LIVING ARCHIVES: INTERGENERATIONAL CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARTISTS
Dates: July 2023 - Ongoing
Location: Online
Curated by: Orsod Malik, Jessica Taylor, Harriet Fleuriot
Designs by: Yolande Mutale
Presented by:Stuart Hall Foundation x International Curators Forum (ICF)
Supported by: Arts Council England, Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)
Living Archives is an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through testimonies shared by UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project attempts to give form to what Stuart Hall calls a “living archive of the diaspora”, which maps the development, endurance and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain.
Hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor, practitioners reflected on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other.
“The very idea of a living archive contradicts this fantasy of completeness. As work is produced one is contributing to and extending the limits of that to which one is contributing. It cannot be complete because our present practice immediately adds to it, and our new interpretations inflect it differently.”
Episode 1: Ingrid Pollard and Rudy Loewe discuss the links between their practices, the relationship between activism and art-making and playful storytelling.
Episode 2: Marlene Smith and Beverley Bennett reflect on family, collectivity and memory.
Epsiode 3: Roshini Kempadoo and Jacob V Joyce exchange ideas around Stuart Hall’s work and legacy, the relationship between the archive and artistic practice and finding allies in history.
Episode 4: Ajamu and Bernice Mulenga bend time reflecting on their respective approaches to photography, intimacy and working with large institutions.
Epsiode 5: Joy Gregory and Anthea Hamilton share the ways their experiences have influenced their practice, the relationship between education and art-making and what plant life can teach us about being in the world.
Episode 6: Alberta Whittle and Sekai Machache think together about freedom, urgency and slowness, their many transnational and international collaborations, and their feelings about edges.