Composer and artist Raven Chacon amplifies the Catholic Church’s complicity in the suppression of Indigenous people in the Americas, through their composition for organ, Voiceless Mass (2022).

Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass was performed at St. Giles’ Cathedral in August 2025, as part of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025.

Deep Time 2025: I See Red, curated by Raven Chacon, is at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh from 27 November 2025 to 29 November 2025. This edition of the annual festival of new music accompanies the exhibition of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work, Wilding, which continues at Fruitmarket in Edinburghuntil 1 February 2026.

Raven Chacon’s Silent Choir (2017) is part of this edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), which continues until 30 November 2025.

For more about GIBCA, you can read my article in Third Text.

For more about the Sámi people and Sápmi region, hear curators Ros Carter and Sofie Krogh Christensen on Pia Arke’s Camera Obscura (1990) at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin: pod.link/1533637675/episode/OWVhZjc3YWItNDRiYy00MTYyLTk0ZmItZmE5MmJlZDY1YmI1

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, filmmaker, cultural theorist, and curator Manthia Diawara joins EMPIRE LINES live, to discuss Édouard Glissant’s relations with natural environmental disasters, connecting the islands of the Caribbean and Scotland, through the exhibition, The Trembling Museum (2023-2024).

This episode was recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Billy Gerard Frank and Sara Shamma, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ

The Trembling Museum, co-curated with Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis, was at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow from 2 December 2023 to 19 May 2024.

Manthia Diawara’s film, A Letter from Yene (2022), is part of The Earth, the Fire, the Water and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo until 25 January 2026. You can join the conference on 25 and 26 November 2025.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Emilija Škarnulytė snakes from the decaying control rooms of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, to Dungeness on the English Channel, exploring time and geology through the concept of future archaeology, via their film installation, Burial (2022).

Folkestone Triennial 2025 continues until 19 October 2025.

From Amber to the Stars. Together with M. K. Čiurlionis: Now and Then is at National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas until 12 October 2025.

The MUNCH Triennale, Almost Unreal, opens at MUNCH in Oslo on 15 November 2025.

A major solo exhibition of Emilija’s work opens at Tate St Ives in Cornwall on 6 December 2025.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, contemporary artists Hoa Dung Clerget and Duong Thuy Nguyen, and gallerist Sarah Le Quang Sang, join EMPIRE LINES live, exploring the legacies of French and British colonialism in East Asia, fifty years since the end of the Vietnam War, through the series, If They Survive, They are Refugees (2024).

Marking 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Only Your Name (2025) is a group exhibition featuring works by artists of Vietnamese descent: Hoa Dung Clerget, Vicky Đỗ, and Duong Thuy Nguyen. The exhibition follows the journey of Vietnamese people migrating to the UK from 1975 onwards, preserving history through a Vietnamese lens and reflecting on the contemporary diaspora.

In this special episode, recorded live at SLQS Gallery in London, gallerist Sarah Le Quang Song discusses the particular location of the exhibition, close to Hackney’s Kingsland Road, also known as the ‘Pho Mile’, where many Vietnamese families settled from the late 1970s. We discuss the title, which draws from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), a novel by Ocean Vuong, and the work of thinkers like Homi Bhabha and Saidiya Hartman.

Duong Thuy Nguyen describes the process of making their embossed aluminium and wax sculptures, which reinterpret Joan Wakelin’s photographs of Vietnamese refugees held in Hong Kong detention centres and refugee camps, now held in the collections of the V&A in London. Hoa Dung Clerget presents installations and sculptural works that consider the labour and lives of immigrant women through Nail Art subculture, distorting stereotypical and fetishised portrayals of Asian women. Drawing on their work, Chinoiserie (2025), Hoa shares examples of orientalism in East Asian art and education systems. We explore both artists’ work with the Museum of the Home in East London, plus Vicky Đỗ’s documentary films, revisiting the history of Vietnamese refugees arriving in Hong Kong.

This episode was recorded live as part of the public programme for Only Your Name, an exhibition at SLQS Gallery in London, in July 2025.

For more information, visit: instagram.com/p/DLhGFqCIhNA/

Womb of Fire 2025, curated by Tuong Linh, opens in Hanoi in October 2025, and tours to Ho Chi Minh City until January 2026.

Interspecies Entanglements, curated by Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp, is at the SLQS Screening Room online until February 2026. Damaris Athene is at SLQS Gallery in London from 10 October 2025.

For more contemporary artists working from diasporas, find out more about SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries (2025)⁠⁠, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland: linktr.ee/seedlingstg2025

Hear Iman Datoo and Jessica J. Lee on Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (2024), recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn: pod.link/1533637675/episode/b457bcd064badcdc4dc2a2a8fde86768⁠

For more about mother of pearl paintings, hear Sonia Ocaña Ruiz’s EMPIRE LINES episode about a Mexican Enconchado of the Virgin of Guadalupe (c. 1700s): pod.link/1533637675/episode/NGEyNWUwOTItNTMzOC00NDgyLWJiZjAtZmFjOWFjNTkzYmQ0

For more about orientalism and French colonialism in North Africa, listen to contemporary artist ⁠Zineb Sedira⁠ on Dreams Have No Titles (2022-Now), recorded with Whitechapel Gallery and Goodman Gallery in London, as part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice: ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/N2NjZjUzYTctY2JlMS00N2JhLThjNTAtNGE3YWUwMjEwYzNl

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

BUZZWORDS is a new pilot podcast from Open City, produced in collaboration with the arts and culture podcast EMPIRE LINES. The podcast unpacks words and phrases often overused in the fields of art and architecture.

