EMPIRE LINES EMPIRE LINES

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 preserved traditional practices and knowledges. Rope became essential to Britain’s burgeoning maritime industry during the Georgian and Victorian eras, tied to the construction of empires, colonial hierarchies, and sites of slavery. Building in collaboration with the resident Master Ropemakers, her sculptures allude to and playfully subvert the media’s historic associations and legacy now.

From her five-metre-high figure for Liverpool’s Canning Dock, to her new, smaller body of works, Lisa walks through her collection and archive on Kent’s waterfront. Born in Coventry in the Midlands, she shares her experiences of growing up ‘by the sea’ in Sussex as a young person of Nigerian and Irish heritages, and the racialised exclusion some face from leisurely pursuits in natural environments.

Inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2006 book, Dancing In The Streets, Lisa unravels ‘collective joy’ and the central role of Black women. We see how dance has been used to resist oppression across continents, with spirit dances, raves, festivals, and carnival masquerades, interests shared by contemporaries like Theaster Gates, Hew Locke, Romuald Hazoumè, Zak Ové, and Hassan Hajjaj.

Straw-fibre figures recall Grain Mother deities, corn dollies, and Kumpo, spinning dances from the Casamance (Senegal) and Gambia. With her ongoing series of Hulls, comprised of found objects, boats, and fishing floats ‘plundered’ from DIY stores, we discuss her interest in the ‘underbelly of empire’, knotty relationships between rail, sail, and transport, and ‘migrant crises’ in the Mediterranean Sea today. Drawing on her research in museum collections, ancient silverwares, and indigo trade routes, Lisa moves on the discussion about globalised ’African masks’ as symbols of ‘aggressive protection’.

We discuss gender and identity, and how her curvilinear copper sculptures challenge conventional representations of the ‘female form’. Dynamic drawings of tornados tell of her designs for statues in the landscape - role models for those subject to the male gaze - exposing the empowering potential of contemporary art. Plus, Lisa shares why her tactile public artworks are designed to be destroyed.

LR Vandy: Twist runs at the October Gallery in London until 25 May 2024.

Dancing In Time: The Ties That Bind Us, commissioned by Liverpool Museums for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King celebrations in 2023, stands at the Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent until 17 November 2024.


On harvest rituals and minkisi figures, hear about Ashanti Hare’s performances at Against Apartheid at KARST in Plymouth (2023) and Invasion Ecology on Dartmoor (2024), and Learning from Artemisia (2019-2020) by Uriel Orlow and Orchestre Jeunes Étoiles des Astres, at the Eden Project in Cornwall.


For more photographs of Black experiences in English coastal towns, and on the transatlantic ‘Triangular Trade’ between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, hear Ingrid Pollard on ⁠Carbon Slowly Turning (2022)⁠ at Turner Contemporary in Margate.


For more women working in port cities, read into:


Lisetta Carmi: Identities, at the Estorick Collection in London.
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, at Tate Modern in London.



And hear Chris Spring on ‘African’ textiles and Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx by Araminta de Clermont (2010)⁠ at the British Museum in London.



PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Editor: Alex Rees.



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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 governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Russian Communist Party in the 20th century, until the Union’s collapse in 1990. As one of the first gener­ations of post-Soviet Central Asian contemporary artists, Saodat Ismailova often draws on shared traditions and transnational connections with groups including Uyghurs in China, to Arabic communities further west, distinguishing between migration and displacement in her practice.

From her documentary, Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004), to her more recent works on Chillpiq, we discuss the cultural importance of water in this double landlocked country; the Aral Sea, now the Aral Desert, was one of the world’s largest lakes until the Soviet government steadily diverted its water sources, reducing it to 10% of its original size. Her most recent film focusses on Al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an 8th century textile dyer and alchemist who became a ‘protosocialist’ political revolutionary in now-Iran. We consider the syncretism of religions and faiths including Islam, Zoroastrianism and Mazdakism, Buddhism, and Christianity, as evidence of cosmopolitan coexistence within empires, and how this figure was appropriated in 20th century communist propaganda.

