EMPIRE LINES

Artist Ibrahim Mahama ‘time travels’ between British colonial and independent Ghana, tracing railway lines across African and European countries in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 20th century. Ibrahim Mahama is well-known for his large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the local effects of colonialism, migration, and global economics. Working in Tamale, Kumasi, and Accra, Gha...

Artist and academic Sequoia Danielle Barnes redresses the ugly side of kitsch and ‘cute’ toy cultures, telling histories of trickster rabbits from Peter Rabbit to Bugs Bunny, appropriated from Black Southern American folklore from the 16th century to now. With ceramics, fabrics, and super sticky slugs, Sequoia Danielle Barnes’ new installation is an Afro-surrealist retelling of Br’er Rabbit and th...

Contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes collages arabesques from Baroque Portugal and Brazil’s many indigenous communities, tracing religious and natural patterns in Roman Catholicism, Islamic architectures, and the islands of Japan, through Casa de Maria (1992). Known for her colourful, large-scale abstract paintings, Beatriz Milhazes’ practice reflects how Brazilian culture has long ‘assimilated’ p...

Artist Hanna Tuulikki connects plantation landscapes in Finland, Scotland, and across the South West of England, making kin across species and with birds. Glasgow-based artist, composer, and performer Hanna Tuulikki considers ‘reworlding’ in times of planetary crisis. Avi-Alarm (2023), a collection of augmented reality filters for social media, transforms the faces of user-participants into hybrid...

Curator Ekow Eshun reframes the Black figure in historic and contemporary art, surveying its presences, absences, and representations in Western/European art history, the African diaspora, and beyond, via The Time is Always Now (2024). In 1956, the American author James Baldwin wrote: ‘There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the ti...

Contemporary and performance artist Paul Maheke moves between France, Congo, and Canada, exploring the ‘archive of their body’ through drawing and dance, via Taboo Durag (2021) . To Be Blindly Hopeful emerged from the very last sentence of a journal that Paul Maheke kept between August 2020 and June 2021, capturing the turbulence of the COVID pandemic on paper. Central to his practice is a delicat...

In this special episode, EMPIRE LINES returns to Ingrid Pollard’s 2022 exhibition, Carbon Slowly Turning, the first major survey of her career photographing Black experiences beyond the city and urban environments, in the English countryside. It marks the artist’s participation in Invasion Ecology, a season of contemporary land art across South West England in summer 2024, questioning what we mean...

Artist LR (Lisa) Vandy shows EMPIRE LINES the ropes in a studio visit to Chatham’s Royal Navy Dockyard in Kent, unravelling entangled imperial and industrial relationships, dance in the African diaspora, and women’s work in abstract sculpture. In 2022, sculptor LR (Lisa) Vandy relocated her studio from the city of London to Chatham Ropery which, with original machinery from the 19th century, has p...

Filmmaker Saodat Ismailova traces stories of spirituality, dissent, and environmental extraction around the Aral Sea from post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Central Asia, via Melted into the Sun (2024). Uzbekistan is at the crossroads of diverse material histories and migratory legacies. Part of ‘Central Asia’ - first defined by the Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt in 1843 - the region was gover...

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 desig...

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...

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...

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....

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 sculpture...

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 becom...

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 Consciousnes s explores...

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 per...

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 comp...

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 th...

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 Gove...

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-Paki...

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 knowl...

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...

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 fami...

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...