Produced by curator, writer, and researcher Jelena Sofronijevic, each episode invites artists, curators, architects, and academics to consider what we really mean when we use terms like “sustainable” or “decolonised.”

In this episode, Jelena speaks with artist Jasmina Cibic about the idea of “care thinking” and what it means to be both care-ful and care-less in the practice, performance, and preservation of art and cultural artefacts. Their conversation ranges from Cibic’s current exhibition The Gift Ecology at Void Art Centre in Derry, to her representation of Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale, exploring how care shapes her work and what we might learn from it.

The theme music is “Devotion” by Jim Hall from the Free Music Archive, licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

Subscribe to the Open City Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or iTunes

The Open City Podcast is supported by Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture platform and produced in association with the Architects’ Journal, London Society, C20 Society and Save Britain's Heritage.

The Open City Podcast is recorded and produced at the Open City offices located in Bureau. Bureau is a co-working space for creatives offering a new approach to membership workspace. Bureau prioritises not just room to think and do, but also shared resources and space to collaborate.

To help support excellent and accessible, independent journalism about the buildings and the urban environment, please become an Open City Friend.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, contemporary artist Elsa James joins EMPIRE LINES live, navigating how the slave ship marks and haunts Black lives in Britain today, in their interdisciplinary exhibition, It Should Not Be Forgotten (2025).

*Content Warning* This episode discusses rape and other forms of sexual violence.

Seeking to capture ‘the rupture, erasure, fragmentation and interconnectedness of Black Life in the diaspora’, Elsa James’ latest exhibition brings together performance works, neon sculptures, and collage. Elsa confronts Britain’s ‘national amnesia’ regarding its role in the transatlantic slave trade, bringing alternative perspectives on how we engage with the past. The artist crafts fictional narratives to contend with colonial archival records, and delves into the psychological effects of enslavement, both exposing historical atrocities and honouring the resistance of two enslaved women.

In this special episode, recorded live in Elsa’s Afro Dada studio at Firstsite in Colchester, we journey through the larger-than-life photographic installation located on the main floor of the gallery, which draws inspiration from American academic Christina Sharpe, and her idea that ‘the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora’. Elsa shares influences including Tina M. Campt, Steve Martin, and David Olusoga, and details her collaborations, including with sound artist Trevor Mathison, who worked with a field recording from a sacred ceremony Elsa attended during an artist residency at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Artists Space in Nigeria. Exploring ideas around Afropessimism, we talk about the role of critical hope in Elsa’s practice, touching on the work of Alberta Whittle and Maya Angelou.

We discuss Elsa’s long relationship with Essex, as the first artist to exhibit in Firstsite’s Living Room space as part of her Black Girl Essex residency, and solo exhibition, Othered in a region that has been historically Othered, at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea in 2022. We explore recent group exhibitions including the Hayward Gallery Touring Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, and transfeminisms at Mimosa House in London, developing her research into Mary Prince. Plus, Elsa describes the interconnectedness of her research interests, and Black British, Caribbean, and African heritages.

This episode was recorded live as part of the public programme for Elsa James: It Should Not Be Forgotten, an exhibition at Firstsite Colchester, in July 2025.

For more information, visit: instagram.com/p/DK-WsOPzeI3/

Hear the first episode with Elsa James, Living in the Wake of the Lust for Sugar (2023), recorded at the Museum of London Docklands: pod.link/1533637675/episode/NTFiZDQxMjUtZDI2Ni00ODE1LTk1YjktOTM4NzNhY2YzOTBi

For more about the Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, listen to artist Yinka Shonibare CBE RA on Decolonised Structures: Queen Victoria (2022) Yinka Shonibare at the Serpentine in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/NTE4MDVlYzItM2Q3NC00YzQ1LTgyNGItYTBlYjQ0Yjk3YmNj

And about fellow resident Leo Robinson, listen to this cutting with Dominic Paterson from The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, part of ⁠⁠SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries (2025)⁠⁠, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland: pod.link/1533637675/episode/ZDA5OTgyY2EtMGE3MC00MGExLTkwOTUtODc3ODFkNTAyZmQ3

About Harold Offeh, listen to We Came Here (2022) at Van Gogh House in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/ZmI5MmM2NWYtYzAyNy00MDkwLTk5MjMtNDhlZjcxZDExMTU3

Hear Ekow Eshun, curator of the touring exhibition, The Time is Always Now (2024) at the National Portrait Gallery in London and The Box in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/df1d7edea120fdbbb20823a2acdb35cf

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Artist Hanna Tuulikki traces the migration route of the Marsh Warbler, a bird that mimics and remixes the songs of European and Afrotropical species it meets, across the English Channel to Kent.

