EMPIRE LINES

Artist Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tamsin Hong of The Serpentine Galleries, coat London’s historic statues and public monuments with fresh layers of history.

For over 30 years, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA has used Western European art history to explore contemporary culture and national identities. With his iconic use of Dutch wax print fabric - inspired by Indonesian batik designs, mass-produced in the Netherlands (and now China) and sold to British colonies in West Africa - he troubles ideas of ‘authentic’ ‘African prints’. Painting these colourful patterns on his smaller-scale replicas of sculptures of British figures like Winston Churchill, Robert Clive, and Robert Milligan, he engages with contemporary debates raised in Black Lives Matter (#BLM) and the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol.

Suspended States, the artist’s first London solo exhibition in over 20 years, puts these questions of cultural identity and whiteness, within the modern contexts of globalisation, economics, and art markets. Wind Sculptures speak to movements across borders, other works how architectures of power affect refuge, migration, and the legacies of imperialism in wars, conflict, and peace today. With his Library series, we read into Wole Soyinka, Bisi Silva, and canonised 17th, 18th, and 19th century artists like Diego Velázquez, focussing on Yinka's engagement with Pablo Picasso, modernism, and ‘primitivism’.

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tamsin Hong highlight the connection between the Serpentine’s ecological work, and Yinka’s new woodcuts and drawings which consider the impact of colonisation on the environment. As a self-described ‘post-colonial hybrid’, Yinka details his diasporic social practices, including his Guest Project experimental space in Hackney, and G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria, and collaborations with young artists and researchers like Leo Robinson, Péjú Oshin, and Alayo Akinkubye.

Artist Zineb Sedira records cultural and postcolonial connections between Algeria, France, Italy, and the UK from the 1960s, featuring films, rugs, and radical magazines from her personal archive.

Dreams Have No Titles (2022) is Zineb Sedira’s love letter to cinema, the classic films of her childhood in Paris, coming of age in Brixton in London, and ‘return’ to Algiers - three cities between which the artist lives and practices. Born in 1963, the year after Algeria achieved independence from French colonial rule, her and her family’s diasporic story is central to her practice.

Zineb recalls her first encounters with 'militant cinema', and international co-productions like the Golden Lion-winning The Battle of Algiers (1966). She shares her decision to represent France at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, controversial reactions from French media and society, and solidarity from her radical contemporaries and women, like Françoise Vergès, Sonia Boyce, Latifa Echakhch, Alberta Whittle, and Gilane Tawadros. We discuss the legacy of her work in the selection of Julien Creuzet, the first person of Caribbean descent and from the French overseas territories to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2024.

Zineb shares how personal histories contribute to collective memory, subverting ideas of ‘collection’, and using museum and gallery spaces to make archives more accessible. With orientalist tapestries and textiles - her ‘feminist awakening’ - we discuss how culture can both perpetuate political and colonial hierarchies, and provide the possibility to ‘decolonise oneself’. From her academic research in the diaspora, Zineb suggests how she carried much knowledge in her body as lived experience, detailing her interest in oral histories (and podcasts!), as living archives. With Nina Simone, Miriam Makebe, and Archie Shepp, performers at the Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1969), she shows her love of jazz and rock music, played with her community of squatters and fellow students from Central Saint Martins. Finally, we see how the meaning of her participatory works change as they travel and migrate between global audiences, and institutions and funding in Algiers today, via aria, her research residency for artists.

Artist and archivist Pio Abad draws out lines between Oxford, the Americas, and the Philippines, making personal connections with historic collections, and reconstructing networks of trafficking, tattooing, and 20th century dictatorships. Pio Abad’s practice is deeply informed by global histories, with a particular focus on the Philippines. Here, he was born and raised in a family of activists, at a time of conflict and corruption under the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (1965-1986). His detailed reconstructions of their collection - acquired under the pseudonyms of Jane Ryan and William Saunders - expose Western/Europe complicities in Asian colonial histories, from Credit Suisse to the American Republican Party, and critique how many museums collect, display, and interpret the objects they hold today.

In his first UK exhibition in a decade, titled for Mark Twain’s 1901 anti-imperial satire, Pio connects these local and global histories. With works spanning engraving, sculpture, and jewellery, produced in collaboration with his partner, Frances Wadworth Jones, he reengages objects found at the University of Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, St John’s College, and Blenheim Palace - often marginalised, ignored, or forgotten. With an etching of Prince Giolo or the ‘Painted Prince’, a 17th century slave depicted by John Savage, Pio outlines why his practice is anchored around the body. We also look at two reconstructed tiaras, which connect the Romanovs of the Russian Empire, to the Royal Family in the UK, all via Christie’s auction house.
Pio shares why he often shows his work alongside others, like the Filipino American artist and art historian Carlos Villa, plus the politics, collections, and textiles of Pacita Abad, his aunt. He details his use of monumental media like marble and bronze, ‘the material of history’. Pio explains his approach to ‘diasporic objects’, not things, but travelling ‘networks of relationships’, which challenge binaries between the East and West, and historic and contemporary experiences - thus locating himself within Oxford’s archives.

Curators Ros Carter and Sofie Krogh Christensen chart Pia Arke’s photo-activism across the Arctic region, from a pinhole view to wider perspectives on Indigenous and Inuit experiences in the 20th century.

Though scarcely exhibited outside Scandinavia, Pia Arke (1958–2007) is widely acknowledged as one of the region’s most important artistic researchers, ‘photo-activists’, and postcolonial critics. Born in Scoresbysund, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) to a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, Arke asserted an identity that was defined as neither exclusively Danish or Greenlandic; a ‘third place’ that allowed for hybridity and resisted binary categories or polarisation. Through performance art, writing and photography, she examines the complex ethnic and cultural relationships between Denmark and Greenland, using long exposure to highlight continuities over time. Modern Danish colonial rule started in the 18th century, and Greenland wouldn’t became a fully autonomous state until the 1970s. Still dependent on grants, much of Greenland’s economic and foreign policy remains under Danish control.

In 1990, the artist developed her own hand-built, life-size camera obscura to photograph the landscapes of Greenland that she had known as a child. Reconstructed today at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and KW Institute in Berlin, the curators share how Arke was drawn to the ‘in-between’ media of photography, like herself, a ‘mongrel’ which challenged artistic conventions. Arke’s self and group portraits, reappropriated photographs, and archive collages also mark stark interventions, reinserting Indigenous and Inuit people and women into Nordic narratives, challenging the artist’s exclusion from conceptual art circles, and stereotypes of ‘naive’ and folk painting.

Arke died before she could experience the growing interest in her work; its continued relevance to questions of representation, climate crises, and the impact of global economics on Indigenous communities throughout the arctic regions, is evident in the work of other artists on display, and contemporaries like Jessie Kleemann, Anna Birthe-Hove, and Julie Edel Hardenberg. We discuss Arke’s experience of art education in Copenhagen, and the ongoing efforts by the likes of the Nuuk Art Museum to find a language for Inuit art histories. Plus, we consider shared histories between Greenland, Denmark, and the UK - including the British explorer who gave his name to Scoresbysund.

Art historian and Professor Griselda Pollock traces the memories of contemporary artist women like Sutapa Biswas, one of her students in the 1980s, and the entanglements in feminist, queer, and postcolonial thinking in art schools and universities.

