EMPIRE LINES

EMPIRE LINES
EMPIRE LINES

EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way, flows of empires through art. Interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith ‘empire’. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Read articles, and join talks, tours, events, and exhibitions: jelsofron.com/empire-lines Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines TRANSCRIPTS: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-pwfn4U_P1o2oT2Zfb7CoCWadZ3-pO4C?usp=sharing MUSIC: Combinación // The Dubbstyle PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic

  1. Terratypes, Tanoa Sasraku (2022-Now) (EMPIRE LINES x RAMM, ICA)

    JAN 9

    Terratypes, Tanoa Sasraku (2022-Now) (EMPIRE LINES x RAMM, ICA)

    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). Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 23 February 2025. Tituba, Who Protects Us? runs at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until 1 May 2025. A major solo exhibition of Tanoa’s work opens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in October 2025. For more about Invasion Ecology (2023), co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, listen to the episodes with the exhibition’s artists: - Ingrid Pollard, on expanded photography, Blacknesses, and British identities, in Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary in Margate: pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4 - Hanna Tuulikki, on selkies, Scottish folklore, and performance, in Avi Alarm (2023): pod.link/1533637675/episode/21264f8343e5da35bca2b24e672a2018 You can also read about Hanna’s installation, ⁠under forest cover (2021)⁠, at City Art Centre in Edinburgh: gowithyamo.com/blog/edinburghs-environmental-exhibitions-the-local And hear about Fern Leigh Albert’s activist photographic practice, now on display at RAMM. - Ashish Ghadiali - whose film Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), from the series Cinematics of Gaia and Magic (2023-Now), also features at RAMM - in the episode from Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST in Plymouth: pod.link/1533637675/episode/146d4463adf0990219f1bf0480b816d3 For more about Ibrahim Mahama’s 2024 exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, drawing from archives, and mineral extraction in West Africa, hear the artist’s episode about Sekondi Locomotive Workshop (2024): pod.link/1533637675/episode/ed0be49d016ce665c1663202091ce224 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    22 min
  2. The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican, with Shanay Jhaveri, Anita Dube, and Nalini Malani) (2024)

    12/19/2024

    The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican, with Shanay Jhaveri, Anita Dube, and Nalini Malani) (2024)

    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 London explores the ways artists articulated this period of transitions. Beyond the focus on the moment of independence and Partition of British India in 1947 - often reflecting Western/European-centric interests in South Asia - the works consider the challenges of instituting democracy and modernity in a late 20th century and post-colonial society. Its curator, Shanay Jhaveri, talks about the diversity and plurality of works on display, and how working and travelling across borders has shaped his own practice. Nalini Malani unpacks her video installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), addressing nuclear competition with Pakistan and China, and the deteriorating environment globally, to Gaza and Palestine today. We discuss violence and forced displacement, drawing on the literature of Saadat Hasan Manto, and their own lived experiences, born in Karachi, and practicing in Bombay (now Mumbai). Nalini details encounters with Marxist and subaltern thinking as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting Noam Chomsky, Alain Resnias, and Chris Marker, and, before then, in India’s many film and cine-clubs, showing communist, Soviet Russian, and Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European (CESEE) cinema. Nalini shares their collaborations with Vivan Sundaram, and connects their theatrical animations with ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ kalighat reverse glass paintings, as modernist forms. First training as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube was a leading member of the Radical Group in Baroda (now Vadodara). She continues to organise globally and locally, from residencies with the Triangle Network and KHOJ Studios, to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, of which she was the first woman to curate. Anita details the work of contemporary women like Gogi Saroj Pal and Sheela Gowda, plus the public reaction in New Delhi to her ambiguous, bodily installations, exploring religion, spirituality, and craft in popular culture. We discuss access, gendered architecture, and the brutalist context of this display. ⁠The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. ⁠Rewriting the Rules: Pioneering Indian Cinema after 1970⁠, and the ⁠Darbar Festival⁠, ran during the exhibition in 2024. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Nalani Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood runs at Tate Modern in London through 2025. Hear more from Nalini Malani in the EMPIRE LINES episode from My Reality is Different (2022) at the Holburne Museum in Bath, and with curator Priyesh Mistry, on The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and Nalini Malani (2022) at the National Gallery in London. You can also read my article in gowithYamo. For more about artists Bhupen Khakar, Nilima Sheikh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Arpita Singh, and Imran Qureshi, listen to curator Hammad Nasar on Did You Come Here To Find History?, Nusra Latif Qureshi (2009), and read into the exhibition, Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and The Box in Plymouth, in my article in gowithYamo. About Imran Qureshi, hear artist Maha Ahmed on Where Worlds Meet (2023) at Leighton House in London, and read about the exhibition in my article in recessed.space. About Partition, hear Sonal Khullar on Bani Abidi’s Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum (2016/2018). PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    40 min
  3. World Civil War Portraits, Sara Shamma (2015) (EMPIRE LINES Live x PEACE FREQUENCIES, Dulwich Picture Gallery, National Museum of Damascus)

