For the fifth episode of Living Archives, 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.

Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.

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 the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, 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.

Hosted by Jessica Taylor

Edited by Chris Browne

Designs by Yolande Mutale

Music by LOX

Bios

Born in 1978 in London, Anthea Hamilton is a British artist known for creating large-scale installations and surreal artworks. She graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000 and the Royal College of Art, London, in 2005. Her practice encompasses film, installation, performance, and sculpture, and her work is frequently site-specific. Hamilton’s approach combines archival study, popular culture, and scientific research with resonant images and objects in unusual and surreal ways. Her installations engage visitors with imagined narratives that incorporate references from art, cinema, design, and fashion. Conversation and collaboration are also key to the way she works. In 2016 Hamilton was short-listed for the Turner Prize for Project for Door (2015). In 2017 she became the first Black woman to be awarded a commission to create a work for Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.

Joy Gregory is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She has developed a practice which is concerned with social and political issues with particular reference to history and cultural differences in contemporary society.

As a photographer she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her the time and the freedom to research for a major piece around language endangerment. The first of this series was the video piece Gomera, which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited all over the world showing in many festivals and biennales. Her work included in many collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. She currently lives and works in London.

Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.

In this, the first conversation in the Living Archives series, we sit down with Ingrid Pollard and Rudy Loewe to discuss the links between their practices, the relationship between activism and art-making and playful storytelling.

Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.

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 the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, 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.

Hosted by Jessica Taylor

Edited by Chris Browne

Designs by Yolande Mutale

Music by LOX

Bios

Ingrid Pollard is a photographer, media artist and researcher. She is a graduate of the London College of Printing, Derby University,  with a Doctorate from University of Westminster  Ingrid has developed a social practice concerned with representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens based media. Her work is included in numerous collections including the UK Arts Council, Tate Britain and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She lives and works in Northumbria, UK.

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Rudy Loewe (b. 1987) is an artist visualising black histories and social politics through painting, drawing and text. They began a Techne funded practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2021. This research critiques Britain’s role in suppressing Black Power in the English-speaking Caribbean, during the 60s and 70s. Loewe is creating paintings and drawings that unravel this history included in recently declassified Foreign & Commonwealth Office records. Their approach to painting speaks to their background in comics and illustration — combining  text, image and sequential narrative.

Recent exhibitions include A Significant Threat, VITRINE Fitzrovia, London (2023); uMoya: the sacred return of lost things, Liverpool Biennial (2023); Unattributable Briefs: Act Two, Orleans House Gallery, London (2023); Unattributable Briefs: Act One, Staffordshire St., London (2022); New Contemporaries, Humber Street Gallery and South London Gallery (2022); Back to Earth, Serpentine Gallery, London (2022); and NAE Open 22, New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2022).

Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.

In episode 2 of Living Archives Beverley Bennett and Marlene Smith discuss their practices in relation to family, collectivity and memory.

Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.

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 the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, 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.

Hosted by Jessica Taylor

Edited by Chris Browne

Designs by Yolande Mutale

Music by LOX

Bios

Beverley Bennett is an artist-filmmaker whose work revolves around the possibilities of drawing, performance and collaboration. Her practice is connected multiple ways of making. The first of these is a concern with the importance of ‘gatherings’ to denote a methodology that differs from the more hierarchical model of the workshop; one person leading and sharing information with participants taking part in the activities. Instead ‘gatherings’ are cyclical, whereby everyone learns from each other and often formulate in myriad ways, from reading together to gathering at a party. This has created a ‘tapestry of voices’, an interweaving of communalities and differences that provide a broader view, an important part of amplifying intergenerational relationships. The second is an investigation of the idea of The Archive (often beginning projects by creating / adding to her own extensive personal archives of interviews, using them for preliminary research and experimentation) and the third is collaboration. This is frequently through socially political work with other creatives, fine artists, community members, young children and their families. Her practice provides spaces for participants to become collaborators and provides a point of focus from where to unpick ideas around what constitutes an art practice and for whom art is generated.

Marlene Smith is a British artist and curator. She was a member of the Blk Art Group in the 1980s and is one of the founding members of the BLK Art Group Research Project. She was director of The Public in West Bromwich and UK Research Manager for Black Artists and Modernism, a collaborative research project run by the University of the Arts London and Middlesex University. She is Director of The Room Next to Mine, and was an Associate of Lubaina Himid’s Making Histories Visible Project and Associate Artist at Modern Art Oxford.

Selected exhibitions include: The More Things Change, Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2023); Cut & Mix, New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2022); Portals, East Side Projects, Birmingham (2021); Get Up, Stand Up, Now!Generations of Black Creative Pioneers, Somerset House, London (2019); The Place is Here,Nottingham Contemporary and South London Gallery (2017); Thinking Back: a montage of black art in Britain, Van Abbe Museu, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2016); Her work is in the Government Art collection and the collections of Sheffield museums and Wolverhampton art gallery.

Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.

In the final episode of Season Two of Living Archives, Rebecca Bellantoni and Gail Lewis exchange ideas on home and belonging, the legacy of black cultural and social movements in pre-2000s Britain, and the ways everyday life shapes their work.

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  

To Whom It May Concern.

I was a London child.

Making alters to concrete long before the green.

Tethered.

To foundations laid long before.

Do you see?

My alters glow, depth dark.

Looking forward,

Rebecca Bellantoni

Bellantoni’s recent projects/performances/exhibitions include her solo show Day and heavy, Judah leaves at De La Warr pavilion (2024), Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y), Tate Britain, London (2023); La Position de l’Amour, CNAC Magasin, Grenoble (2023); In the house of my love, Brent Biennial, London (2022); Frieze Live London (2021). She has been a recipient of bursaries and awards from Fluxus Art Projects, Womxn of Colour Art Award (2022), and Jerwood Arts (2020). She was shortlisted for the 9th Max Mara Art Prize for Women(2023). In 2025, she will launch The Institute of C.R.Y

Gail Lewis is Visiting Professor at Yale University and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist having trained at the Tavistock Clinic. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She organises her thinking through the category ‘experience’ which she conceives as a vector of both the felt senses and an analytic in the production of meaning and knowing otherwise. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, and the psychosocial dynamics of racialised-gendered experience.

Her publications include ‘Black Arsenal: Potentiality of being and becoming’ (2024) in Black Arsenal, eds. Clive Nwonka and Mathew Harle; ‘Whose Movement Is It Anyway?: Intergenerationality and the Problem of Political Alliance’, Radical Philosophy, 2-14, Spring; ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal;, vol.1 ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2012); ‘In the Absence of Truth, At Least Not the Lie: travels towards self, other, relatedness’, BPS, Psychology of Women Section Review (Spring, 2012); ‘Questions of Presence’, (2017) Feminist Review, Issue 117; ‘Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use’ (2020) Feminist Review 126 (1). ‘Unsafe Travel: experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements’ (2013) Signs: journal of women in culture and society.

She works alongside artists and other creative practitioners to explore, disrupt and offer alternatives to the violent and violating representations of black and queer lives. She, along with Barby Asante, Foluke Taylor and others, recorded a reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay ‘Caribana: African Roots and Continuities’ for the podcast Dipsaus (first available to coincide with the on-line version of London’s annual Nottinghill Carnival in 2020). She also participated in NourbeSe Philips Zong! Global 2020. She believes that intergenerational conversations, as part of process of ancestral connection and guidance, are among the most urgent in these times. She is a season ticket holder for Arsenal soccer club.

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.