Griselda Pollock has long advocated for the critical function of contemporary art - and artists - in society. Whether paintings, drawings, or sculptures, these media can translate the traumatic legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and migration into visual form, and serve as refusals to forget - especially in our memory-effacing digital age.

Born in apartheid South Africa, Griselda has lectured in global contexts; at the University of Leeds in the 1980s, she encountered Sutapa Biswas, a ‘force of nature’ and one of the institution’s first POC art students. She shares her experience of the two-way flows of teaching and learning. Drawing on stills from the artist’s new film work Lumen (2021), and historic ‘Housewives with Steak-Knives’ (1984-1985), she highlights both Bengali Indian imagery, and motifs of 17th and 18th century Old/Dutch Masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt - and why the artist ‘didn’t need Artemisia Gentileschi’ when she had the Hindu goddess Kali.

Engaging with leaders of the Blk Art Group like Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, and Claudette Johnson, we find connections with the first generation of British artists, born in the UK of migrant parents. Griselda also shares the important work of art historians and academics beyond Western/Europe, like Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Catherine de Zegher, and Hiroko Hagewara. We discuss how being open to challenge and conversation, unsettling your own assumptions, denormalising and widening visibility are all ongoing obligations. Still, with Coral Woodbury’s paintings, layered atop H.W. Jansen’s History of Art (1968), we see how little the education system has changed. Griselda concludes with thoughts on Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and challenging the norms of modernist colonial tourism within the confines of free speech and market demand.

Artist and curator Lubaina Himid unravels entangled histories of transatlantic slavery and textile production, across continents, and Britain’s museum collections, via Lost Threads (2021, 2023).

Lubaina Himid considers herself ‘fundamentally a painter’, but textiles have long been part of her life and practice. Had she stayed in Zanzibar, the country of her birth in East Africa, she may have become a kanga designer, following a pattern set by her mother’s interest in fashion, and childhood spent around department stores in London. First commissioned by the British Textile Biennial in 2021, and installed in Gawthorpe Hall’s Great Barn, her 400m-long work Lost Threads’ flows in a manner reflective of the movement of the oceans, seas, and waterways which historically carried raw cotton, spun yarn, and woven textiles between continents, as well as enslaved people from Africa to pick raw cotton in the southern states of America, and workers who migrated from South Asia to operate looms in East Lancashire. Now on display in Bath, the rich Dutch wax fabrics resonate with the portraits on display in the Holburne Museum’s collection of 17th and 18th century paintings - symbols of how much of the wealth and prosperity of south-west England has been derived from plantations in the West Indies.

Lubaina talks about how the meaning of her work changes as it travels to different contexts, with works interpreted with respect to Indian Ocean histories in the port city of Sharjah, to accessible, participatory works in Cardiff, and across Wales. We consider her ‘creative interventions’ in object museums and historic collections, ‘obliterating the beauty’ of domestic items like ceramics, and her work with risk-taking curators in ‘regional’ and ‘non-conventional’ exhibition spaces. We discuss her formative work within the Blk Art group in the 1980s, collaboration with other women, and being the first Black artist to win the Turner Prize in 2017. And drawing on her interests in theatre, Lubaina hints at other collections and seemingly ‘resolved’ histories that she’d like to unsettle next.

Decolonial thinker Professor Paul Gilroy joins EMPIRE LINES live in Plymouth, to chart thirty years since the publication of The Black Atlantic, his influential book about race, nationalism, and the formation of a transoceanic, diasporic culture, of African, American, British, and Caribbean heritages.

Published in 1993, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness explores the interconnectedness of Black diasporas and communities across Western/Europe. He argues that the experience of slavery and colonisation, racism and global migration has shaped a unique Black cultural identity that transcends national borders.

By examining the cultural contributions of Black individuals in music, literature, and art, Paul suggests that the Black Atlantic remains a site of resistance and creativity. Highlighting the plural and complex experiences of Black people throughout history and today, he challenges the notion of a singular, essential Black identity. We consider some of the transdisciplinary artist-activist-academics referenced in his texts, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall, and James Baldwin, to more contemporary figures, like Nadia Cattouse, bell hooks, and June Jordan, and Angeline Morrison. Plus, Paul talks about his early interests in music journalism, research into Black jazz and blues music, as well as British folk and country songs - and even Eminem.

We consider Paul’s engagements with Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the Midlands, and how his practice challenges ideas of Black nationalism, Afro-centrism, and political Blackness. We discuss too his ideas about afro-pessimism and planetary humanism, and how capitalism, militarism, and the environment has changed over the last thirty years. A self-described ‘child of Rachel Carson’, he details his support for Extinction Rebellion, and the obligation of older generations to find hope in an era of climate and ecological crises. Finally, Paul describes his ‘Creole upbringing’ in north London, connecting with his Guyanese heritage in the multicultural, cosmopolitan city, and how his mixed parentage shaped his relationship with rural landscapes, including the south-west of England, from where we speak.

Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey joins EMPIRE LINES live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, to discuss Afrogallonism, uplifting communities with upcycled plastic waste, and how the traditional Ghanaian harvest festival of Homowo challenges colonial hierarchies of gender.

Accra-based artist Serge Attukwei Clottey works across installation, performance, photography, painting, and sculpture, exploring personal and political narratives rooted in histories of trade and migration. He refers to his practice with yellow plastic, Kufuor-era, cooking oil cans as ‘Afrogallonism’, using found and recycled materials to create a dialogue with the city’s cultural history and identity, whilst exploring the meanings that are invested in everyday objects, and how they circulate in local and global economies.

Referencing Ghana’s historic wealth, a region known as the Gold Coast during British colonial rule during 19th and 20th century, Serge’s installations like Follow the Yellow Brick Road (2015-2020) also serve a practical function, in creating wealth and employment for the local community. On display alongside his existing work at the Eden Project is a new audio piece, a remembrance of famine that once befell pre-colonial Ghana, and is once again impacting farmers as a consequence of climate change.

Serge talks about his family’s migration from city of Jamestown/Usshertown, in British Accra, to La (Labadi), on the coast, and how water has long infiltrated his practice. We discuss the realities of resource extraction and consumption captured by his work, connecting with the likes of Romauld Hazoumè, El Anatsui, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji.

Artist - and winner of Artes Mundi 10 - Taloi Havini mines connections between extractive industries in the Pacific Islands, and Wales. documenting the environmental damage caused by colonial, and patriarchal, relations with land, in Habitat (2017).

The Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea was the largest in the world when it first opened in 1972. Run by the Australian mining company, Conzinc Riotinto, it symbolises how legacies of extraction - in colonialism, and contemporary capitalism - are often entangled. Born in Bougainville, and now based in Brisbane, Taloi Havini’s own multidisciplinary artistic practice is informed by her matrilineal ties to her land and communities. In Habitat, a three-channel, immersive video installation, Taloi follows the journey of a woman called Agata, as she continues to investigate the legacies of resource extraction in Panguna and the Pacific region. Moving from lush greens to lurid blue waters - unnatural colours which Taloi hasn’t tampered with in film - we trace the poisonous tailings, waste products of mining, that have destroyed the landscape.

Taloi talks about how mining has ‘robbed’ people of sustainable ways of living, and how communities have come together to resist the imposition of destructive, gendered relationships to land. She describes various women as leaders, and shares her research-based practice, based on the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous Knowledge Systems,. Taloi details her work in ‘countermapping’, turning the same tools used by 19th century British settler-governments in Australia and New Zealand (Aoterea) for colonial discovery, plunder, and control, to showing evidence for those seeking environmental compensation. She also shares how her communities asked her to use drones, challenging the temporal othering of Indigenous identities.

Acknowledging her particular identity from the Nakas Tribe of Hakö people, Taloi connects with the practices of other Pacific artists, and details her forthcoming curatorial project, Re-stor(y)ing Oceania at Ocean Space, part of the Venice Biennale. On her announcement as winner of Artes Mundi 10, the UK’s largest contemporary art prize, she connects with her contemporaries - including John Akomfrah, Rushdi Anwar, Alia Farid, and Naomi Rincón Gallardo - and the solidarity shared by this year’s participants, most of whom come from areas of conflict, in seeking peace with respect to the situation in Palestine. She also shares how the work translates as it travels, challenging stereotypes like the ‘tropicalisation’ of Pacific identities, by platforming everyday Indigenous and Black experiences and identities. And at the Prize announcement in Cardiff, we discuss how Habitat resonates in local communities in Wales, a nation with its own particular relationship with oil, gas, and coal resource extraction.

Jamie Ruers, Mariano Ben Plotkin, and Mariano Ruperthuz Honorato, from the Freud Museum in London, reinterpret psychoanalysis through 20th century Latin American pop culture, relocating the practice in radio shows, surrealist photographs, women’s magazines, and comic books from the 1960s, like Freud: El Mago de los Sueños (The Wizard of Dreams).

Psychoanalysis is often considered a practice of the Global North, starting in Sigmund Freud’s home in Vienna before World War II. But South America has been at the forefront of the practice since the end of the 20th century, where it is is even more popular than Europe. So who are the figures who led - and simultaneously developed - such thinking? And how did Buenos Aires come to have the highest proportion of psychoanalysts in the world?

Curator and researchers Jamie Ruers, Mariano Ben Plotkin, and Mariano Ruperthuz Honorato share how psychoanalysis permeated all layers of society, especially pop culture. They draw on existing traditions and new trends like magical realism, associated with Jorge Luis Borges. We discuss the ‘cultural complex’ of dreams and sex, and the difference between Freudism and psychoanalysis, highlighting histories of exchange and reinterpretation, agency and appropriation for economic gain, rather than simplying adoption or propagation, of Freud’s thinking. Beyond Spanish, Portuguese, both languages of colonial import, we consider the many ways Freud’s works were translated, and some of those he failed to credit, whose contributions have been written out of history, like Peruvian psychiatrist Honorio Delgado, Julio Pires Porto-Carrero, founder of the Society of Brazilian Psychoanalysis (1928), and disciple of Juliano Moreira, the son of a Black slave who picked up Freud’s ideas and circulated them throughout Brazil.

We hear Gastão Pereira da Silva’s radio programmes, authored ‘in the vein of Dr. Frasier Crane’, and read women’s magazines like Idilio, illustrated by exiles like the German-Argentinian photographer Grete Stern, whose surrealist images highlight the intellectual interests and engagements of women, and shared experiences of migrants across continents. Plus, contemporary artworks and interventions in Freud’s former home in London challenge the exotification of South America, connecting the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of people both past and present.

Jana Manuelpillai revisits the Madras College of Arts and Crafts, the first British colonial art school set up in India, through the post-independence practice and striking monochrome works of A.P. Santhanaraj.

The Madras College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, was the first art school in India, set up by the British colonial administrator in 1850. Post-independence in 1948, as the Government College of Arts and Crafts, teachers like K.C.S. Paniker and S. Dhanapal, and A.P. - Andrew Peter - Santhanaraj, transformed from the School, from its ‘Kensington style’ education, to focus on Indian influences. Historical attention has focussed on schools in Bombay, Baroda, Calcutta, and Delhi, but curator Jana Manuelpillai suggests that this actually let a more ‘authentic’ southern idiom to flourish - something he continues to explore with contemporary artists.

Marking 55 years since Madras State was renamed Tamil Nadu, Jana shares footage from his meetings with the Santhanaraj, and outlines his plural influences, from Indian fresco painting to the art of Jackson Pollock. We discuss the diversity and deep practice of traditional religions in the south, and the differences between European primitivism and nativism, ‘othering’ the likes of Pablo Picasso. Plus, we discuss the globalisation of contemporary art markets, challenging London, New York, and Paris’ primacy, and the ‘stamps of approval’ they’ve granted diaspora artists past.

Interdisciplinary artist Osman Yousefzada crafts stories of working-class migration experiences, unwrapping the influence of his mother and many other textile makers in his diaspora community in Birmingham.

From large-scale textile works to prints and drawings, Osman Yousefzada’s practice considers representations and reimaginings of working class migration experience. Growing up in a British-Pakistani diaspora community in Birmingham in the 1980s, Yousefzada’s craft is grounded in his childhood experiences, watching his mother, ‘a maker’ of shalwar kameez and other textiles.

A new exhibition at Charleston in Firle draws connections between these domestic, private spaces, the Bloomsbury group and fashion, and the artist’s public practice. We look at a new series of works on paper, on public display for the first time, inspired by characters in the Falnama, a book of omens used by fortune tellers in Iran, India and Turkey during the 16th and 17th centuries. At the time, people seeking insight into the future would turn to a random page and interpret the text; Yousefzada transposes this to the present day, to tell stories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, and recreate such talismans that protect or heal and work as guardians of the immigrant experience.

Curators Hannah Hooks and Misha Curson connect global environments and food practices, from guerrilla gardeners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to foragers in Palestine, challenging extractive, colonial approaches to land through contemporary art at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

Artemisia afra – or African wormwood – is traditionally used as a medicine to prevent and treat malaria. This knowledge has long been passed down through generations and communities via music and craft, both marginalised in Western rational thought. In the 1970s, research to develop new anti-malarial drugs led to the discovery, extraction, and patenting of Artemisin - already used for two thousand years in China and Asia. Whilst still cultivated by some women’s cooperatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the plant, and its producers, have been continually suppressed and banned, by the Belgian colonial administration in the 19th century, to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Big Pharma businesses.

With a multimedia installation of film, song, and tea tastings, Swiss artist Uriel Orlow seeks to platform these ongoing practices. He joins other contemporary artists in Acts of Gathering, a new exhibition at the Eden Project in Cornwall which explores how our relationship with food is linked with the land, environment, and labour that goes into its production. Harvest festivals in Homowo in Ghana and Guldize in Cornwall link the different practices of Serge Attukwei Clottey and Jonathan Baldock. Meanwhile, in Jumana Manna’s film FORAGERS (2022), we see how Israeli nature protection laws prohibit the foraging of native plants, alienating Palestinians from their land, and sustainable harvesting practices.

Curators Misha Curson and Hannah Hooks connect traditions across cultures, acknowledging how human and planetary health are also entwined. We discuss legacies of extraction in science, botany, and renewed mining in Africa. Misha and Hannah suggest why some local methods are classed (and commodified) as sustainable, while others are marginalised by globalisation, industrial farming, and neoimperial hierarchies. Plus, we discuss the opportunities Eden presents for public participation, access, and activation as a non-conventional museum space, its position within the wider arts ecology of south-west England, and its own regeneration, as a former clay mine.

Curator Matthew Barrington marks 220 years since the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave uprising, unreeling how resistance continues with a series of films, from the first zombie horrors, to contemporary Caribbean and diasporic documentaries.

The Caribbean island of Haiti is often reduced to binary representations, of the 18th century Haitian Revolution and its iconic leader, Toussaint Louverture, or environmental disasters, with the earthquake of 2010. But resistance has long been central to Haitian identities and the popular imagination - past and present. Since 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived on Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French colonists all attempted to ‘settle’ the land. The Revolution was the first and only successful uprising of self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in the island region of Saint-Domingue, a rebellion that still resounds across the islands and diasporas today - whether in the words of Naomi Osaka, or filmmakers like Esery Mondesir, who say ‘we’ve been screaming Black Lives Matter (#BLM) for over 200 years’.

Marking 220 years since the Revolution, and formation of the first independent Black republic on 1 January 1804, Barbican Cinema curator Matthew Barrington shares some of the ways Haiti is depicted on screen. We cover 70 years of films, travelling from ‘exotic’ plantations to more everyday scenes, starting with Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), which birthed the horror genre. Drawing on Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of factory owner Murder Legendre, and own othering, we discuss how such movies often sensationalised local spiritual practices as ‘superstitions’, and reinforced racial and gender hierarchies with their Western European-centric gaze. But they can also be read more subversively, in relation to colonialism, as evidence of forced labour, slavery, and capitalist extraction. We find similar tropes in gothic and body horrors, from vampires to killer plants, and connect with post-colonial landscapes across the Caribbean like Cuba.

Photographer Armet Francis documents African diasporic cultures across ‘The Black Triangle’, and captures the co-founding of the Association of Black Photographers in London, now Autograph ABP, 35 years ago.

For over four decades, Jamaican-British photographer Armet Francis has taken portraits that celebrate the resilience and survival of African diasporic cultures. Having immigrated with his family as a young child in the 1950s, he was part of the post-Windrush generation, acutely aware of his ‘cultural displacement’ and ‘political alienation’ as the only Black child in his school in London Docklands. Drawing on the transatlantic slave trade route, between Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Armet developed the idea of ‘The Black Triangle’ to guide his photographic practice from 1969, as a means to connect with the rich and diverse pan-African communities.

Armet details his ‘social documentary’ approach, his experiences as one of the first Black photographers to shoot fashion, and how he challenged exotic tropes in commercial, white photography and advertising. He shares images of Notting Hill Carnival, Brixton Market, and tributes to those who protested the injustice of the New Cross Fire in 1981. Armet retells the unlikely story of taking Angela Davis’ photograph at the Keskidee Centre, his engagement with activists like Malcolm X and Stuart Hall, and how he had to ‘become Black’ before he could becoming politically conscious and active in civil rights movements.

Armet was also the first Black photographer to have a solo exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London when The Black Triangle series was exhibited there in 1983. Five years later, he co-founded the Association of Black Photographers, now Autograph ABP, where he has represented the series in 2023. To mark both anniversaries, he talks about what it was like founding the institution, working with the likes of David A Bailey, Mark Sealy, and Charlie Phillips, and his ongoing practice in the archives, keeping record of the important contributions - and canons - of British history.

Writer and musician Kalaf Epalanga moves between Angola, Portugal, and Brazil, sounding out colonial histories and contemporary migrant experiences through kizomba and kuduro music, in Whites Can Dance Too (2023).

‘It took being caught at a border without proper documents for me to realise I'd always been a prisoner of sorts.’ Kalaf Epalanga’s debut novel follows a young man migrating from Africa to Western Europe, when he is suddenly stopped on his journey and demanded his papers by the immigration police. Finding work in various jobs, he does soon find community - and freedom - in the dance clubs of the cities.

Whites Can Dance Too is an invitation to ‘embrace the other’ and it's also a form of auto-fiction. Kalaf migrated from Angola to Portugal, the former a colony, known as Portuguese West Africa until 1951, which remained a province and state of the Portuguese Empire until 1975. First publishing in Portuguese, Kalaf details the legacies of this colonisation in contemporary culture, taking from the Latin tradition of writing the stream of consciousness, and challenging Anglophone standards with oral storytelling. Kalaf also talks about his relationship with translation - and why the English language edition is his favourite.

Drawing on his background in electronic dance music, Kalaf relocates techno on the African continent, combining elements of the traditional African zouk and contemporary kuduro genres to design kizomba, or dance parties. We talk about sound as a vibration - a migration - which can articulate emotions and memories beyond words, and why curating exhibitions or DJ sets is a form of storytelling too. Traveling across continents, he shares some of his literary inspirations, from Ondjaki to Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, and how he has connected with Afro-Brazilians since working in South America. We also discuss the relationship between diasporas in the Global South, and the importance of supporting cultural and literary industries.

Contemporary artist Maha Ahmed reconnects Asian art forms along the Silk Road, migrating between traditional Mughal and Persian miniature paintings, Japanese woodblock prints, and imported Islamic ceramics.

Where Worlds Meet captures both Maha Ahmed’s practice and life. Born in 1989 in Pakistan, she first studied Miniature Painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore from Imran Qureshi, pursuing her practice in that city, and also London, Tokyo, and Dubai, where she is currently based. Ahmed’s detailed paintings relate to her own migrations, each one populated with one or two birds in flight. Over time, her titles have shifted, from references to noise, towards solitude, emptiness, and meeting ‘a wall at every turn’. Ahmed speaks about her experience of isolation in Japan, and the loneliness shared by many during COVID lockdowns. But she also shares how Japan offered her many meeting points in her artistic journey, as displayed in her Leighton House exhibition.

Maha’s miniatures draw from traditional Persian and Mughal manuscripts, and classical Japanese forms. Though historically-informed, her application of colour is wholly contemporary, with rich greens and blues lent from her time working at an illustration studio in Tokyo. She talks about about artistic exchanges between Asia and East Asia, and how woodblock prints, pigments, and dyes were often traded along the Silk Road, inspiring interdisciplinary and multimedia artworks. These are cultural histories which decentre and exclude Western Europe entirely, often absent in the art historical canon.

The artist also combines historic and contemporary media; some are aged, with paint layered atop tea and coffee-stained paper, and some are stark and modern. She links back to London with ‘An Unfolding’ (2023), a work specially commissioned for Leighton House, which references the importance of colour in ‘non-representational’ art. Ahmed also details how she draws from the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and how, as a Muslim, she feels ‘comfortable appropriating’ the colours of its 18th century Arab Hall, adorned with vivid ceramic tiles from Turkey and Greece, Egypt and Syria.

For EMPIRE LINES’ 100th episode, we join artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah to journey the Columbian Exchange, connecting continents from the 15th century, and contemporary port cities from Plymouth to Sharjah and Venice. The Columbian Exchange refers to the widespread transfer of plants, animals, goods, and people between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia and Europe - or the ‘Old’ and ‘New World’ - since the 1400s. With five screens, Arcadia considers these layered, overlapping journeys, travelling across stormy seas and sublime, epic landscapes. But these histories are also ‘interrupted’ with symbolic images of trade, disease, and smallpox, highlighting the fatal, often ‘genocidal’, nature of colonial encounters.

Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah talks about his intersectional, environmentally-engaged films, comparing previous works like Purple (2017) to this first ‘post-human project’. He connects historic viruses - often represented by Indigenous cultures in vivid oral and visual sources like Aztec codexes and ‘plague journals’ - with his experience producing during the COVID pandemic. Drawing on his work with the Black Audio Film Collective, John shares his collaborative, ‘democratic’ approach to filmmaking. And, 400 years since the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth to transport the Pilgrims to North America, we discuss the meaning of Arcadia’s immersive cinematic display for the port city today.

Curator Alice Wilke transports from Switzerland to sub-Saharan cities in Africa, tracing Carnival traditions across continents, via Carrie Mae Weems’ 20th century wallpapers, ceramic plates, and photographs.

In 1993, the North American artist Carrie Mae Weems undertook a ‘pilgrimage’ to West Africa to discover her heritage. With photographs of historic architectures, former slave sites, and colonies, she seeks to retell histories about the origins of civilisation - but ones which also highlight her position as a contemporary artist practicing from a diaspora.

As The Evidence of Things Not Seen - the final stop on Weems’ current ‘world tour’ of exhibitions - opens in Switzerland, curator Alice Wilke talks about how the show has changed from between the Barbican, in London, and Basel. Starting with the Missing Link series (2003), we consider the particular history of Carnival in Basel, a time of social and political critique, and tradition with unexpected connections to the Caribbean. We see how Weems relocates celebrated - and celebrity - Black women like Mary J. Blige in her practice, composing photographs like Baroque paintings to play on conventions of Western/European art, and keep stories alive through their retelling. Moving through Weems’ wider work, we consider the racism, internalised shadism, and hyper-visibility of Black people in society, and what European institutions haven’t yet seen, in their under-representation of POC artists.

Curator Hammad Nasar expands ideas of miniature painting, moving around South Asia and Western Europe from the 17th century to now, with Nusra Latif Qureshi’s 2009 digital print scroll, Did You Come Here To Find History?

Beyond the Page, a touring exhibition of South Asian miniatures, is truly historic and historical. At its core are more than 180 detailed, small-scale works on paper, dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the time when the Mughal Empire ruled over much of South Asia. But these miniature paintings are borrowed not from contemporary India or Pakistan, but the British Museum in London, the Tate and V&A, and the Royal Collection. So how did this wealth of South Asian miniature paintings come to be held (and hidden away) in Britain’s greatest collections – and what does it mean for this sheer quantity to be here now?

Hammad Nasar, one of the exhibition’s curators, puts these works in conversation with those by leading contemporary artists from South Asia and its diasporas, including Hamra Abbas, Imran Qureshi, Shahzia Sikander, Khadim Ali, and Ali Kazim. We consider their practice across media, highlighting the different forms in which miniature practice lives and lives on, whether in sculpture, film, or architectural installations. Travelling along Nusra Latif Qureshi’s digital-printed scroll, we unpick the layers of portraits, from contemporary passport photographs, to traditional portraits from Venice and Mughal India. With a miniature painting of Saint Rabia, the first female saint in Sufi Islam, Hammad also highlights how women and the body have been represented in Islamic cultures, pluralising perspectives on the past.

Connecting Britain and South Asia, we consider the foundation of the world-renowned Miniature Department of the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan, and how artists have long engaged with a range of non-Western/European media, including Japanese woodblock prints. Hammad defies the marginalisation of miniatures – due to their size, and ‘non-conventional’ means of distribution and display – suggesting that art markets and institutions must ‘grow up’ in their appreciation of the media. We also trace migrations and two-way flows, how courtly and Company paintings influenced well-known Dutch Masters like Rembrandt, to Anwar Jalal Shemza, a multidisciplinary artist of modernist and abstract works. Plus, Hammad talks about the ‘empire-shaped hole’ in British history, and why it is important that we share uncomfortable histories like the legacy of the East India Company to challenge the displacement of empire, as something that happened over there and then.

Photographer Hélène Amouzou, and curator Bindi Vora, capture the in/visibility of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe, moving between 21st century Togo and Belgium in a series of haunting autoportraits.

Born in Togo, and now based in Belgium, Hélène Amouzou’s self-portraits consider how migration has shaped her identity. Her blurred, ghostly figure, set against suitcases, and the peeling wallpaper of a destitute attic, suggests at the sense of in/visibility, and the particular experiences of women trapped in domestic spaces. These photographs, created during a period where she was seeking political asylum, have become documents of her family’s two-decade long journey seeking safety and citizenship during the 1990s and 2000s.

As the artist’s first exhibition in the UK opens at Autograph, she details her practice, and use of long exposures and sweeping motions to suggest continuities between past and present. Hélène shares Togo’s perspectives on northern European countries, as informed by colonial histories and myths. Togoland was a ‘protectorate’ of the German Empire in West Africa from 1884 to 1914, an area which included the current state of Togo and much of Ghana, and which Europeans had long dubbed ‘the Slave Coast’. During the First World War, it was invaded by British and French forces, and endured military rule by the latter until its independence in 1960. She likens Belgium’s location - similarly placed between France and Germany - whilst curator Bindi Vora connects with her own family’s experiences of displacement, herself a second-generation Ugandan-Asian migrant with connections to both Kenya and India. Plus, we discuss the impact of this public exhibition on Hélène’s private, intimate practice, and what it means to display these works in the context of the British media discourse about ‘migrant crises’.

Curator and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali connects climate science, contemporary art, and activism, cultivating a radical, cultural ecology in the countryside of south-west England, in their multidisciplinary exhibition, Against Apartheid.

As environmental crises disproportionately affect Black and brown communities, and the resulting displacement often racialised, should we consider these states of ‘climate apartheid’? And could contemporary art help to bridge the gap between science and academics, and everyday action guidance? Against Apartheid, a multidisciplinary exhibition in Plymouth, puts these practices, histories, and geographies in conversation, from vast wallpapers charting global warming, to an intimate portrait of Ella Kissi-Debrah, and plantation paylists collected by the Barbadian artist Annalee Davis, linking land ownership in Scotland and the Caribbean from the 19th century Abolition Acts. Other works affirm how historic ecologies of empire – African enslavement, the middle passage, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples - continue to shape our present and future, in the geopolitics of international borders, migration, and travel.

Activist and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali talks about his work as ‘organisation’, not curation, and how we can resist the individualisation that prevents effective collective political action. From his background in film, he suggests why museums and exhibitions might be better places for screenings than cinemas, outside of the market. We discuss why both rural countryside and urban city landscapes should be considered through the lens of empire, drawing on ‘post-plantation’ and anti-colonial thinkers like Paul Gilroy, Françoise Vergès, Sylvie Séma Glissant, and Grada Kilomba. We relocate Plymouth’s global history, a focus since #BLM, reversing the notion of the particular and ‘regional’ as peripheral to the capital. We explore the wider arts ecology in south-west England, and how local connections with artists like Kedisha Coakley at The Box, and Iman Datoo at the University of Exeter and the Eden Project in Cornwall, also inform his work with global political institutions like the UN.

Curator Dorothy Price outlines the figures of Claudette Johnson, a founder member of the Black British Art Movement (Blk Art Group), and one of the first ‘post-colonials’ practicing in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the Midlands from the 1980s to now.