    12/12/2024

    World Civil War Portraits, Sara Shamma (2015) (EMPIRE LINES Live x PEACE FREQUENCIES, Dulwich Picture Gallery, National Museum of Damascus)

    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* Syria has a ‘young’ or ‘short’ art history, in Western/European terms. The country’s first galleries and art schools appeared in the 1960s, offering little contemporary arts education or practice. Working within - and rebelling against - these institutions, Damascus-born artist Sara Shamma taught themselves to paint ‘as an Old/Dutch Master’, referencing the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens in their large-scale, expressive, portraits. In their 2023 exhibition, Bold Spirits, Sara’s figurative paintings were displayed in conversation with these figures, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. And now, 25 years after graduating, the artist returns to the National Museum of Damascus with a survey spanning their personal and artistic journey through Lebanon and the UK in the twelve years since the start of the civil war. ‘I decided to keep one or two paintings from each project, to exhibit them all in Syria when the time was right,’ says Sara. ‘Now, it’s time for them to come home.’ In this conversation from 2023, when Sara was still living in London, the artist describes their decades of migrations between Dulwich and Damascus. Sara first left Syria for work, in 2000, with exhibitions in Britain as part of the the BP Portrait Prize, and a British Council partnership with Coventry, a city admired as a model for postwar reconstruction. In 2016, Sara relocated to London on an Exceptional Talent Visa but, during this period, continued to travel to their homeland frequently, working from their studio in the city, and engaging with wider Arab art communities. Through global exhibitions, Sara is now one of Syria’s most internationally recognised artists. We touch on Syria’s changing position, as part of the Ottoman Empire and a French Mandate, during the 20th century, and the permeable borders that permitted their refuge in the years of President Bashar al-Assad’s violent regime. Sara describes their interest in biology, visiting butchers and mortuaries during their studies, and ‘surrealist eye’ on everyday life. We discuss Sara’s research into modern slavery, trafficking, and rape cultures, speaking with women during their time as artist-in-residence with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London (KCL). Sara explains how they translate oral testimonies and traumatic experiences through their artistic practice, and why music is their universal language, travelling from Sufi Asia, to the blues of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. 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 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Listen back to the recordings with Manthia Diawara and Billy Gerard Frank online, and find all the information in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ Sara Shamma: Bold Spirits ran at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London until 25 February 2024. Sara Shamma: Echoes of 12 Years runs at the National Museum of Damascus until 31 January 2025. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    34 min
  4. Ancestral Future, Ailton Krenak (2022) (EMPIRE LINES x Arika, Tramway)

    12/05/2024

    Ancestral Future, Ailton Krenak (2022) (EMPIRE LINES x Arika, Tramway)