Saodat shares her interests in oriental classical music, and improvision within maqam and raga, as living archives ‘deadened’ by notation, alongside archaeology, and the number 40. We discuss her collaborative practice with Davra Collective at documenta in Kassel. From her first residency with Fabrica, to her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2013 as part of the Central Asian Pavilion, Saodat explains her long connection with Italy, ‘the start of her life in Europe'.

Saodat Ismailova’s film, Melted into the Sun (2024), is on view as part of Nebula, produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, which runs at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice until 24 November 2024.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.




For more about Zoroastrianism, listen to Dr. Talinn Grigor on Persian Revival architecture, and Parsi patronage in India, via the Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Bombay (Mumbai) (1881).



On music, memory, and history, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), and Professor Paul Gilroy, on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now).



Find out more about textiles and embroidery across Central and South West Asia and North Africa with Rachel Dedman, curator of Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and the Whitworth in Manchester:

On an ⁠UNRWA Dress from Ramallah, Palestine (1930s)⁠, on EMPIRE LINES.

On the exhibition more widely, in this gowithYamo article.


Hear Nil Yalter, awardee of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and fellow Paris-practicing artist, at Ab Anbar during London Gallery Weekend 2023, with ⁠Exile is a Hard Job (1974-Now)⁠.


WITH: Saodat Ismailova, filmmaker and artist who lives and works between Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Paris, France. She is the initiator of the educational program CCA Lab, Tashkent Film Encounters, and the DAVRA research group, which is dedicated to studying, documenting, and disseminating Central Asian culture and knowledge.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



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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 designs, mass-produced in the Netherlands (and now China) and sold to British colonies in West Africa - he troubles ideas of ‘authentic’ ‘African prints’. Painting these colourful patterns on his smaller-scale replicas of sculptures of British figures like Winston Churchill, Robert Clive, and Robert Milligan, he engages with contemporary debates raised in Black Lives Matter (#BLM) and the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol.

Suspended States, the artist’s first London solo exhibition in over 20 years, puts these questions of cultural identity and whiteness, within the modern contexts of globalisation, economics, and art markets. Wind Sculptures speak to movements across borders, other works how architectures of power affect refuge, migration, and the legacies of imperialism in wars, conflict, and peace today. With his Library series, we read into Wole Soyinka, Bisi Silva, and the Harlem Renaissance, alongside canonised artists like Diego Velázquez and Pablo Picasso, engaging with modernism and ‘primitivism’.

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tamsin Hong highlight the connection between the Serpentine’s ecological work, and Yinka’s new woodcuts and drawings which consider the environmental impacts of colonialism. A self-described ‘post-colonial hybrid’, Yinka details his diasporic social practices, like the Guest Project space, G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria, and collaborations with young artists and researchers like Leo Robinson, Péjú Oshin, and Alayo Akinkubye, rethinking this 'moment' or 'fashion' for Black art.

Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States runs at the Serpentine Galleries in London until 1 September 2024. Yinka is also an Invited Artist, and participant in Nigeria Imaginary, the official Nigerian Pavilion, at the 60th Venice Biennale, which runs until 24 November 2024.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.



For more about Dutch wax fabric and ‘African’ textiles, listen to Lubaina Himid on Lost Threads (2021, 2023) at the Holburne Museum in Bath
and British Textile Biennial 2021, and the British Museum’s Dr. Chris Spring on Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx by Araminta de Clermont (2010)⁠.

For more about Nelson's Ship in a Bottle (2010), listen to historicity London, a podcast series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are.

On bronze as the ‘media of history’, hear artist Pio Abad on Giolo’s Lament (2023) at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

On the globalisation of ‘African’ masks, hear Tate curator Osei Bonsu in the episode about Ndidi Dike’s A History of A City in a Box (2019).

For more about the Blk Art Group, hear curator Dorothy Price on Claudette Johnson’s And I Have My Own Business In This Skin (1982) at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Hear curator Folakunle Oshun, and more about Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), in the episode on Lagos Soundscapes by Emeka Ogboh (2023), at the South London Gallery.

Read about Nengi Omuku in this article about Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.