Through vocal mimesis, or mimicry, Hanna Tuulikki offers alternative approaches to making kin with more-than-human beings. Developing their performance work with birds and bats in Scotland, recently part of an exhibition on Dartmoor, Hanna returns to southern England to raise the alarm for another endangered species - the Marsh Warbler. The artist imagines a fictional creature called the Love Warbler, part-human and part-bird, composing its song from traditional love songs collected from 27 countries along the Marsh Warbler’s migratory route across Europe and Africa. Taking on the role of ‘nature’s original DJ’, Hanna creates a musical mashup with the bird’s song structure, and live sounds from the concrete sound mirrors at Denge near Dungeness in Folkestone. The audio is then broadcast locally into a former World War I shelter that overlooks the English Channel, internationally on shortwave radio - and via the EMPIRE LINES podcast.

Meeting 64 species in just over seven minutes, Hanna explains how the work takes a bird’s eye view over the routes which humans and animals have long travelled. Both celebrating histories and making new relations, the artist details their collaborations, including with ornithologist Geoff Sample, and musicians from the Western Balkans. We explore how Hanna’s work is both inspired by and critical of romantic depictions of natural landscapes, and national identities. The artist shares experiences from her residency at Prospect Cottage, the former home and sanctuary of artist, filmmaker, gay rights activist, and gardener Derek Jarman (1942-1994). Encountering a Qur’an, washed up on the shore of the southern coast, we discuss British media representations of the ‘migrant crisis’. Through the warbler, we explore entangled ecological and geopolitical crises, and individual stories behind transnational journeys, that often risk being lost at sea.

Folkestone Triennial 2025 continues until 19 October 2025. Radio Love Warbler is broadcast locally on FM radio (87.7 MHz), internationally on shortwave radio, and via the EMPIRE LINES podcast.

For more, you can read my article.

Hear more from Hanna in the EMPIRE LINES episode about Avi-Alarm (2023), recorded as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024: pod.link/1533637675/episode/21264f8343e5da35bca2b24e672a2018

FInd all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C9TMW1BoWXy/?hl=en

For more about Hanna’s work with plantation landscapes in Finland and Scotland, read about under forest cover (2021) in Deep Rooted at City Art Centre in Edinburgh, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-local

On the Dungeness nuclear power stations, hear artist Emilija Škarnulytė on their film installation, Burial (2022), part of Folkestone Triennial 2025:

Hear Emeka Ogboh on the sounds, tastes, and smells of place, in the episode on Lagos Soundscapes (2023), recorded at South London Gallery: pod.link/1533637675/episode/dd32afc011dc8f1eaf39d5f12f100e5d

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, filmmaker and contemporary artist Alia Syed joins EMPIRE LINES live, to weave together their works in moving image, photography, and oral history, and reflect on personal experiences of migration in South Asian diasporic communities in 1960s–1970s Glasgow, through their ongoing film series, The Dhaba (2025).

Drawing inspiration from the tale of St. Mungo - the patron saint and founder of Glasgow - Alia Syed’s exhibition, The Ring in the Fish, is an intimate exploration of memory, cultural transmission, and identity in Scotland. In The Dhaba (2025), Alia gleans stories from a series of interviews she initiated with members of the South Asian community, exposing absences in official narratives and archives, and illuminating histories in the spaces between national identities, race, gender, and diaspora. With this new, experimental, 16mm film work, Alia explores the role of imagination in migration, and how images carried across multiple generations of migrants from India and Pakistan can create new landscapes and enable new ways of being.

Alia details her relationships with ‘the second city of Empire’, Swansea in Wales, and London, including her long-term creative relationship with Gilane Tawadros, her formative work, Fatima’s Letter (1992), filmed at Whitechapel Underground Station, and shortlisting for the Film London Jarman Award (2018). From her current work with curator Shalmali Shetty, we discuss her many intergenerational collaborations, and relations to artist women including Jasleen Kaur, who shares Alia’s experiences of ‘monocultures’ in Glasgow. Alia shares the importance of audio, literature, language, and translation, in her work with film and moving image.

Plus, we consider political solidarity through her life and practice, from her father’s activism and connections to Yasser Arafat, to the present. Alia reflects on the CCA Glasgow as an institution – one that she recalls having occupied as a teenager, when it was known as the Third Eye Centre - including the Board’s ambiguous statements around endorsing PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) and BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and response to Art Workers for Palestine Scotland’s programme to Reclaim the CCA in June 2025.

This episode was recorded live as part of the public programme for Alia Syed: The Ring in the Fish, an exhibition at CCA Glasgow, in June 2025. The exhibition was originally scheduled to continue until 26 July 2025. Join the artist in a panel discussion at Many Studios in Glasgow on Saturday 26 July.

For more information, visit: instagram.com/p/DKuql9-It_3/?img_index=1

Wallpaper (2008) is on view as part of Tigers & Dragons: India and Wales in Britain at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea until 2 November 2025.

Read about Alia’s work at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and relations to Jasleen Kaur and Permindar Kaur, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/permindar-kaur-john-hansard-gallery

Listen to Ingrid Pollard’s EMPIRE LINES episodes, from Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4, and with Corinne Fowler, as part of Invasion Ecology (2024) at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor: pod.link/1533637675/episode/9f4f72cb1624f1c5ee830c397993732e

Nil Yalter on Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now) at Ab-Anbar Gallery in London, part of London Gallery Weekend (LGW) 2023, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/36b8c7d8d613b78262e54e38ac62e70f

And Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, sounding out 1960s migration between post-colonial Kerala and the Arab Gulf in a cassette of S. A. Jameel's Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song) (1977): pod.link/1533637675/episode/417429b5c504842ddbd3c82b07f7b0f8

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Find out more about Leo Robinson’s relations to African and Caribbean cosmologies, and worldbuilding through play, with Stone Portals (Ongoing), now part of ⁠⁠SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries⁠⁠, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland.