Ever so-slightly-larger than-life, Claudette Johnson’s drawings of Black figures reflect the status of their artist. A founding member of the Black British Arts Movement or BLK Art Group in the 1980s, she was a leading figure in a politically-charged creative community - called the first ‘post-colonials’ by Stuart Hall, for being born and raised in Britain. Johnson worked closely with fellow ‘post-Windrush’ contemporaries include Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard and Maud Sulter, Marlene Smith and Lubaina Himid - but her work has been relatively underrepresented.

As the artist’s first public monographic exhibition opens in London, curator Dorothy Price talks about her practice in the Wolverhampton Young Black Artists Group - which predated the YBAs - and formative speech in the First National Black Arts Conference in 1982. Dorothy shares personal insights from the groundbreaking ICA exhibition, The Thin Black Line, and Claudette’s complex position as a Black European artist of African and Caribbean descent. Drawing on the Courtauld’s permanent collection, we see the artist’s work with African masks, sculptures, and conventional representations of Black women, challenging the colonial foundations of Western European modernism, and reappropriating the ‘primitivism’ of the likes of Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin to state her place in art history. We also discuss her contemporary practice, and how the history of the Black British Arts Movement can decentre the contemporary ‘Brixtonisation’ of the singular Black experience, drawing attention to cities in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and the Midlands.

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.

Artist and curator Tony Albert collects Aboriginalia, colonial kitsch still found in Australia’s second-hand and souvenir shops, to reconstruct historic racial stereotypes and reclaim contemporary Indigenous experiences.

From ‘Picanniny Floor Polish’ to ‘Bally Boomerang Pinball Machines’, Sydney-based artist and collector Tony Albert has long been fascinated by Australiana, tourist objects which attempt to define, and commodify, Aboriginal and Torres Strati Islander peoples. Transforming them into grand sculptural installations, his works are political interventions with these vintage objects, and reappropriations of their use and meaning - which refuse to shy away from the shameful status they now hold.

Curator Eleanor Nairne traces the migrations of contemporary artist Julianknxx, as he travels between European port cities, and back to the Barbican in London, collaborating with Black choirs and musicians.

Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx challenges stereotypes around African art, history, and culture through the lens of his personal experiences. Crossing the boundaries between poetry and music, audio and visual art, his new multichannel installation at the Barbican is born out of a year of travelling over four thousand kilometres across Europe, from Berlin to Barcelona, in a process of collaboration and ‘active listening’ with Black choirs and collectives.

Curator Eleanor Nairne shares her experience of working with the artist, and how their interdisciplinary practice challenges the singular ‘Black experience’. We discuss the importance of water and migration, ‘shipwrecked’ cities like Amsterdam, and how the language of historical reckonings is rooted in transatlantic slavery and colonialism. Drawing on academics like Édouard Glissant and Lorna McDaniel, we consider the role of songs as non-conventional sources, sites of community and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge. Plus, Eleanor details the importance of immersion in unsettling narratives - including online.

Contemporary artist Elsa James moves through the Museum of London Docklands’ London, Sugar & Slavery gallery - and so, the missing histories of the 17th and 18th centuries - in her 2023 film, Living in the Wake of the Lust for Sugar.

In 2023, the Museum of London Docklands invited artist and activist Elsa James to make a disruptive intervention in their London, Sugar & Slavery gallery. Finding the enslaved African voice missing - from both this particular space, and museums more widely - Elsa shot a seven-minute film in shades of black and red, embedding in the space her personal, contemporary experience from the British African-Caribbean diaspora, as connected with the long history of the transatlantic slave trade.

Curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery locate Cambridge within the transatlantic slave trade, connecting global commodities and local consumption, historic and contemporary art, to reveal how five hundred years of colonial resistance constructed new cultures, known as the Black Atlantic.

Between 1400 and 1900, European empires colonised much of the Americas, transporting over 12.5 million people to these colonies from Africa as slaves. It’s a history often recounted as something singular, concluded in the past - detached as happening ‘then, and over there’ - else told from the perspective of imperial powers. But in their resistance of colonial slavery, people also produced new cultures that continue to shape our present. Black Atlantic, a new exhibition at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, reconnects the institution’s collection, university, and city more widely with these global histories. Installed within the Founder’s Galleries, part-funded by the profits from the transatlantic slave trade, it builds on the ‘grandeur and smugness’ of the Fitzwilliam’s architecture - an intervention which asks whether it is possible to decolonise museums, as imperial infrastructures.

Co-curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery consider contrasts and continuities between historic and modern works, with contemporary Black artists like Barbara Walker and Keith Piper, Alberta Whittle and Donald Locke commenting on visibility, racism, and colourism, and how visual representations of Black people have shifted over time. Vicky smashes stereotypes about abolitionism, ceramics, and popular culture, from the UK’s largest pro-slavery punch bowl, to Jacqueline Bishop’s new Wedgwood dinner set. Plus, with a botanical painting from a Caribbean plantation - one of the first signed works by a Black artist of a Black subject - we travel between environments in West Africa, North and South America, and Europe, finding examples of exploitation, agency, and self-liberation - and pathways to future ‘repair’.

Curator Rachel Dedman unpicks the personal and political histories woven into Palestinian textiles, the role of the ‘embroidered woman’ in resistance movements, and how the British Mandate changed clothes after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century.

With a century of dresses, jackets and coats - ‘hundred-year-old sisters’ - from Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, a new exhibition in Cambridge shows embroidery as both a historic and living tradition, and why clothing could be some of the most significant cultural sources from Palestine today. A split-front jellayeh, stitched up after World War I, reveals how British occupation of the former Ottoman territories affected social codes. Studio photographs of urban, middle-class Jerusalemites wearing European imports - and ‘traditional’ clothes like costumes - speak to class and regional inequalities, as much as diversity.

Reading textiles like history books, curator Rachel Dedman reveals how women’s bodies have long been sites of national identity, through the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, Naksa (setback) in 1967, to the first Intifada against Israel. We look at a dress patched up with a United Nations Relief and Works Agency-issued bag of flour, to find histories of resistance, transnational solidarity, and economic empowerment. Plus, Rachel explains ‘auto-orientalism’, and refashions the keffiyeh, revealing the role of men in this women’s work, and deconstructing binaries between genders, arts and crafts.

Writer and photographer Johny Pitts captures everyday experiences from Black communities around the British coast, bringing together the sights, sounds, and sofas shared from Liverpool to London, in his touring installation, Home is Not a Place.

In 2021, Johny Pitts and the poet Roger Robinson set off on a journey clockwise around the British coast, to answer the question: 'What is Black Britain?' Their collaboration, Home is Not is Place, captures contemporary, everyday experiences of Blackness between Edinburgh and Belfast, Liverpool and Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948.

Setting out from London, the multidisciplinary artist challenges the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Black experiences, and binary media representations of Black excellence, or criminality. Johny shares stories of migration, how Brexit and COVID changed his perceptions of local environments, and archive albums from his own childhood in multicultural, working-class Sheffield. Flicking through shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, we find his travels-past in 1980s bubble-era Japan. And in his Living Room, we sit down to discuss Afropean, inspirations like James Baldwin, Paul Gilroy, and Caryl Phillips, plus his sister Chantal’s pirate radio playlists, and the role of family and community in his practice.