And for another artist practicing in port cities like Venice, hear John Akomfrah of the British Pavilion (2024) on ⁠Arcadia (2023)⁠ at The Box in Plymouth.



WITH: Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, British-Nigerian artist. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, and Tamsin Hong, Exhibitions Curator, at the Serpentine Galleries in London.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevi

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 the artist lives and practices. Born in 1963, the year after Algeria achieved independence from French colonial rule, her and her family’s diasporic story is central to her practice.

Zineb recalls her first encounters with 'militant cinema', and international co-productions like the Golden Lion-winning The Battle of Algiers (1966). She shares her decision to represent France at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, controversial reactions from French media and society, and solidarity from her radical contemporaries and women, like Françoise Vergès, Sonia Boyce, Latifa Echakhch, Alberta Whittle, and Gilane Tawadros. We discuss the legacy of her work in the selection of Julien Creuzet, the first person of Caribbean descent and from the French overseas territories to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2024.

Zineb shares how personal histories contribute to collective memory, subverting ideas of ‘collection’, and using museum and gallery spaces to make archives more accessible. With orientalist tapestries and textiles - her ‘feminist awakening’ - we discuss how culture can both perpetuate political and colonial hierarchies, and provide the possibility to ‘decolonise oneself’. From her academic research in the diaspora, Zineb suggests how she carried much knowledge in her body as lived experience, detailing her interest in oral histories (and podcasts!), as living archives. With Nina Simone, Miriam Makebe, and Archie Shepp, performers at the Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1969), she shows her love of jazz and rock music, played with her community of squatters and fellow students from Central Saint Martins. Finally, we see how the meaning of her participatory works change as they travel and migrate between global audiences, and institutions and funding in Algiers today, via aria, her research residency for artists.

Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles runs at the Whitechapel Gallery in London until 12 May 2024. A free Artist and Curator Talk takes place at the Gallery on 11 April 2024. and the film version of the work shows at Tate Britain in London until September 2024.

Zineb Sedira: Let’s Go On Singing! ran at the Goodman Gallery in London until 16 March 2024.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at Venice, a series of episodes leading to Foreigners Everywhere (Stranieri Ovunque), the 60th Venice Biennale or International Art Exhibition in Italy, in April 2024.



For more about Souffles, Tricontinental, and the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987), listen to curator Morad Montazami at Tate St Ives in Cornwall.



For more about Baya, read into:

Baya: Icon of Algerian Painting at the Arab World Institute, Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), in Paris.

Kawkaba: Highlights from the Barjeel Art Foundation, part of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World. at Christie’s London.


And for other artists inspired by the port city of Venice, hear John Akomfrah of the British Pavilion (2024) on Arcadia (2023) at The Box in Plymouth, and curator Hammad Nasar on Nusra Latif Qureshi’s 2009 work, Did You Come Here To Find History?


WITH: Zineb Sedira, Paris and London-based artist, who also works in Algeria. Working across photography, film, installation and performance, she was shortlisted for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Dreams Have No Titles was first commissioned for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



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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 a time of conflict and corruption under the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (1965-1986). His detailed reconstructions of their collection - acquired under the pseudonyms of Jane Ryan and William Saunders - expose Western/Europe complicities in Asian colonial histories, from Credit Suisse to the American Republican Party, and critique how many museums collect, display, and interpret the objects they hold today.

In his first UK exhibition in a decade, titled for Mark Twain’s 1901 anti-imperial satire, Pio connects these local and global histories. With works spanning engraving, sculpture, and jewellery, produced in collaboration with his partner, Frances Wadworth Jones, he reengages objects found at the University of Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, St John’s College, and Blenheim Palace - often marginalised, ignored, or forgotten. With an etching of Prince Giolo or the ‘Painted Prince’, a 17th century slave depicted by John Savage, Pio outlines why his practice is anchored around the body. We also look at two reconstructed tiaras, which connect the Romanovs of the Russian Empire, to the Royal Family in the UK, all via Christie’s auction house.Pio shares why he often shows his work alongside others, like the Filipino American artist and art historian Carlos Villa, plus the politics, collections, and textiles of Pacita Abad, his aunt. He details his use of monumental media like marble and bronze, ‘the material of history’. Pio explains his approach to ‘diasporic objects’, not things, but travelling ‘networks of relationships’, which challenge binaries between the East and West, and historic and contemporary experiences - thus locating himself within Oxford’s archives.

Ashmolean NOW: Pio Abad: To Those Sitting in Darkness runs at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until 8 September 2024, accompanied by a full exhibition catalogue.

Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Pio’s forthcoming exhibition book, is co-published by Ateneo Art Gallery and Hato Press, and available online from the end of May 2025.



For other artists who’ve worked with objects in Oxford’s museum collections, read about:

- Ashmolean NOW: Flora Yukhnovich and Daniel Crews-Chubbs, at the Ashmolean Museum.

- Marina Abramović: Gates and Portals, at Modern Art Oxford and the Pitt Rivers Museum.


For more about the history of the Spanish Empire in the Philippines, listen to Dr. Stephanie Porras’ EMPIRE LINES on an ⁠Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Basilica of Guadalupe (17th Century)⁠.


And hear Taloi Havini, another artist working with Silverlens Gallery in the Philippines, on Habitat (2017), at Mostyn Gallery for Artes Mundi 10.



WITH: Pio Abad, London-based artist, concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. He is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad.
PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

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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. Born in Scoresbysund, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) to a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, Arke asserted an identity that was defined as neither exclusively Danish or Greenlandic; a ‘third place’ that allowed for hybridity and resisted binary categories or polarisation. Through performance art, writing and photography, she examines the complex ethnic and cultural relationships between Denmark and Greenland, using long exposure to highlight continuities over time. Modern Danish colonial rule started in the 18th century, and Greenland wouldn’t became a fully autonomous state until the 1970s. Still dependent on grants, much of Greenland’s economic and foreign policy remains under Danish control.

In 1990, the artist developed her own hand-built, life-size camera obscura to photograph the landscapes of Greenland that she had known as a child. Reconstructed today at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and KW Institute in Berlin, the curators share how Arke was drawn to the ‘in-between’ media of photography, like herself, a ‘mongrel’ which challenged artistic conventions. Arke’s self and group portraits, reappropriated photographs, and archive collages also mark stark interventions, reinserting Indigenous and Inuit people and women into Nordic narratives, challenging the artist’s exclusion from conceptual art circles, and stereotypes of ‘naive’ and folk painting.

Arke died before she could experience the growing interest in her work; its continued relevance to questions of representation, climate crises, and the impact of global economics on Indigenous communities throughout the arctic regions, is evident in the work of other artists on display, and contemporaries like Jessie Kleemann, Anna Birthe-Hove, and Julie Edel Hardenberg. We discuss Arke’s experience of art education in Copenhagen, and the ongoing efforts by the likes of the Nuuk Art Museum to find a language for Inuit art histories. Plus, we consider shared histories between Greenland, Denmark, and the UK - including the British explorer who gave his name to Scoresbysund.

Pia Arke: Silences and Stories runs at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until 11 May 2024. The partner exhibition, Pia Arke: Arctic Hysteria, runs at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin from 6 July 2024.

A new publication on Pia Arke’s work, co-published by John Hansard Gallery and KW Institute, will be available in late April 2024. Symposiums will take place in both Southampton and Berlin too.



Recommended Exhibitions:


Outi Pieski runs at Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 6 May 2024.
Michelle Williams Gamaker: The Silver Wave runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 27 October 2024.
Shuvinai Ashoona: When I Draw runs at The Perimeter in London until 26 April 2024.



For more about Godland, Hlynur Pálmason (2023), read my article from the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) 2022.



On Sonia Ferlov Mancoba, hear Cobra Museum curators Winnie Sze and Pim Arts on We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948.


On long exposures, hear photographer Hélène Amouzou and curator Bindi Vora on Voyages (2023).


WITH: Ros Carter, Head of Programme (Senior Curator) at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Sofie Krogh Christensen, Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. They are the respective curators of Silences and Stories and Arctic Hysteria.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠

And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1