The second conversation of Living Archives Season Two invites Ebun Sodipo and Ain Bailey to consider the creative potential of archives and imagination within the current social and political landscape, collage and fragmentation in building meaning and art-making, and how sound and performance shape an audience’s experience.

Conversation transcript available here.

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists.

The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘living archive’, the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present.

Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

Edited by Chris Browne

Original designs by Yolande Mutale

Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

Music by LOX  

Ebun Sodipo makes work for black trans people of the future. Guided by black feminist study, with a methodology of collage and fabulation, her work locates and produces real and imaginable narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future. In doing this, Sodipo fills in historical gaps to create moments of archival pleasure for black trans people. This work takes place across multiple spaces: galleries, festivals, theater, digital, and print; in varied forms such as sound, performance, text, installation, video, and sculpture.

Sodipo’s work has been shown, read, watched, and performed at Frieze London, Cubitt, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, SHOWStudio, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s ‘How To Sleep Faster,’ Auto Italia, Institute for Contemporary Arts, Tate Britain, Text zur Kunst, Bergen Kunsthall, Wasafiri, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, and Camden Arts Centre.

Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops exploring identity, memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London. Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ programme for the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. Other recent commissions are the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: (Our Wedding)’ for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA; ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany and the installation ‘Four’ (2024) for FACT Liverpool’s ‘Resolution’ research project. She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Newer works for 2026 are ‘The Jamaica Project’ at Camden Arts Centre, London, UK and ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’ with Elaine Mitchener for Art On The Underground at Waterloo Station, London, UK.

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund and Arts Council England.

For the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, the Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Prof. Françoise Vergès as the keynote speaker. Taking place on Saturday 17th May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast, the event inaugurated our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground.

Vergès’ keynote, titled ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, considered how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis. The writer and activist posited that building common ground is building transnational solidarity, and urged against despair: “Let us think defeat as a chapter in the long fight for liberation and freedom.”

The keynote was preceded by a video excerpt from Stuart Hall’s Race, The Floating Signifier (1997) and an introductory address from SHF Executive Director Orsod Malik. After the keynote, Vergès was joined by Mohammed Elnaiem, Director of the Decolonial Centre, for a discussion and audience Q&A which further considered how we might understand Hall’s thinking on “a politics without guarantees”. A video recording of the keynote, discussion and audience Q&A will be published in the coming weeks.

The event also featured the premiere screening of ‘The Audacity of Our Skin’. Featuring poet and essayist Selina Nwulu reading her newly revisited version of the titular work to camera, the filmed performance was shot and edited by videographer Alice Kanako and commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation supported by Comic Relief.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate at an informal reception, where they discussed ideas with programme contributors and with each other. Plant-based South Asian food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and drinks from the bar were made available, while Newham Bookshop held a stall with titles related to the programme on offer.

Skin Deep hosted a pop-up library at the back of the hall, continuing their efforts to make space for creative thinking in service of and beyond racial justice. The library of liberatory texts offered attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through back prints of the Skin Deep magazine, pick up their latest issue and delve into their sources of inspiration.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.