    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 participant in Episode 11: To End The World As We Know It, five days of revolutionary art, discussions and performances at Tramway in Glasgow, run by Edinburgh-based collective, Arika, he shares some personal connections between South America and Scotland. Amilcar details the work of Ailton Krenak, a leading anti-colonial activist in the Brazilian indigenous movement, who joins the programme along with transnational thinkers like Denise Ferreira da Silva, Geni Núñez, and Françoise Vergès. We discuss his practice in popular culture, including literature and radio, and environmental activism. Amilcar describes Ailton as ‘one of the knots in a net’ of entangled counterpolitical and liberation movements, sharing the struggles of Brazil’s Black and maroon communities, descendants of escaped African slaves, and many peoples of the Amazon forest and river. As one of many contemporary thinkers in the programme, Ailton’s work provokes conversations about history, and time as a colonial, imperial, and capitalist construct. We explore his engagement with the pluriverse or multiverse, and possibility of jumping between alternative worlds. We also discuss the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities in different contexts, from the reclamation of the Americas as Turtle Island, to Karrabing Film Collective from Arson Bay, Darwin, Australia, and their presentation of The Ancestral Present - connecting with Ailton’s 2022 book, Ancestral Future. Challenging the monoculture of Western/European thought - and simplistic understandings of religion and spirituality, sexuality, and gender, which often lack relevance or utility with respect to indigenous worldviews - Amilcar talks about cosmology, and the constructive force of ‘tensions’. We discuss the ‘human archive’ of violence and brutality, and ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Palestine, and over the definition of land rights. Amilcar shares where assimilation, making indigenous people Brazilians, has been used to ensure indigenous people lose their relations with their land, which makes it easier to dispossess. We consider whether the decolonisation of institutions like museums or universities is possible, and active forms of resistance. Exploring a plurality of approaches to study, learning, and education, Amilcar shares the ideas of Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, and the importance of multiplicity, in constructing and realising other ways of being with the world and each other. Episode 11: To End the World As We Know It, presented by Arika, ran at Tramway in Glasgow and online through November 2024. The full programme, including the conversation with Ailton Krenak, is available online. Hear more about Françoise Vergès with Professor Paul Gilroy, recorded live in conversation at The Black Atlantic Symposium in Plymouth (2023): ⁠pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f⁠ For more about the temporal othering of indigenous and aboriginal identities, hear artist and curator Tony Albert in the EMPIRE LINES episode about Story, Place (2023) at Frieze London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/f1c35ebd23ea579c7741305bba2e6c4e And for more about Afro-Brazilian cultures, hear writer and musician Kalaf Epalanga on kizomba and kuduro music, in the episode on Whites Can Dance Too (2023), recorded at Africa Writes 2023 at the British Library in London: pod.link/1533637675/episode/0a7191316798c30ed1494e5fb2c3e798 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    17 min
  5. I Am in a Pretty Pickle, Steph Huang (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x esea contemporary, Tate Britain)

    11/28/2024

    I Am in a Pretty Pickle, Steph Huang (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x esea contemporary, Tate Britain)

    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 the transcultural and historical dimensions of food industries, and the implications of such markets on our natural environment. Roaming the street markets of cities in Taiwan, where she was born, and London, where she lives and works, she also draws from their vernacular architectures, and different local cultures. Steph’s first exhibition at Tate Britain in London sits near the river Thames, a boat ride away from Billingsgate, the UK’s largest inland fish market; and in Manchester, at its historic Market Buildings, once part of the Victorian Smithfield Fish Market. Curator Jo-Lene Ong connects sculptural works like I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024), with the Situationist International’s practice of the dérive, repurposing objects collected through exploration. We situate her interest in wonder and playful approach to media with the likes of Haegue Yang, currently on view at the Hayward Gallery in London, and Rasheed Araeen, entwining the roles of cook and artist. We look at the traces of maritime trades and food industries on our everyday lives, and our relationship with ocean ecosystems, highlighting the legacies of colonialism in contemporary capitalism and climate crises. From esea contemporary’s previous exhibitions of artists like Jane Jin Kaisen, Jo-Lene moves towards her particular interest in transmission, and more ‘watery ways of being’ beyond borders, referencing Astrida Neimanis’ hydrofeminism (2017) and looking to Sharjah Biennale 16 in 2025. We discuss ‘island travel’ and ‘archipelagic thinking’ as central to Steph’s artistic, and Jo-Lene’s curatorial, practices. Jo-Lene shares how her relationship with identity has been shaped by working in different contexts, from Malaysia, to Amsterdam, and the UK. We discuss the relative in/visibility of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) identities in these different places - histories of Indonesia and the Dutch East Indies, and Malaysia, a British colony between the 1820s and 1957 - as well as the overlaps between Hokkein and Taiwanese languages, as variants or dialects of Chinese. Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun runs at esea contemporary in Manchester until 8 December 2024. The exhibition is part of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award (MTSA)’s National Touring Programme, first exhibited at Standpoint in London in 2024. The exhibition will tour to Cross Lane Projects in Kendal in March 2025. An exhibition book of the same number launches at esea contemporary on 30 November 2024. Art Now: Steph Huang: See, See, Sea runs at Tate Britain in London until 5 January 2025. For more about archipelagos and Édouard Glissant, listen to ⁠Manthia Diawara⁠, co-curator of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian in Glasgow, and artist ⁠Billy Gerard Frank on Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories (2019)⁠, part of ⁠PEACE FREQUENCIES 2023⁠: ⁠instagram.com/p/C0mAnSuodAZ⁠ For more from esea contemporary, hear Musquiqui Chihying, a recent artist-in-residence, on Too Loud a Dust (2023) at Tabula Rasa Gallery during London Gallery Weekend in 2023: pod.link/1533637675/episode/29b9e85442a30e487d8a7905356541dd PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    15 min
  6. It Will End in Tears, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican)

