the Roberts Institute of Art

Osman Yousefzada’s poem, Untitled (for Prem), is written in response to Prem Sahib’s User_01 (2016) , a panel of black aluminium covered with drops of resin that look like sweat and moisture, smudged in one part as if by a hand. The work’s eroticism, inspired by the sweaty walls of clubs, is framed by Yousefzada’s evocation of memory, longing and sensuality. The text was commissioned as part of ou...

Marina Warner’s Pentimento is written in response to Paula Rego’s drawing in pencil and conte, St Mary of Egypt (2011) and tells the story of the little-known saint from fragments of reports of those who knew and remembered her. Knowing Rego’s love of storytelling and character studies, Warner has written a fictional account of a professor who has discovered Rego’s drawing and has pieced together...

Heather Phillipson’s The Creeps is written in response to Emma Talbot’s How the Web was Woven (2009), an acrylic on canvas work with a variety of vignettes, spider webs, texts and mysterious figures. Reflecting the haunting, unsettling atmosphere in Talbot’s painting, Phillipson considers how an artwork can never be fully understood or described, but is something we can continually think with and...

Julie Ezelle Patton’s Three Phases of Eva, 1965 is written in response to Eva Hesse’s Three (1965) , a triptych of gouache and oil on paper collage. Patton takes Hesse’s triptych and title to structure the poem in three, imaginatively exploring Hesse's name, work and life, from Patton's first memory of hearing the artist’s name to once assisting Hesse’s partner, artist Tom Doyle. For Patton, the e...

Imani Mason Jordan’s 1:1 is written in response to Ellen Gallagher’s Untitled (2005) . Gallagher’s intimate work shows two silhouetted figures etched onto a gold leaf background. The figures, posed as if in conversation, recall nineteenth-century portraits of authors found in narratives of slave emancipation. Jordan’s couplets of words and sounds, pulsing and intimate, fragmentary and accumulative...

Renee Gladman’s All These Not-Places for Wandering is written in response to Ayan Farah’s Stardust (2011) , a work dyed and bleached by UV light and painted with acrylic paint. Gladman approaches the work and the project of writing about it questioningly. Taking the encounter with the work as one of ‘wandering’ through it, Gladman follows the different lines of thought that Farah's atmospheric wor...

In this podcast, we invited Liliane Lijn, whose work is featured in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection to choose a piece from the collection as a starting point for a conversation. Lilliane is one of the curatorial collaborators for Deep Horizons , our exhibition with MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and she selected Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work Water Towers, 1972-2012 which featu...

In this podcast, artist Valerie Asiimwe Amani discusses her first live performance To dismantle a hous e which was jointly commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art and South London Gallery and presented in June 2022. RIA and South London Gallery invited Valerie to participate in a new five-week performance residency at South London Gallery. The work she developed whilst in residence presented...

In this podcast series, we ask an artist represented in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, and who was also part of one of the Evening of Performances, to select a work by another artist represented in the collection as the starting point for the discussion. We invited Dora García, an artist who often draws on interactivity and performance in her work. At our 2008 Evening of Performances, Gar...

In this podcast series, we ask an artist who performed in one of the Evening of Performances to choose someone to be in conversation about collaboration, their respective practices and the future of performance. In this edition, DJ and producer, Nkisi, aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo, who was commissioned as part of the 2017 Evening of Performances, invited artist and choreographer Tiran Willemse , to c...

Grace Schwindt is a German artist working with film, live performance, sculpture, and drawing. As part of Evening of Performances 2018, Grace presented The Boxer. The Boxer proposed the intimate moment of sharing physical and mental wounds as a possibility to create open social relations. Belgian curator and academic Katleen Van Langendonck joins Grace Schwindt in conversation about Grace's practi...

We invited Phyllida Barlow, whose work is featured in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, to choose a piece from the collection as the starting point for a conversation about influences and objects of interest. She chose Bethan Huws’ Untitled , 2002.  Untitled  is from Huws' Word Vitrine series and is a text-based work of sculptural form, using standard office word vitrines made from aluminium...