The group exhibition, featuring Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Remi Jabłecki, Leo Robinson, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, is touring across Scotland, culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.

Join Leo Robinson at City Art Centre in Edinburgh on Friday 8 August, where he will guide you through the single-player quest game – also playable collaboratively – which makes a journey through the feeling of longing for a lost home 🎟️edinburghartfestival.com/event/seedlings-stone-portals-gameplay-with-artist-leo-robinson/

Developed through Leo’s current research, Stone Portals explores questions of ritual, ancestry, and migration, aiming to provide often absent archetypal stories to those searching for a sense of diasporic belonging, and worldbuilding through play.

The game appropriates images from postal stamps in St. Vincent and the Grenadines which depict Carnival from the 1970s to the present day. These images, originally created through a fetishistic and idealistic gaze, are recontextualised to construct new narratives and meanings in conversation with ideas about psychoanalysis, tarot, pop culture, and Afrofuturism, as well as the work of black theorists such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon.

The event is open to all but we encourage attendance by those with connections to histories of migration or who identify as part of a diaspora.

Programmed as part of Travelling Gallery’s current exhibition SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, a group exhibition exploring ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives.

For more information, follow Travelling Gallery and EMPIRE LINES on social media, and visit: linktr.ee/SEEDLINGSTG2025

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This cutting with Dominic Paterson comes from a series of EMPIRE LINES events with The Trembling Museum, co-curated with Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow. The exhibition and public programme ran until 19 May 2024.

Find EMPIRE LINES Live with Leo Robinson at Friday Focus, the Hunterian’s online talks programme, on 11 October 2024: instagram.com/p/DAtbDyUIHzl

Revisit the TREMBLING CONVERSATIONS Symposium at the University of Glasgow on 3 May 2024: instagram.com/p/C6TW0HoINmV/?igsh=MXd0Y3FmZHMzdXh3YQ

And hear exhibition co-curator Manthia Diawara on EMPIRE LINES, recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Billy Gerard Frank and Sara Shamma ⁠online⁠, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: .instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ?img_index=6

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Find out more about Iman Datoo’s installation, Kinnomic Botany (2022), now part of ⁠SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries⁠, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland.

The group exhibition, featuring Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Remi Jabłecki, Leo Robinson, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, is touring across Scotland, culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.
For more information, follow Travelling Gallery and EMPIRE LINES on social media, and visit: linktr.ee/SEEDLINGSTG2025

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This cutting comes from the EMPIRE LINES episode, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging, Jessica J. Lee (2024), recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024.

The wider programme featured anti-colonial talks and workshops with exhibiting artists, writers, researchers, and gardeners, reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals, and landscapes. For more information, follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Radical Ecology⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Southcombe Barn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on social media, and visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Listen to the full episode, on the EMPIRE LINES podcast: pod.link/1533637675/episode/b457bcd064badcdc4dc2a2a8fde86768

Watch the full video conversation online, via Radical Ecology: vimeo.com/995973173

And find all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/DCFmxMHorvI/

In this special episode, contemporary artist Amba Sayal-Bennett joins EMPIRE LINES live, to trace the migrations of rubber seeds between South America, London, and British colonies in South Asia in the 19th century, plus the role of soil in anticolonial resistance, through their digital drawing and sculpture, Kern (2024).

Rubber is a commodity that was once so highly demanded that its value surpassed that of silver. In a mission facilitated by the British government, Henry Wickham stole and trafficked 70,000 rubber seeds from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in 1876. Transported to Kew Gardens in London, they were then dispersed across Britain’s colonies for cultivation. Its plural uses and potential for profit led to its proliferation across the globe - yet the soil in India, then known as the British Raj, refused to take the seeds, which the artist puts forward as a form of environmental resistance to the colonial project.

Amba Sayal-Bennett’s wall-based sculptures Kern (2024) and Phlo (2024) are part of their investigations into the migrations of forms, bodies, and knowledge across different sites. Presented in SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, currently touring Scotland with Travelling Gallery, we discuss this visual research into how colonial practices often decontextualise and appropriate forms. Amba delves botanical and anatomical drawings, and how these illustrations have been used to commodify and control plants, environments, and people. We consider through the construction and overlapping uses of terms like ‘native’ and, ‘invasive’, ‘indigenous’, ‘naturalisation’, and ‘dispersal’, to challenge binaries between human and other-than-human beings, and consider ideas of home, identity, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Amba details her relationship with ornamentation, abstraction, and displacement, and how she translates her digital drawings into sculptural forms, rendered with biodegradable, but ‘unnatural’, industrial plastics. Drawing on her site-specific works for Geometries of Difference (2022) at Somerset House, and Drawing Room Invites... in London, we also delve into Amba’s critical engagement with sci-fi and modernist architecture, travelling to Le Corbusier’s purpose-built city of Chandigarh in Punjab, the birthplace of her maternal grandparents, to explore tropical modernism.