    11/21/2024

    It Will End in Tears, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican)

    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 narrative landscapes, that seem simultaneously futuristic and ancient, playing with conventions of linear time. Pamela often draws from literature, theatre, and science fiction - with references from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, to Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth - particularly in their slippery representations of people and places. Born in Botswana, and practicing in the US, Canada, South Africa, and the Netherlands, Pamela describes how their work has been shaped by these different contexts. They detail their transformative residency with Arturo Lindsay in the rainforest in Panama, a coastal Central American and Caribbean country, which has shaped their representations of volcanic, subterranean, and cosmological environments. Seeing the landscape as ‘another character’ in their their works, Pamela challenges the binary of landscape and figurative painting, and Western/European art historical conventions. Though It Will End in Tears (2024) is Pamela’s first major UK solo exhibition, it is not their first in the city of London; we discuss their relationship with spaces across the capital, and its colonial histories. Curator Diego Chocano highlights how Pamela has both challenged and embraced conventions of Western/European art history. We discuss the artist’s academic approach, and ‘research’ approach to art, which has inspired interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of science, with theoretical physicist Dr. James Sylvester Gates. He details the artist’s interest in performance and artifice, drawing on film noir, wooden theatre sets, and the figure of the femme fatale for this body of work. We discuss how Pamela’s self-constructed alter ego, Asme, enables the artist more freedom of creative expression, and the ability to resist categorisation by identity, biography, or subjectivity. ⁠Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears⁠ runs at the Barbican in London until 5 January 2025. For more, you can read my article, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/pamela-phatsimo-sunstrum-barbican Find out more about Leo Robinson, and Édouard Glissant’s ideas of ‘trembling’, at the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE: instagram.com/p/DAtbDyUIHzl/?next=%2F&img_index=3 Hear Barbican curator Florence Ostende on Carrie Mae Weems’ series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996): pod.link/1533637675/episode/b4e1a077367a0636c47dee51bcbbd3da And curator Alice Wilke on Carrie Mae Weems’ Africa Series (1993), at the Kunstmuseum Basel: pod.link/1533637675/episode/d63af25b239253878ec68180cd8e5880 For more from the Curve, hear Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne on Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023), on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/1792f53fa27b8e2ece289b53dd62b2b7 And find out more about ancient Adinkra symbology and geometric structures in the episode about El Anatsui’s Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta (2024) at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh: pod.link/1533637675/episode/2e464e75c847d9d19cfa4dc46ea33338 PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    18 min
  7. M Street, Sylvia Snowden (1978-1997) (EMPIRE LINES x White Cube Paris)

    11/14/2024

    M Street, Sylvia Snowden (1978-1997) (EMPIRE LINES x White Cube Paris)