Multimedia artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown maps out the long history of extractivism in southern America, constellating 18th century settler colonialism, oil and gas extraction, and contemporary environmental crises.

South of the Mississippi River sits the US state of Louisiana, a place transformed from ‘Plantation County’ in the 1700s, to an ‘apartheid state’, and today, ‘Cancer Alley’, for its polluted land and water. Colonial legacies have contributed to contemporary environment problems - including Hurricane Katrina - and continue to shape community planning and housing, a phenomenon known as ‘extractivism’.

Artist Imani Jacqueline Brown pushes back against the ‘segregation’ of human/nature, and Black humans from humanity, in her multidisciplinary practice. The artist shares how culture is too ‘entangled’ with public political action, and her ‘grassroots research’ in permit applications awarded to fossil fuel businesses like Texaco (now Chevron) and the Colonial Pipeline Company. The artist describes how she has collaborated to map enslaved peoples’ burial grounds, as marked by magnolia trees, highlighting pan-African traditions of ecological regeneration. Drawing on her work with Follow the Oil and Occupy Museums, Brown suggests that culture and capitalism are often closely linked - and the unique power of repackaging these projects in the form of artistic constellations.

Curator Folakunle Oshun links Peckham in the UK, and Lagos in Nigeria, with water and two centuries of shared colonial histories. Artist David Sanya captures European statues and lingering stereotypes in West Africa. Plus, Emeka Ogboh projects the sounds of the megacity onto the streets of south east London, and recreates the taste of migration with a brand new beer.

Often called ‘Little Lagos’, Peckham in south east London is home to one of the largest Nigerian diaspora communities. When the West African country declared independence after a century of British colonial rule in 1960, the flow of migration soon increased, with economic crises and civil unrest in the country. But individuals and families have long moved between both places. As a port city, Lagos became key to the transatlantic slave trade; its name meaning ‘lake’, after the Portuguese, the first Europeans in the area.

Using water as a channel to connect Lagos and London, a new exhibition at the South London Gallery brings together both Nigerian and British-Nigerian artists like Yinka Shonibare, crossing generations and diasporas. Its curator Folakunle Oshun, founder and director of the Lagos Biennal, describes growing up with CNN, navigating imperial architectures in Berlin and Paris, and why he’d never drive in London. Artist Emeka Ogboh takes us beyond the museum space, using loudspeakers to project the sound of Lagos’ Danfo bus drivers onto the streets of Peckham. We sip his ‘bittersweet’ beer made in collaboration with local brewery Orbit, a blend of English hops and Nigerian alligator pepper, and discuss how food and art can together capture the ‘multisensorial’ experience of migration.

Plus, closer to the River Thames, Birmingham-based artist David Sanya traces his travels from Nigeria to the UK, and how he combines the European artistic tradition of the sublime with Lagos’ distinctive lake and seascapes, creating contemporary photographs of his own environments.

In this bonus episode, brought to you with historicity Tokyo, Japan House London curator Hiro Sugiyama, and contemporary artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, ride the great waves of Japanese graphic design, commercial illustration, and counterculture, from the 1980s to now.

Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, heta-uma rocked the established conventions of Japanese art, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma challenges what is ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’ or skilled art - as well as what ‘subcultures’ mean in the context of a global mainstreaming in Japanese art, embodied by Hokusai’s The Great Wave.

Hiro Sugiyama, artist and co-curator of WAVE, has brought the annual exhibition in Tokyo to Japan Houses in San Francisco, Sao Paolo, and London. From his training at Yumura Teruhiko’s Flamingo Studios in Shinjuku, we return to the city’s Inari shrines with the surrealistic paintings of Suga Mica, and Showa period traditions with Tsuzuki Mayumi. Both artists also detail the long role of women artists in commercial illustration, the two-way exchanges between Japanese and Western European art traditions like ‘superrealism’ and ‘hyperrealism’, and how contemporary Japanese artists take as much from the concept of haziness (morotai), as David Hockney and the films of David Lynch.

Photographer Gregor Sailer exposes the neo-imperial scramble for resources in the Arctic Circle and the Polar Silk Road, with stills frozen in white cubes at the Natural History Museum in London.

Climate change is melting ice across the Arctic Sea, opening a channel known as ‘The Polar Silk Road’- and for traders, access to a wealth of natural resources. The term was defined by contemporary China, a nod to the long history of the the Eurasian Silk Road, characterised by the exchange of tea, spices, and disease. But these stark monochrome settings are contemporary sites of geopolitical conflict over the ownership and exploitation of oil, gas, and borders, all subjects of a new Cold War; the damage endured by local Indigenous people, animals, and plants has global impacts.

From isolated research centres to Icelandic geothermal power plants, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer captures man-made architectures across the region, but always avoids photographing people themselves. He talks about documenting the ‘surreal’, the sustainability of travel photography, and how taking one-shot analogue photographs makes him more present in his environments.

Artist Nil Yalter, a pioneer in 20th century video and multimedia installations, explores the often challenging experience of being an immigrant in a foreign country, through her transnational wallpapers, posters, and photographs of Turkish workers, in Exile is a Hard Job.

Born in Egypt in 1938, Nil Yalter moved from Istanbul to Paris in 1965. Since the 1970s, she has pioneered the practice of socially-engaged video art; working at the intersections of feminist, anti-racism, and labour movements, her media is always decided by the political issue at hand. But her contemporary practice has always been historically-informed, drawing on literatures and languages from the Ottoman Empire.

Pasted up in global cities from Valencia to Mumbai, ‘Exile Is a Hard Job’ includes defaced photographs exposing the living conditions of illiterate ‘guest workers’. Navigating between private, intimate spaces, and public displays, the artist also considers the ethics of photography, using her practice to reflect the loss of identity felt in these communities. She talks about its latest installation at Ab-Anbar Gallery in London, the parallels between her ‘illegal’ practices and subjects, and why women are often ‘doubly punished’. Plus, Yalter describes her motivations for migration from Turkey to France - ‘to learn’ - why MENA artists produce the most exciting work today, and how she feels about her status as the ‘grandmother’ of viral, video art.

Curators Osei Bonsu, Jess Baxter, and Genevieve Barton cross the diverse landscapes, borders, and generations of contemporary African photography, exposing how the past, present, and future can co-exist on camera. Plus, contemporary artist Ndidi Dike revisits the ‘living archive’ of colonialism in Nigeria, from Independence House in Lagos, to London.

Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, Africa’s cultures and traditions have often been seen through Western lenses. By 1914, European powers had colonised 90% of the African continent, often using the media to construct Africa and Black diasporas, in opposition to whiteness. But photography - and photographic traditions of preservation - has long been used by artists on the continent, whether in the pioneering work of studio photographers like James Barnor in pre-independence Ghana, as a means of anti-colonial resistance and political protest in the 1950s, or powerful shots of modern Nigerian Monarchs.

Tate Modern’s A World in Common platforms how artists are reclaim Africa’s histories and reimagining its contemporary place in the world. Curator Osei Bonsu connects show how masks, removed from their ritual context for display in European museums, can also address contemporary questions of restitution, highlighting Edson Chagas’ passport-style photographs connecting Portugal and Angola. Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton look at how globalisation, inequality, migration, and urbanisation, are differently experienced across the continent, and how their ‘hopeful’ exhibition focusses as much on climate activism as climate change. Moving beyond Afrofuturism and pan-Africanism towards ideas around ecology and global solidarity, we see how artists exercise agency in ever changing cities, and through boundary-pushing practices of ‘expanded photography’. Plus, moving from the diaspora London to practice in Lagos, multimedia artist Ndidi Dike explains what discarded files and archive documents from Nigeria can reveal about the post-colonial government.

Curator Florence Ostende visualises how violence against African Americans has been perpetuated throughout history, and challenged with contemporary art, by developing Carrie Mae Weems’ radical photographic practice from the 1980s to now, and how she reframes whiteness, and ‘Anglo-America’, in relation to Black subjects.

Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary US artists, and interest in her films, installations, and performance artworks is rising in Europe too. From her first UK exhibition with Autograph, founded in Brixton to support Black photographers, Weems returns to London with her largest UK exhibition to date, spanning three decades of her multidisciplinary practice, and over 300 years of American history.

Curator Florence Ostende talks about how her ‘direct intervention’ in daguerreotypes taken from the Harvard Museum archives - with colour, tints, and text - challenges their use in perpetuating systemic racism, inequality, and violence, whilst blurring the boundaries between past and present to reveal how colonial stereotypes still linger today. Alongside these ‘appropriated photographs’, she details the artist as art historian - and her bid to expose the Black Abstract Expressionist painters hidden in plain sight. Beyond her iconic Kitchen Table (1990) series, we see Weems’ political activism, with works addressing women’s position in domestic spaces and Marxism, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the murder of George Floyd. Ostende reveals why Weems literally puts the muse in Museums, the complex relationship between artist and institution, and what it was like to work with the artist - and ‘win over’ the Barbican’s brutalist architecture.

Curator Morad Montazami assembles the revolutionary artist-professors and students of the Casablanca Art School who constructed the post-colonial state of Morocco in the 20th century, and how North African crafts were part of both transnational networks, and local traditions, pre-dating Western European modernism.

The Casablanca Art School proposed a bold, revolutionary new wave of Arab visual culture following Morocco’s declaration of independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in 1956. Reflecting a new social awareness, Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi looked beyond Western European academic traditions - and demanded the removal of all Greco-Roman sculptures - sending students to travel more locally, where they encountered traditional arts and crafts more modern than Klee and Kandinsky.

The Tate is the only institution in the world to hold works by all three of the Casablanca trio. Morad Montazami, a curator of a landmark new show in St Ives, explores how the School’s many artists worked across painting, sculpture, graphic design, and architectural murals, integrating art and infrastructure, and artists and the economy. Plus, why we should decentre the Bauhaus as a Western European school, how artists incorporated modern abstract influences alongside Mexican, pan-Arabic, and Marxist revolutionary politics, why a Dutch anthropologist coined the phrase Afro-Berberism, and how the absence of museum spaces after empire provided an opportunity for more public, accessible art - for the nation to ‘build itself’.

Artist Shahrzad Ghaffari replies to orientalism in the Arts & Crafts Movement, William De Morgan’s Arab Hall, and the new contemporary architecture of Leighton House in London, in her Persian poetry-inspired mural paintings.

Since reopening in 2022, Leighton House has commissioned contemporary, often SWANA-based artists, to respond to its interiors and collection - particularly, the vivid ceramic tiles collected from Turkey and Greece, Egypt and Syria, which shroud its 18th century Arab Hall. Iranian-born, Canada-based Shahrzad Ghaffari was the first invited to contribute to the museum’s redesign. A new exhibition, Journey to Oneness, follows her process to construct the helical staircase which now sits at the House’s core – a ‘totem of union’, connecting East and West, the historic and the contemporary.

The artist details how Islamic patterns and Persian poetry permeates her practice, interests shared with the House’s creator, Lord Leighton. Shahrzad describes her movement back to abstract, calligraphic painting after studying graphic design, and why making public art is a physical, constructive act. Plus, she details Iran’s contemporary political landscape which informs Lion and Sun (2010), painted in response to the women-led protests which followed the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan - and its continued resonance amidst global attention on the death of Mahsa Amini.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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, their sculptures, paintings, drawings, and quilts speak to these artists’ 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 canon of art history. 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, what the Freedom Quilting Bee and local churches had to do the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how contemporary housetop textiles continue to ‘bend and break’ traditions today.

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.

Winnie Sze and Pim Arts, curators at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, carve out the connections between Dutch, Danish, and South African artists like Ernest Mancoba, and see how African masks and sculptures, encountered in European museums, shaped abstract-surrealism in the 20th century.

Cobra - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam - were three cities at the core of a pan-European political art movement, calling for freedom and common humanity in the wake of World War II. Drawing on cubism, expressionism, and surrealism, they shared Pablo Picasso’s attraction to African masks and sculpture. Yet, they worked between abstract and figurative art, some seeking to escape the exotification, othering, and orientalism of movements past.

Born in British-colonial South Africa in 1904, Ernest Mancoba didn’t ‘come into contact’ with African sculpture as art until he travelled to ethnographic and colonial museums in Paris and London. Along with artists like Sonia Ferlov and Egill Jacobsen, he became a leading figure in collaborative movements like Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), based in Denmark. Winnie Sze and Pim Arts curate two of three exhibitions celebrating 75 years of the Cobra art movement (1948-1951), which focus on Scandinavia. They detail the differences between African and Western sculpture, how Danish artists used satire and Degenerate Art in acts of resistance against the Nazi Empire, and why Denmark has been othered in the history of avant-garde art.

Design Museum curator Rachel Hajek makes sense of Ai Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects, from ancient Chinese porcelain to Lego bricks, and how the contemporary artist’s fascination with the history of making is itself making history.

One of the world’s most well-known living artists and activists, Ai Weiwei works across disciplines, from film and sculpture, to collection, curation, and archealogical excavation. But Making Sense is his first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and how traditional crafts and artefacts can help us re/consider what we value today. One of Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects features over 200,000 hand-crafted porcelain spouts from Song dynasty China, their sheer quantity a testament to the scale of mass-production in Asia, many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

Curator Rachel Hajek digs into Weiwei’s practice and politics, exploring tensions between the minor and the monumental, construction and destruction, and past and present. Plus, how the artist reimagines ‘Western masterpieces’ like Claude Monet’s Waterlilies with LEGO. to articulate his relationships with his father, a poet subjugated during the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese state today.

Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells, curators at the Freud Museum London, dig into the Austrian’s collection of ancient objects, and how archaeology shaped his approach to psychoanalysis in the 20th century.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) simultaneously pioneered both psychoanalysis and global antiquity.  Fascinated by classical cultures, he collected objects across space and time, from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, finding interconnections across the Mediterranean and Middle East. Freud challenged historical precedents - posing Moses as an Egyptian, not a Jew - but he also appropriated classical history to legitimate his practice, and reckon with ideas like the Oedipus Complex.

But above all, Freud saw the mind and conscious as ‘an archaeological site’. Likewise, Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells dig into his study to find the objects for Freud’s Antiquity, unearthing his complex position as both a product and critic of 19th century imperialism. They share how Freud challenged the Western ownership of both historical objects and knowledge, the parallels between individual and human history, why his writings reflect the Nazification of Europe before World War II, and how the violence of empire continues to impact our present.