This episode was recorded live at Somerset House Studios in London, as part of the public programme for SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland. The group exhibition, featuring Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Remi Jabłecki, Leo Robinson, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, is touring across Scotland, culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF 2025) in August 2025.

For more information, follow Travelling Gallery and EMPIRE LINES on social media, and visit: linktr.ee/SEEDLINGSTG2025

Drawing Room Invites…: Anna Paterson, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Amba Sayal-Bennett is at the Drawing Room in London until 27 July 2025.

For more about Between Hands and Metal (2024), a group exhibition featuring Amba Sayal-Bennett, Alia Hamaoui, and Raheel Khan at Palmer Gallery in London, read my article in gowithYamo:. gowithyamo.com/blog/palmer-gallery-marylebone

For more science fiction and sci-fi films, hear Tanoa Sasraku on their series of Terratypes (2022-Now) at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter: pod.link/1533637675/episode/3083096d6354376421721cfbb49d0ba7

For more from Invasion Ecology (2024), co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor, visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition⁠⁠⁠⁠ and instagram.com/p/C7lYcigovSN

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Conceptual photographer Hrair Sarkissian moves between Syria, Armenia, and Turkey, capturing present absences in personal and political histories in the 20th and 21st centuries, through his video installation, Sweet & Sour (2021-2022).

Hrair Sarkissian: Other Pains is at Wolverhampton Art Gallery until 22 June 2025. You can hear the artist in conversation at the gallery on Saturday 14 June.

Finding My Blue Sky, curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, is at Lisson Gallery in London until 26 July 2025.

The Aichi Trienniale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses opens in Japan on 13 September 2025.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Billy Gerard Frank explores the deep connections between Grenada, Scotland, and England, following the life and legacies of Ottobah Cugoano in their film, Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019).

This episode was recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Manthia Diawara and Sara Shamma ⁠online⁠, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: ⁠instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ⁠

Billy Gerard Frank: Palimpsest is at Paxton House in Berwickshire until 31 October 2025.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Curator Sukanya Rajaratnam and biographer Jon Ott weld together African American culture and 20th century Western/European modernism, through Richard Hunt’s 1956 sculpture, Hero’s Head.

Born on the South Side of Chicago, sculptor Richard Hunt (1935-2023) was immersed in the city’s culture, politics, and architecture. At the major exhibition, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, which travelled from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1953, he engaged with the works of artists Julio González, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși - encounters with Western/European modernism, that ‘catalysed’ his use of metal, as the medium of his time and place.

Hero’s Head (1956), one of Richard’s earliest mature works, was the first among many artistic responses dedicated to the legacy of Emmett Till. The previous year, Hunt joined over 100,000 mourners in attendance of the open-casket visitation of Till, a 14-year-old African American boy whose brutal lynching in Mississippi marked a seismic moment in national history. Modestly scaled to the dimensions of a human head, and delicately resting on a stainless-steel plinth, the welded steel sculpture preserves the image of Till’s mutilated face. Composed of scrap metal parts, with dapples of burnished gold, it reflects the artist’s use of found objects, and interest in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, which characterise his later works.

With the first major European exhibition, and posthumous retrospective, of Richard’s work at White Cube in London, curators Sukanya Rajaratnam and Jon Ott delve into the artist’s prolific career. We critically discuss their diasporic engagement with cultural heritage; Richard collected over one thousand works of 'African art', referenced in sculptures like Dogonese (1985), and soon travelled to the continent for exhibitions like 10 Negro Artists from the US in Dakar, Senegal (1965). Jon details the reception of Richard’s work, and engagement with the natural environment, connecting the ‘red soil’ of Africa to agricultural plantations worked by Black slaves in southern America.

We look at their work in a concurrent group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which retraces the presence and influence of Black artists in Paris, and considers the city as a ‘mobile site’, highlighting the back-and-forth exchanges between artists, media, and movements like abstract expressionism. Shared forms are found in the works of French painters, Wangechi Mutu’s Afrofuturist bronzes, and Richard’s contemporaries practicing in France, Spain, Italy, and England.

Plus, LeRonn P. Brooks, Curator at the Getty Research Institute, details Richard’s ongoing legacies in public sculpture, and commemorations of those central to the Civil Rights Movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, Hobart Taylor Jr., and Jesse Owens.

Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis is at White Cube Bermondsey in London until 29 June 2025.

Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 – 2000 is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until 30 June 2025.

Listen to Sylvia Snowden at White Cube Paris, in the EMPIRE LINES episode on M Street (1978-1997).

Hear more about Wangechi Mutu’s This second dreamer (2017), with Ekow Eshun, curator of the touring exhibition, The Time is Always Now (2024).

For more about Dogonese and ‘African masks’ from Mali, listen to ⁠Manthia Diawara⁠, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠.

For more about ‘Negro Arts’ exhibitions in Dakar, Senegal, read about Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds at the Serpentine in London.

For more about Black Southern Assemblage, hear Raina Lampkins-Felder, curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Royal Academy in London, on the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend (20th Century-Now).