    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 Musée de l'Orangerie, and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, where they likely first experienced the work of expressionist artist Chaïm Soutine. His gestural brushwork and use of impasto soon ‘saturated’ into her own treatment of paint, on her return to the United States. Today, Sylvia’s work is often ‘read’ in the context of abstract expressionism, placed in conversation with artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Karel Appel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Pablo Picasso. Though art historical references to such figures are present, they are never made directly, and are found deeper, in the thick layers of acrylic paint and oil pastel that build up their works. Perhaps, like the well-travelled Jones, Sylvia would prefer to be known as ‘an American painter with no labels’. With her first exhibition in Paris, Sylvia shares how she has literally built up her practice over the past six decades, at times tending towards abstraction, and others, more figurative works. We talk about other 20th century migrants to the French city, including Beaufort Delaney and James Baldwin, both associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and Vincent van Gogh. Sylvia talks about the M Street series, named after the place in Washington DC where she has lived and worked since the late 1970s. Sylvia talks about the ‘turning’ of the predominantly African American neighbourhood, which experienced both ‘white flight’ and gentrification. She also details how her representations of men’s and women’s bodies speak to our universal, shared humanity, not individual forms. Sylvia details how she started painting as a ‘social commentator’, and how she sees the choice of art as a ‘responsibility’. She talks about her time at Howard University, learning with artists such as Alex Katz, James A Porter, and David Driskell, the latter widely known for establishing African American Art as a field of study in its own right. Drawing on her own teaching, we discuss the distance between painting, and talking about painting, in art history and the media, as well as access to education for young Black students today, and her interest pluralising Western/European art histories of movements like impressionism and cubism. Challenging binary understandings of artistic practice, she describes the role of intuition in artistic production, a ‘combination of emotion and intellect’ or ‘thought and feeling’, that is often ignored in Western/European cultures. Seen for the first time on the gallery walls, Sylvia describes her triptych of her mother, a professor of English Literature who studied William Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon, sharing how her practice is also like writing - and the next chapter in her work. Inside the White Cube: Sylvia Snowden runs at White Cube Paris until 16 November 2024. For more about Sylvia Snowden, read about their exhibitions with Edel Assanti during Frieze London in 2022, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/frieze-2022-retrospective For more about Chaïm Soutine read about ‍Soutine: Kossoff at Hastings Contemporary, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog-post-app/a-perfect-match-chaim-soutine-meets-leon-kossoff For more about Oskar Kokoschka, read about A Rebel from Vienna at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and Guggenheim Bilbao, in The Quietus: thequietus.com/culture/art/skar-kokoschka-a-rebel-from-vienna-guggenheim-bilbao-review/ PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/13065635

    14 min
  8. Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging, Jessica J Lee (2024) (EMPIRE LINES Live, Invasion Ecology)

    11/07/2024

    Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging, Jessica J Lee (2024) (EMPIRE LINES Live, Invasion Ecology)

    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 - as they cross borders. Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica often draws on her own lived experiences to observe our world in motion, and close connections between seemingly distant places - sometimes, with shared tastes for seaweed. Dispersals, their latest book of linked essays, journeys further still, exploring migrations, displacements, and the entanglements of the plant and human worlds - and the language we use to describe them. Jessica shares some of their influences and references, like Richard Mabey’s Weeds and the works of Mary Douglas, to expose our historic human and anthropocentric understanding of plant life. We discuss how our everyday words and phrases are often borrowed from citizenship law, and see how beings are mis/represented in the media, from giant hogweed in Victorian England, to wakame kelp, Japanese knotweed, and eucalyptus plants today. Drawing on their work across the South West of England, Iman Datoo shares their research into soils, potatoes, and tea. Bringing together Iman and Jessica’s works, installed at the exhibition, Invasion Ecology, at Southcombe Barn on Dartmoor, we also delve into the history of botanical illustrations and mapping as tools of colonialism - here reimagined by contemporary artists. This episode was recorded live as part of the programme for Invasion Ecology, co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor. The central group exhibition, featuring Ingrid Pollard, Iman Datoo, Hanna Tuulikki, Ashish Ghadiali, Fern Leigh Albert, and Ashanti Hare, ran from 1 June to 10 August 2024. Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee is published by Penguin, and available in all good bookshops and online. Watch the full video online, via Radical Ecology: vimeo.com/995973173 Find all the links in the first Instagram post: instagram.com/p/C9hjlxrIcgo PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: ⁠instagram.com/empirelinespodcast⁠ And Twitter: ⁠twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936⁠ Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: ⁠patreon.com/empirelines

    59 min
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5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way, flows of empires through art. Interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith ‘empire’. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Read articles, and join talks, tours, events, and exhibitions: jelsofron.com/empire-lines Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines TRANSCRIPTS: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-pwfn4U_P1o2oT2Zfb7CoCWadZ3-pO4C?usp=sharing MUSIC: Combinación // The Dubbstyle PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic

Information

  • Creator
    EMPIRE LINES
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2025
  • Episodes
    139
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 199170
  • Show Website
    EMPIRE LINES

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