nabi, a curator of Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Forms of Life, explores how showing these artists in conversation defies their typical depiction as solitary artists who worked alone. We see Klint and Mondrian as active participants in global communities, with works that speak to scientific debates around Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the spiritual and philosophical movement, theosophy. Rethinking ‘control’ and ‘rationality’ - as stereotypes of abstract art, and concepts used to exclude women artists from history - Abdel Nabi underlines af Klint and Mondrian’s intuitive practices, and how both used abstraction not to defy nature, but to think through it. Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life runs at the Tate Modern in London until 3 September 2023. For more, read my article in The New European: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/does-food-have-any-place-in-an-art-gallery/ For more on theosophy, hear Jessica Albrecht’s EMPIRE LINES on the 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cf022e2ac70910d0741747e59f2f6f2 For more on Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern, listen to Carine Harmand, Keith Shiri, and Richard Gray on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/bc78f4df16a50055611d88aa812c7bfb WITH: Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and a curator of Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. ART: ‘The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint (1908)’. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

31 Mai 202310min

Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, weaves together the histories of Black artists who stayed in Southern America during the Great Migration, like the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.Black artists based in the American South have always forged unique artistic practices - as multigenerational as multimedia in form. Using found and ‘reclaimed’ materials, these sculptures, paintings, drawings, and quilts speak to their makers’ individual ingenuity - and the enslavement, Jim Crow-era segregation, and institutionalised racism which continues to colour America’s past and present.Geographically isolated, but well-connected within communities, artists like Thornton Dial, Estelle Witherspoon, and the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers have challenged conventions about the education and display of art - perhaps why they’ve been overlooked in the canons of art history. Now, though, they are often placed in conversation with abstract expressionism, for their use of bold colours and geometric patterns, which combine African American textile traditions and modernist art and design.As a landmark exhibition opens in London, ‘activist curator’ Raina Lampkins-Felder shares why so many artists stayed on their lands, and why last names like Lockett, Bendolph, and Pettway crop up time and again. We travel from plantations and kitchen tables, to yard shows, typically Southern sculpture parks, where artists self-represent and directly communicate with their publics. We hear about the women at the fore of the first Black-owned businesses in the US, the Freedom Quilting Bee and local churches working with the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how contemporary housetop textiles continue to ‘bend and break’ traditions today.Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South runs at the Royal Academy in London until 18 June 2023.WITH: Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is the curator of Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.ART: Quilts by the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.IMAGE: Installation View.PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcastSupport EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

25 Mai 202323min

We return to Nalini Malani’s immersive installation My Reality is Different as it iterates in London, where curator Priyesh Mistry draws out the colonial and classical connections between the contemporary artist’s animation chamber, and the permanent collections of the National Gallery. Born in British India in 1946, the year before Partition, contemporary artist Nalini Malani has always focussed on both ‘fractures’ and continuity. From paintings to animations, her ambitious practice has always challenged conventions - none more so than her new installation, in which she ‘desecrates’ well known works of art with her iPad, drawing out overlooked details, and immersing the viewer in her own perspectives. As My Reality is Different moves from the Holburne Museum in Bath to London, curator Priyesh Mistry explains how Malani’s ‘endless paintings’ speak to historical continuities, from the economics of slavery, to contemporary violence, and the treatment of women in ancient Greece as Cassandra and Medea. He explores the artist’s use of Instagram as a ‘democratic platform’, and how the exhibition radically changes our realities, in how and what we see in these paintings, and museums as products of imperial exchange. Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the National Gallery in London until 11 June 2023. For more, listen to the artist Nalini Malani on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/74b0d8cf8b99c15ab9c2d3a97733c8ed And read my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review WITH: Priyesh Mistry, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London, and a curator of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different. ART: ‘The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022)’. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

18 Mai 202321min