In this special episode, historian Corinne Fowler joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Ingrid Pollard, linking rural British landscapes, buildings, and houses, to global histories of transatlantic slavery, through their book, Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (2024).

Though integral to national identity in Britain, the countryside is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings together rural life and colonial rule, through ten country walks with various companions. These journeys combine local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. They also highlight how the British Empire transformed rural lives, whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, presenting both opportunity and exploitation.

Corinne explains how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances, and dispossession in England. They highlight how these histories, usually considered separately, persist in the lives of their descendants and our landscapes today. We explore the two-way flows of colonial plant cultures, as evident in WIlliam Wordsworth’s 19th century poems about daffodils, as contemporary works of literature by Chinua Achebe and Grace Nichols.

Contemporary artist - and walking companion - Ingrid Pollard shares their research into ferns, seeds, and magic, across Northumberland, the Lake District, and South West England, Ingrid details histories of lacemaking in Devon and Cornwall, and we explore representations of ‘African’ and Caribbean flowers in art. Bringing together Ingrid and Corinne’s works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also explore their previous collaborations including the project, Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reimagined. Plus, Corinne questions ‘cancel culture’ in the British media and academia, drawing on their experiences as Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online. You can pre-order the paperback, released on 1 May 2025.

This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024.

The wider programme featured anti-colonial talks and workshops with exhibiting artists, writers, researchers, and gardeners, reimagining more empathic connections between humans, plants, animals, and landscapes. For more information, follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Radical Ecology⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Southcombe Barn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ on social media, and visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Watch the full video conversation online, via Radical Ecology: https://vimeo.com/995929731

And find all the links in the first Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8cyHX2I28

You can also listen to the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠EMPIRE LINES x Invasion Ecology Spotify playlist⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, for episodes with Paul Gilroy, Lubaina Himid, Johny Pitts, and Imani Jacqueline Brown, plus partners from the University of Exeter, KARST, CAST, and the Eden Project in Cornwall.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Karanjit Panesar recasts stories of migrant labourers from Punjab working in British industrial foundries, exploring constructs of memory, and national myths in metal, through his film installation, Furnace Fruit (2024). Karanjit Panesar’s practice considers the entanglements of labour, migration, memory, and empire. Furnace Fruit, their new exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery, centres on the stories of the many Punjabi immigrants who, with the end of British colonial rule in South Asia, came to the UK and worked in metal foundries in the 1950s and 1960s - including members of the artist’s own family.

Audio and sound underlie his transdisciplinary practice. Drawing on the South Asian oral history collections at Bradford Industrial Museum and the British Library in London, Karanjit’s exhibition is also an intergenerational conversation, and ongoing process of translation: ‘He’s speaking in our language, I’m listening in mine,’ says one character in the film at the exhibition’s core. Karanjit explains how he ‘embeds’ the archive ‘within the language of the work’, and wider practice of storytelling.

We journey through the steel and automotive foundries across Yorkshire and northern England, as well as Smethwick, Birmingham, in Midlands, central to his research and work. Karanjit explains how railway tracks, and statues of Queen Victoria, were exported from ports like Ormsgill, Barrow-in-Furness around the British Empire, to India, Pakistan, and Australia. We find these parallels in the foundry - a duality, not binary, also reflected in the exhibition’s titular two-channel film - as a place of both imperial and industrial expansion, and artistic production. Karanjit reflects on his own position, navigating the Morris Singer (J.W. Singer & Sons) and John Galizia and Son’s archives at the Henry Moore Institute. He shares his research into sculptors like Bernard Meadows, whose bronze castings of apples, pears, peaches, mangoes informed the artist’s work Double Fruit (2024), a pomegranate figured in both plaster, and black cast iron, as representations of nationhood and Britishness.

From facsimiles by the Boyle Family, artistic explorations of truths and myths, Karanjit explains other processes of translation. He navigates the wooden architectural structure central to this installation, drawing on his work as a technician. We explore technology in his practice - including photogravure prints, or electro-plated sculptural photographs - and ongoing research in deindustrialisation endured by working class communities across the country.

Karanjit Panesar: Furnace Fruit runs at Leeds Art Gallery until 15 June 2025, the second Collections in Dialogue co-commission between Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library in London.

Find more from Bradford Industrial Museum through Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture.

For more about artifice and film, hear Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum at their exhibition, It Will End in Tears (2024), at the Barbican in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6e9a8b8725e8864bc4950f259ea89310

And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum-barbican

For more about Ibrahim Mahama’s 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives to reconstruct railway lines, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist’s episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224

For more about Pakistani and South Asian diasporic communities in Birmingham, and domestic labour in the Midlands and ‘Black Country’, listen to artist Osman Yousefzada on Queer Feet (2023) at Charleston in Firle: pod.link/1533637675/episode/6ca95c67d24936cff9d2d478f4450cf2

And read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/osman-yousefzada-at-charleston-in-firle

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artist Tanoa Sasraku unearths complex relations with British landscapes and natural resources, connecting environments from the north coast of Scotland to South West England, and flagging colonial extractivism in Ghana, through their series of Terratypes (2022-Now).

