EMPIRE LINES

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 surpas...

Conceptual photographer Hrair Sarkissian moves between Syria, Armenia, and Turkey, capturing present absences in personal and political histories in the 20th and 21st centuries. Hrair Sarkissian uses photography, installation, moving image, and sound to reflect on social issues, often silenced or obscured from view. Born and raised in Syria, the grandson of refugees of the Armenian Genocide in 191...

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 Uni...

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...

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 hav...

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, cen...

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,...

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 Lon...

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* This episode discusses rape and other forms of sexual violence. Syria has a ‘young’ or ‘short’ art history, in Western/European terms. The co...

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 participa...

Curator Jo-Lene Ong walks through historic marketplaces across Taiwan, Paris, Devon, London, and Manchester, exchanging island mentality for more archipelagic thinking, via Steph Huang’s sculptural installation, I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024). Through works combining sculpture, sound, and film, contemporary artist Steph Huang explores mass production, consumption, and waste. She often focusses on...

Contemporary artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and curator Diego Chocano, slip between places and times, reconstructing the landscape of Botswana in the centre of the city of London, through their filmic installation, It Will End in Tears (2024). Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s practice spans landscapes and media, encompassing painting, installation, and animation. Their drawings take the form of narrat...

Contemporary artist Sylvia Snowden figures different approaches to expressionism, layering Western European and African American art histories, through their paintings of M Street, in Washington DC (1978-1997). In 1962, the young artist Sylvia Snowden spent a summer in France on a student tour led by her teacher, the watercolourist Loïs Mailou Jones. They visited museums such as the Louvre, the Mu...

In this special episode, writer Jessica J. Lee joins EMPIRE LINES live with visual artist and researcher Iman Datoo, to explore the languages of ‘natural’ history and invasive species through their book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (2024). Bringing together memoir, history, and scientific research, writer Jessica J. Lee considers how both plants and people come to belong - or not...

In this special episode, artist Kedisha Coakley joins EMPIRE LINES live at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, connecting their work from Jamaican and Black diasporic communities across the UK, with their research into sculptor Ronald Moody, uncovering shared interests in Ancient Egypt, indigenous Caribbean cultures, and questions of restitution. Born in Brixton, and based in Sheffield, Kedi...

In this special episode, Fozia Ismail and Ayan Cilmi from the feminist art collective Dhaqan Collective join EMPIRE LINES live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, alongside artists Kaajal Modi and Sovay Berriman, and environmental humanities lecturer Jim Scown, to discuss Somali cultural heritage in the face of climate crises. In the last few decades, Somali nomadic lives have been endangered by envi...

Artist and sculptor Permindar Kaur moves between the Black British Arts Movement, the Young British Artists (YBAs), and Barcelona in the 1990s, exploring the ambiguities of Indian and South Asian cultural identities, Nothing is Fixed is an idea that has grown from ⁠Permindar Kaur’s 2022 exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield⁠. For their latest, in Southampton, the artist brings together the publ...

Curator Tessa Giblin deconstructs El Anatsui’s monumental, sculptural textiles, unravelling the ties that still bind post-colonial Ghana, Nigeria, and Scotland in the 21st century. Born in 1944, between the German and British colonial periods of the Gold Coast (1821-1957), El Anatsui has engaged critically with the impact of colonialism across Africa. He is well-known for his large-scale, sculptur...

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...