A brush with...

Ben Luke talks to Adam Pendleton about his influences—from the worlds of literature, music and, of course, art—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Pendleton, born in 1984 in Richmond, Virginia, makes paintings, drawings, performances, films and other works exploring the relationship between Blackness, abstraction and histories of the avant-garde. He is perhaps best kno...

Ben Luke talks to Pierre Huyghe about his influences—including writers, musicians and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Huyghe was born in 1962 in Paris and today lives and works in New York. He has experimented over more than 30 years with the form of exhibitions and the very nature of art. His works are complex systems involving a host of...

Ben Luke talks to the Canadian-Korean artist Zadie Xa about her influences—from the worlds of literature, film, music and, of course, art—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Xa was born in 1983 in Vancouver, Canada, and is now based in London. She explores folklore and speculative fiction, familial and collective histories, diasporic identity and the climate emergency...

Ben Luke talks to Lina Iris Viktor about her influences—including writers, film-makers, musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Born in the UK in 1987, the Liberian-British artist works in painting, sculpture, photography, performance and installation. She creates works that reflect on her own identity amid broader themes—history an...

Ben Luke talks to Megan Rooney about her influences—including other artists, writers and musicians—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Rooney was born in 1985 in South Africa, but grew up in Brazil and then in Canada, before studying in London. She works in performance, sculpture and painting and has gained particular attention recently for the vast murals she has made...

Ben Luke talks to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster about her influences—from other artists to writers, film-makers and musicians—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Gonzalez-Foerster is one of the leading European artists of her generation. Born in 1965 in Strasbourg, France, she works primarily with installation but her artistic language is enormously diverse, taking in fi...

Ben Luke talks to Emma Talbot about her influences, including writers, film-makers, musicians, and, of course, other artists, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Talbot (born in Stourbridge, UK, in 1969) brings together drawing, painting, text, sculpture and animation in installations that fuse a personal response to her internal emotional world with societal and geopo...

Ben Luke talks to Stan Douglas about his influences—including writers, film-makers, musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Douglas is a video artist and photographer—one of the leading pioneers of video installation and large-scale photography. He scrutinises these different media and explores how they shape our understanding of re...

Nari Ward talks to Ben Luke about his influences—including literature, music and, of course, art—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Ward often uses found materials, from baby strollers to baseball bats and shoelaces, and repurposes them in sculptures, wall-based text works and installations. They address present and historical social and political issues, including ra...

Cornelia Parker talks to Ben Luke about her influences, including artists, writers, film-makers, composers and musicians, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Parker, born in 1956 in Crewe, Cheshire, north-west England, makes works ranging from dramatic room-filling installations to subtle, ephemeral objects— some of the most profound, witty and thought-provoking art of...

Mark Leckey tells Ben Luke about the influences—from art to literature, film and music—and cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Leckey’s enormously varied and experimental work sits on the cusp of digital and analogue worlds. Using video, sound, performance and installation, he explores the meanings and effects of images, consumer products, media and technologies, alongside the...

Ali Cherri talks to Ben Luke about his influences, from art to literature, film and music, and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Cherri works with film, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting and other media to explore geopolitical and cultural histories, the loaded sites of museums, and the meanings and practices of archaeology. He was born in 1976 in Beirut at the...

Ben Luke talks to Ai Weiwei about his influences, from art to literature, film and music, and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Ai, born in Beijing in 1957, is an artist who needs little introduction; he is among the most famous artists in the world, principally due to the activism which led him to be incarcerated in his native China for months without charge in 2011. Si...

Ben Luke talks to Allison Katz about her influences in the realms of literature, music and, of course, art, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Born in Montreal in 1980, Katz is an artist who probes the complexities of painting, drawing on diverse imagery, a range of painterly techniques and distinctive forms of display to create environments that are by turns del...

Ben Luke talks to Charles Ray about his influences and the cultural experiences that shape his life and work. Ray, born in 1953 and based in Los Angeles, is one of the most singular voices in contemporary sculpture, with a extraordinary grasp of the key elements of the discipline—space, material, surface, scale, weight and mass—and a unique approach to imagery, drawing on a huge range of sources t...

In this first episode of 2022, Ben Luke talks to Dayanita Singh about her influences, from art to literature, music and film, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Singh, who was born in 1961 in New Delhi, India, is one of the most pioneering photographers of recent decades. She resists the idea of a single, decisive image, and instead presents her richly diverse, poetic...

Ben Luke talks to Kehinde Wiley about his influences, including artists, writers, composers, musicians and filmmakers, and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Perhaps more than any other contemporary artist, Wiley has situated himself within the history of Western portrait painting. He makes direct reference to the art of the past, quoting from artists like Holbein, Titian...

Isaac Julien talks to Ben Luke about his influences, from art to literature, music and film, and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Julien's films and video installations are often swooningly beautiful, and always deeply engaged in diverse cultural histories, reflecting on, among other things, diaspora and Blackness, queer identity and the movement of people. His work act...

Pablo Bronstein talks to Ben Luke about the art, literature, music, film and much more that have influenced him and inspire him today, and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Bronstein was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1977, but came to the UK as a child and grew up in suburban London. He makes beautifully executed drawings, performances and video works. They reflect...

South African artist Candice Breitz talks to Ben Luke about the artists, writers, musicians, film-makers and other figures that have influenced her and inspire her today, and the cultural experiences that have defined her life and work. Breitz is a film-maker whose work, mostly in the form of video installations, explores selfhood and identity, community, race and gender, and reflects on how mass...

Billie Zangewa talks to Ben Luke about the art, literature, music and film that have influenced her and inspire her today, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Zangewa hand-stitches images, often featuring herself, using raw silk, in highly coloured, intricate compositions, and hopes to challenge existing representations of Black women. Born in 1973 in Blantyre, Malawi,...

Thomas J Price talks to Ben Luke about the art, books and music that have influenced him and continue to inspire them today, and the cultural epiphanies that have defined his life and work. For two decades, Price has been making work about a subject that has now become a major cultural issue across the world: how power is transmitted through statuary and public sculpture and how diverse people in...

Sarah Sze talks to Ben Luke about ​​the art, literature, music and film that have influenced her and continue to inspire her today, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Sze, who was born in 1969 in Boston and studied at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts, New York, takes objects and images and gathers them into intricate, uncanny assemblages which often envel...

Ben Luke talks to Tacita Dean, whose 16mm and 35mm films, drawings on blackboard, photogravures, collages, sound works and found object pieces form one of the most poetic bodies of work in contemporary art. Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury in the UK, but for most of her life as an artist has lived outside of Britain, first in Berlin, which has provided the location for some of her most compelli...

Philippe Parreno talks to Ben Luke in depth about his cultural experiences and influences. A master of exhibition-making, Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria, but grew up Grenoble in France. Ever since he emerged in the 1990s, he has used the spaces he shows in and the immediate environment around them as an active presence in his work. Architectural elements in the gallery might be animated...