Tanoa Sasraku’s Terratypes (2022-Now) capture specific sites across Britain. Constructed from layers of newsprint paper, and foraged natural pigments, these ‘ultimate drawings’ are hybrids of painting, collage, sculpture, architecture, and textiles that embody plural experiences of identity and place. With their inclusion in a group exhibition at Exeter, Tanoa delves into their creative journey from Plymouth to the Isle of Skye, and their particular relationship with their father’s practice in fashion design. We explore patterns, from tartan to Asafo flags, assertions of Fante identity and independence in British colonial Ghana and Africa.

Tanoa’s expanded (and expansive) practice is rooted in the physicality of natural water and landscapes. We explore their interest in colour, the likes of Joseph Albers and Richard Smith in Abstract Expressionism and action painting. Tanoa details how their drawings are ‘direct photographs’ of the environment or data stores, objects grounded in the present, but appearing as 'future-past hybrids'. Drawing on sci-fi films like Interstellar, we explore their engagement with deep time and space, alongside personal narratives of romantic love and loss.

Tanoa’s work challenges conventional institutions, making radical interventions in how art is collected, displayed, and conserved. They discuss the generalisation of ‘Blackness’ and anti-Black racism, experiences of working with curators in different contexts, and education at Goldsmiths and Royal Academy Schools in London. From their studio in Glasgow, we return to England’s capital as the location of their forthcoming solo exhibition, connecting both imperial cities, and the rise and fall of extractive industries like oil in Scotland.

Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 23 February 2025.

Tituba, Who Protects Us? runs at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until 1 May 2025.

A major solo exhibition of Tanoa’s work opens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in October 2025.

For more about Invasion Ecology (2023), co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, listen to the episodes with the exhibition’s artists:

- Ingrid Pollard, on expanded photography, Blacknesses, and British identities, in Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4

- Hanna Tuulikki, on selkies, Scottish folklore, and performance, in Avi Alarm (2023): pod.link/1533637675/episode/21264f8343e5da35bca2b24e672a2018

You can also read about Hanna’s installation, ⁠under forest cover (2021)⁠, at City Art Centre in Edinburgh: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-local

And hear about Fern Leigh Albert’s activist photographic practice, now on display at RAMM.

- Ashish Ghadiali - whose film Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), from the series Cinematics of Gaia and Magic (2023-Now), also features at RAMM - in the episode from Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3

For more about Ibrahim Mahama’s 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist’s episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Contemporary artists Nalini Malani and Anita Dube, and curator Shanay Jhaveri, journey through two decades of cultural and political change in South Asia, from Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the State of Emergency in 1975, to the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998, in the 2024 exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India.

Titled after Sudipta Kaviraj’s 1991 text, this landmark group exhibition in London explores the ways artists articulated this period of transitions. Beyond the focus on the moment of independence and Partition of British India in 1947 - often reflecting Western/European-centric interests in South Asia - the works consider the challenges of instituting democracy and modernity in a late 20th century and post-colonial society. Its curator, Shanay Jhaveri, talks about the diversity and plurality of works on display, and how working and travelling across borders has shaped his own practice.

Nalini Malani unpacks her video installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), addressing nuclear competition with Pakistan and China, and the deteriorating environment globally, to Gaza and Palestine today. We discuss violence and forced displacement, drawing on the literature of Saadat Hasan Manto, and their own lived experiences, born in Karachi, and practicing in Bombay (now Mumbai). Nalini details encounters with Marxist and subaltern thinking as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting Noam Chomsky, Alain Resnias, and Chris Marker, and, before then, in India’s many film and cine-clubs, showing communist, Soviet Russian, and Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European (CESEE) cinema. Nalini shares their collaborations with Vivan Sundaram, and connects their theatrical animations with ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ kalighat reverse glass paintings, as modernist forms.

First training as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube was a leading member of the Radical Group in Baroda (now Vadodara). She continues to organise globally and locally, from residencies with the Triangle Network and KHOJ Studios, to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, of which she was the first woman to curate. Anita details the work of contemporary women like Gogi Saroj Pal and Sheela Gowda, plus the public reaction in New Delhi to her ambiguous, bodily installations, exploring religion, spirituality, and craft in popular culture. We discuss access, gendered architecture, and the brutalist context of this display.

⁠The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. ⁠Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970⁠, and the ⁠Darbar Festival⁠, ran during the exhibition in 2024. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.

Nalani Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood runs at Tate Modern in London through 2025.

Hear more from Nalini Malani in the EMPIRE LINES episode from My Reality is Different (2022) at the Holburne Museum in Bath, and with curator Priyesh Mistry, on The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and Nalini Malani (2022) at the National Gallery in London. You can also read my article in gowithYamo.

For more about artists Bhupen Khakar, Nilima Sheikh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Arpita Singh, and Imran Qureshi, listen to curator Hammad Nasar on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009), and read into the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and The Box in Plymouth, in my article in gowithYamo.

About Imran Qureshi, hear artist Maha Ahmed on Where Worlds Meet (2023) at Leighton House in London, and read about the exhibition in my article in recessed.space.

About Partition, hear Sonal Khullar on Bani Abidi’s Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum (2016/2018).

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

In this special episode, contemporary artist Sara Shamma paints experiences of conflict, modern slavery, and hopes for postwar reconstruction, travelling between Syria, Lebanon, and London, in their series, World Civil War Portraits (2015).

