EMPIRE LINES

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, purs...

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’ - sinc...

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 coloni...

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...

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 wallpap...

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 ‘...

Curator Dorothy Price outlines the figures of Claudette Johnson, a founder member of the Black British Arts 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...

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-base...

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 a...

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,...

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. Fin...

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...

Curator Rachel Dedman unpicks the personal and political histories woven into Palestinian textiles, the role of the ‘embroidered woman’ and tatreez 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 ne...

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 Brita...

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’...

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’, P...

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 establi...

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,...

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 soc...

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...

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 cul...

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 cera...

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...

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 resista...

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...