Arike Oke is currently the Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, which is known as the leading institutional voice on the Windrush Generation and the home of Black British history. Independent curator, writer and researcher  Pelumi Odubanjo  joins Arike Oke for a discussion about how their work with archival materials creates spaces to heal, discover new stories and find oth...

Michaela Crimmin is an independent curator and co-director of the not-for profit agency, Culture+Conflict. For over 15 years she taught on the Royal College of Art’s curating contemporary art MA. Hrair Sarkissian is a photographer who was brought up in Damascus and who now lives and works in London. His practice explores his own personal memories and histories and the relationship between visibili...

Matthew Spellberg is a scholar whose topic of study is the comparative history of dreaming—how dreams are experienced, shared, and made use of in different cultures. Originally trained as an architect,  Professor Richard Sommer is interested in where politics and design meet. He writes on monument making, urbanism and time-based architecture. The pair sit down to discuss dream sharing and the impo...

Gander chose Study of a Coloured Tile Path With Red, Black and White Tiles , 1988 due to seeing a shared interest in time and collecting places in moments. It is a meticulous recreation of a randomly chosen area of the earth's surface in resin, fibreglass and mixed media, perhaps representing a front garden path in London. Ryan Gander 's work takes many different forms, from sculpture, film, writi...

Emma Talbot selected What is Love (2013) by Huma Bhabha when asked to pick a work from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection to discuss in relation to her own practice. Bhabha’s painted sculpture, which could just as easily be an alien from the future or symbol of an ancient past, forms the basis of a discussion about time travel and the way both artists imbued their works with with feeling and t...

Both having keen interests in the animal world, art history and mythology, Caroline Achaintre quickly gravitated to Berlinde De Brucykere when asked to choose a work from the David Roberts Collection other than her own to discuss.  De Bruyckere's Lost II (2007) is a large sculpture made from epoxy, horse skin metal and wood, where what looks like a spineless horse carcass is draped over a domestic...

An artist he has long loved and admired, artist Jonathan Baldock quickly gravitated towards Niki de Saint Phalle when asked to choose a work to discuss  from the David Roberts Collection. Topic of deliberation is her small sculpture Nana Danseuse made around 1972.  He is interested in both the joyous celebration of female figures and the (at times overlooked) politicized, feminist activism and tra...

Glasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn has chosen to talk about Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka’s drawing Sur La Plage, made circa 1926. This drawing from the David Roberts Collection becomes the basis for a conversation that touches on the female nude, Madonna videos and cigarette packets.   This is a new series of conversations as part of Broadcasts: Podcast , which will open up the David R...

Nicoletta Lambertucci 's career so far has been a story of beginnings. Firstly, working as a Curator at DRAF, she joined the team in 2012 just after the Foundation moved to its previous site, which was a huge former furniture factory in Camden.  Since 2017 she has been Curator of Contemporary Art at The Box, co-shaping the strategy for this £46m museum, gallery and archive.  Collections can be see...

How do bodies excavate movements, and do we archive movement? SERAFINE1369 and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome discuss how their approaches to these questions, what role translation plays in dance, and how to navigate proximity and intimacy — particularly in terms of a 'post-COVID' landscape. Both have been  invited to discuss their respective performance practices as part of their participation in DRAF Li...

Sound is a portal. It can shape how we perceive our environment, call our attention or create cognitive dissonance. Artists Anne Hardy and Aura Satz are particularly attuned to the workings of sound or noise, working with it as a material.  Aura Satz is interested in sonic notation and electronic soundscapes from feminist and historical perspectives.  Anne Hardy is particularly interested in the r...

DRAF Broadcasts: Live with Shezad Dawood and Professor Madeleine van Oppen Professor van Oppen's work finding ways to enable coral reefs to adapt better to rapid changes in ocean conditions and her approach to making her findings more accessible to the public have been a key touchstone for Dawood's thinking whilst developing his Leviathan . Dawood's Leviathan Cycle is an ambitious ten-part film cy...

DRAF Broadcasts: Podcast with Laura Smith Having worked as a Curator at Tate St Ives for many years before moving to Whitechapel Gallery, Laura Smith has a good understanding of the benefits of building relationships with local audiences. Her curatorial approach is one that foregrounds good social relations between everyone involved in making, hanging and experiencing an exhibition. Collaboration...