*Content Warning*

Syria has a ‘young’ or ‘short’ art history, in Western/European terms. The country’s first galleries and art schools appeared in the 1960s, offering little contemporary arts education or practice. Working within - and rebelling against - these institutions, Damascus-born artist Sara Shamma taught themselves to paint ‘as an Old/Dutch Master’, referencing the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens in their large-scale, expressive, portraits. In their 2023 exhibition, Bold Spirits, Sara’s figurative paintings were displayed in conversation with these figures, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. And now, 25 years after graduating, the artist returns to the National Museum of Damascus with a survey spanning their personal and artistic journey through Lebanon and the UK in the twelve years since the start of the civil war. ‘I decided to keep one or two paintings from each project, to exhibit them all in Syria when the time was right,’ says Sara. ‘Now, it’s time for them to come home.’

In this conversation from 2023, when Sara was still living in London, the artist describes their decades of migrations between Dulwich and Damascus. Sara first left Syria for work, in 2000, with exhibitions in Britain as part of the the BP Portrait Prize, and a British Council partnership with Coventry, a city admired as a model for postwar reconstruction. In 2016, Sara relocated to London on an Exceptional Talent Visa but, during this period, continued to travel to their homeland frequently, working from their studio in the city, and engaging with wider Arab art communities. Through global exhibitions, Sara is now one of Syria’s most internationally recognised artists.

We touch on Syria’s changing position, as part of the Ottoman Empire and a French Mandate, during the 20th century, and the permeable borders that permitted their refuge in the years of President Bashar al-Assad’s violent regime. Sara describes their interest in biology, visiting butchers and mortuaries during their studies, and ‘surrealist eye’ on everyday life. We discuss Sara’s research into modern slavery, trafficking, and rape cultures, speaking with women during their time as artist-in-residence with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London (KCL). Sara explains how they translate oral testimonies and traumatic experiences through their artistic practice, and why music is their universal language, travelling from Sufi Asia, to the blues of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

This episode was recorded live as part of PEACE FREQUENCIES, a 24 hour live radio broadcast to mark International Human Rights Day in December 2023, and 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Manthia Diawara and Billy Gerard Frank online, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ

Sara Shamma: Bold Spirits ran at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 25 February 2024.

Sara Shamma: Echoes of 12 Years runs at the National Museum of Damascus until 31 January 2025.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

Artist and curator Amilcar Packer unpacks ideas of decolonisation and anti-colonialism in education, thinking through the works of Ailton Krenak, a leading activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement.

Born in Santiago de Chile, and based in São Paulo, Brazil since the 1980s, artist and curator Amilcar Packer locates his life and work ‘between’ the Pacific and Atlantic. An organiser and participant in Episode 11: To End The World As We Know It, five days of revolutionary art, discussions and performances at Tramway in Glasgow, run by Edinburgh-based collective, Arika, he shares some personal connections between South America and Scotland.

Amilcar details the work of Ailton Krenak, a leading anti-colonial activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement, who joins the programme along with transnational thinkers like Denise Ferreira da Silva, Geni Núñez, and Françoise Vergès. We discuss his practice in popular culture, including literature and radio, and environmental activism. Amilcar describes Ailton as ‘one of the knots in a net’ of entangled counterpolitical and liberation movements, sharing the struggles of Brazil’s Black and maroon communities, descendants of escaped African slaves, and many peoples of the Amazon forest and river.

As one of many contemporary thinkers in the programme, Ailton’s work provokes conversations about history, and time as a colonial, imperial, and capitalist construct. We explore his engagement with the pluriverse or multiverse, and possibility of jumping between alternative worlds. We also discuss the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities in different contexts, from the reclamation of the Americas as Turtle Island, to Karrabing Film Collective from Arson Bay, Darwin, Australia, and their presentation of The Ancestral Present - connecting with Ailton’s 2022 book, Ancestral Future.

Challenging the monoculture of Western/European thought - and simplistic understandings of religion and spirituality, sexuality, and gender, which often lack relevance or utility with respect to indigenous worldviews - Amilcar talks about cosmology, and the constructive force of ‘tensions’. We discuss the ‘human archive’ of violence and brutality, and ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Palestine, and over the definition of land rights. Amilcar shares where assimilation, making indigenous people Brazilians, has been used to ensure indigenous people lose their relations with their land, which makes it easier to dispossess. We consider whether the decolonisation of institutions like museums or universities is possible, and active forms of resistance. Exploring a plurality of approaches to study, learning, and education, Amilcar shares the ideas of Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, and the importance of multiplicity, in constructing and realising other ways of being with the world and each other. Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, presented by Arika, ran at Tramway in Glasgow and online through November 2024. The full programme, including the conversation with Ailton Krenak, is available online.

Hear more about Françoise Vergès with Professor Paul Gilroy, recorded live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠

For more about the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities, hear artist and curator Tony Albert in the EMPIRE LINES episode about Story, Place (2023) at Frieze London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/f1c35ebd23ea579c7741305bba2e6c4e

And for more about Afro-Brazilian cultures, hear writer and musician Kalaf Epalanga on kizomba and kuduro music, in the episode on Whites Can Dance Too (2023), recorded at Africa Writes 2023 at the British Library in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/0a7191316798c30ed1494e5fb2c3e798

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines