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Tate Modern curator Nabila Abdel Nabi plants European abstract art in transnational networks of spirituality and theosophy, through Hilma af Klint’s 1908 series or cycle, The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple.

Abstract artists Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian never met. But in their respective environments of Sweden and the Netherlands, both invented new languages of visual art as rooted in nature at the turn of the 20th century. Departing from traditional landscapes - with a touch of Vincent Van Gogh - they embarked on radical and ethereal painting series, connecting humans as a part of. not separate to, ecology.

Nabila Abdel Nabi, a curator of Tate Modern’s new exhibition, Forms of Life, explores how showing these artists in conversation defies their typical depiction as solitary artists who worked alone. We see Klint and Mondrian as active participants in global communities, with works that speak to scientific debates around Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the spiritual and philosophical movement, theosophy. Rethinking ‘control’ and ‘rationality’ - as stereotypes of abstract art, and concepts used to exclude women artists from history - Abdel Nabi underlines af Klint and Mondrian’s intuitive practices, and how both used abstraction not to defy nature, but to think through it.



Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life runs at the Tate Modern in London until 3 September 2023.



For more on theosophy, hear Jessica Albrecht’s EMPIRE LINES on the 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cf022e2ac70910d0741747e59f2f6f2

For more on Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern, listen to Carine Harmand, Keith Shiri, and Richard Gray on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/bc78f4df16a50055611d88aa812c7bfb



WITH: Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and a curator of Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life.

ART: ‘The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint (1908)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.






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Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, weaves together the histories of Black artists who stayed in Southern America during the Great Migration, like the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

Black artists based in the American South have always forged unique artistic practices - as multigenerational as multimedia in form. Using found and ‘reclaimed’ materials, their sculptures, paintings, drawings, and quilts speak to these artists’ individual ingenuity, and the enslavement, Jim Crow-era segregation, and institutionalised racism which continues to colour America’s past and present.

Geographically isolated, but well-connected within communities, artists like Thornton Dial, Estelle Witherspoon, and the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers have challenged conventions about the education and display of art - perhaps why they’ve been overlooked in the canon of art history. As a landmark exhibition opens in London, ‘activist curator’ Raina Lampkins-Felder shares why so many artists stayed on their lands, and why last names like Lockett, Bendolph, and Pettway crop up time and again. We travel from plantations and kitchen tables, to yard shows, typically Southern sculpture parks, where artists self-represent and directly communicate with their publics. We hear about the women at the fore of the first Black-owned businesses in the US, what the Freedom Quilting Bee and local churches had to do the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how contemporary housetop textiles continue to ‘bend and break’ traditions today.



Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South runs at the Royal Academy in London until 18 June 2023.



WITH: Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is the curator of Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.

ART: Quilts by the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



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We return to Nalini Malani’s immersive installation My Reality is Different as it iterates in London, where curator Priyesh Mistry draws out the colonial and classical connections between the contemporary artist’s animation chamber, and the permanent collections of the National Gallery.

Born in British India in 1946, the year before Partition, contemporary artist Nalini Malani has always focussed on both ‘fractures’ and continuity. From paintings to animations, her ambitious practice has always challenged conventions - none more so than her new installation, in which she ‘desecrates’ well known works of art with her iPad, drawing out overlooked details, and immersing the viewer in her own perspectives.

As My Reality is Different moves from the Holburne Museum in Bath to London, curator Priyesh Mistry explains how Malani’s ‘endless paintings’ speak to historical continuities,
from the economics of slavery, to contemporary violence, and the treatment of women in ancient Greece as Cassandra and Medea. He explores the artist’s use of Instagram as a ‘democratic platform’, and how the exhibition radically changes our realities, in how and what we see in these paintings, and museums as products of imperial exchange.


Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the National Gallery in London until 11 June 2023.

For more, listen to the artist Nalini Malani on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/74b0d8cf8b99c15ab9c2d3a97733c8ed

And read my article in gowithYamo:
gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review



WITH: Priyesh Mistry, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London, and a curator of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different.

ART: ‘The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.




Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936
And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast


Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Winnie Sze and Pim Arts, curators at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, carve out the connections between Dutch, Danish, and South African artists like Ernest Mancoba, and see how African masks and sculptures, encountered in European museums, shaped abstract-surrealism in the 20th century.

Cobra - Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam - were three cities at the core of a pan-European political art movement, calling for freedom and common humanity in the wake of World War II. Drawing on cubism, expressionism, and surrealism, they shared Pablo Picasso’s attraction to African masks and sculpture. Yet, they worked between abstract and figurative art, some seeking to escape the exotification, othering, and orientalism of movements past.

Born in British-colonial South Africa in 1904, Ernest Mancoba didn’t ‘come into contact’ with African sculpture as art until he travelled to ethnographic and colonial museums in Paris and London. Along with artists like Sonia Ferlov and Egill Jacobsen, he became a leading figure in collaborative movements like Linien (The Line) and Helhesten (Hell Horse), based in Denmark. Winnie Sze and Pim Arts curate two of three exhibitions celebrating 75 years of the Cobra art movement (1948-1951), which focus on Scandinavia. They detail the differences between African and Western sculpture, how Danish artists used satire and Degenerate Art in acts of resistance against the Nazi Empire, and why Denmark has been othered in the history of avant-garde art.

The three exhibitions of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art run at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands until 14 May 2023. For more, you can also read my review of Cobra 75 in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/a-triptych-of-danish-modernism-cobra-and-degenerate-art-in-denmark.



WITH: Pim Arts, curator of We Kiss the Earth - Danish Modern Art 1934-1948. Winnie Sze, curator of Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov. Both exhibitions are part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art.

ART: Works from ‘We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948’.

IMAGE: Peter Tijhuis.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

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Design Museum curator Rachel Hajek makes sense of Ai Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects, from ancient Chinese porcelain to Lego bricks, and how the contemporary artist’s fascination with the history of making is itself making history.

One of the world’s most well-known living artists and activists, Ai Weiwei works across disciplines, from film and sculpture, to collection, curation, and archealogical excavation. But Making Sense is his first exhibition to focus on design and architecture, and how traditional crafts and artefacts can help us re/consider what we value today. One of Weiwei’s ‘fields’ of found objects features over 200,000 hand-crafted porcelain spouts from Song dynasty China, their sheer quantity a testament to the scale of mass-production in Asia, many centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

Curator Rachel Hajek digs into Weiwei’s practice and politics, exploring tensions between the minor and the monumental, construction and destruction, and past and present. Plus, how the artist reimagines ‘Western masterpieces’ like Claude Monet’s Waterlilies with LEGO. to articulate his relationships with his father, a poet subjugated during the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese state today.



Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum in London until 30 July 2023.

For more, read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/making-sense-ai-weiwei-at-the-design-museum





WITH: Rachel Hajek, Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, and a curator of Making Sense.

ART: ‘Spouts, Ai Weiwei (2023)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

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Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells, curators at the Freud Museum London, dig into the Austrian’s collection of ancient objects, and how archaeology shaped his approach to psychoanalysis in the 20th century.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) simultaneously pioneered both psychoanalysis and global antiquity.  Fascinated by classical cultures, he collected objects across space and time, from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, finding interconnections across the Mediterranean and Middle East. Freud challenged historical precedents - posing Moses as an Egyptian, not a Jew - but he also appropriated classical history to legitimate his practice, and reckon with ideas like the Oedipus Complex.

But above all, Freud saw the mind and conscious as ‘an archaeological site’. Likewise, Professors Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells dig into his study to find the objects for Freud’s Antiquity, unearthing his complex position as both a product and critic of 19th century imperialism. They share how Freud challenged the Western ownership of both historical objects and knowledge, the parallels between individual and human history, why his writings reflect the Nazification of Europe before World War II, and how the violence of empire continues to impact our present.



Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire runs at the Freud Museum London until 16 July 2023.

For more on Freud’s Asian objects, listen to Professor Craig Clunas, curator of Freud and China, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/44861b4a5e6a32380693ec6622210890



WITH: Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London (UCL). Daniel Orrells, Professor of Classics and Centre Director for Queer@Kings at King’s College London (KCL). They are co-curators are Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire.

ART: ‘Red-Figure Hydria, Greece (380-360BCE)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.



Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines