EMPIRE LINES

Curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery locate Cambridge within the transatlantic slave trade, connecting global commodities and local consumption, historic and contemporary art, to reveal how five hundred years of colonial resistance constructed new cultures, known as the Black Atlantic.

Between 1400 and 1900, European empires colonised much of the Americas, transporting over 12.5 million people to these colonies from Africa as slaves. It’s a history often recounted as something singular, concluded in the past - detached as happening ‘then, and over there’ - else told from the perspective of imperial powers. But in their resistance of colonial slavery, people also produced new cultures that continue to shape our present. Black Atlantic, a new exhibition at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, reconnects the institution’s collection, university, and city more widely with these global histories. Installed within the Founder’s Galleries, part-funded by the profits from the transatlantic slave trade, it builds on the ‘grandeur and smugness’ of the Fitzwilliam’s architecture - an intervention which asks whether it is possible to decolonise museums, as imperial infrastructures.

Co-curators Jake Subryan Richards and Vicky Avery consider contrasts and continuities between historic and modern works, with contemporary Black artists like Barbara Walker and Keith Piper, Alberta Whittle and Donald Locke commenting on visibility, racism, and colourism, and how visual representations of Black people have shifted over time. Vicky smashes stereotypes about abolitionism, ceramics, and popular culture, from the UK’s largest pro-slavery punch bowl, to Jacqueline Bishop’s new Wedgwood dinner set. Plus, with a botanical painting from a Caribbean plantation - one of the first signed works by a Black artist of a Black subject - we travel between environments in West Africa, North and South America, and Europe, finding examples of exploitation, agency, and self-liberation - and pathways to future ‘repair’.

Curator Rachel Dedman unpicks the personal and political histories woven into Palestinian textiles, the role of the ‘embroidered woman’ in resistance movements, and how the British Mandate changed clothes after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century.

With a century of dresses, jackets and coats - ‘hundred-year-old sisters’ - from Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, a new exhibition in Cambridge shows embroidery as both a historic and living tradition, and why clothing could be some of the most significant cultural sources from Palestine today. A split-front jellayeh, stitched up after World War I, reveals how British occupation of the former Ottoman territories affected social codes. Studio photographs of urban, middle-class Jerusalemites wearing European imports - and ‘traditional’ clothes like costumes - speak to class and regional inequalities, as much as diversity.

Reading textiles like history books, curator Rachel Dedman reveals how women’s bodies have long been sites of national identity, through the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948, Naksa (setback) in 1967, to the first Intifada against Israel. We look at a dress patched up with a United Nations Relief and Works Agency-issued bag of flour, to find histories of resistance, transnational solidarity, and economic empowerment. Plus, Rachel explains ‘auto-orientalism’, and refashions the keffiyeh, revealing the role of men in this women’s work, and deconstructing binaries between genders, arts and crafts.

Writer and photographer Johny Pitts captures everyday experiences from Black communities around the British coast, bringing together the sights, sounds, and sofas shared from Liverpool to London, in his touring installation, Home is Not a Place.

In 2021, Johny Pitts and the poet Roger Robinson set off on a journey clockwise around the British coast, to answer the question: 'What is Black Britain?' Their collaboration, Home is Not is Place, captures contemporary, everyday experiences of Blackness between Edinburgh and Belfast, Liverpool and Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948.

Setting out from London, the multidisciplinary artist challenges the ‘Brixtonisation’ of Black experiences, and binary media representations of Black excellence, or criminality. Johny shares stories of migration, how Brexit and COVID changed his perceptions of local environments, and archive albums from his own childhood in multicultural, working-class Sheffield. Flicking through shots of Yorkshire puddings and Mount Fuji, we find his travels-past in 1980s bubble-era Japan. And in his Living Room, we sit down to discuss Afropean, inspirations like James Baldwin, Paul Gilroy, and Caryl Phillips, plus his sister Chantal’s pirate radio playlists, and the role of family and community in his practice.

Multimedia artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown maps out the long history of extractivism in southern America, constellating 18th century settler colonialism, oil and gas extraction, and contemporary environmental crises.

South of the Mississippi River sits the US state of Louisiana, a place transformed from ‘Plantation County’ in the 1700s, to an ‘apartheid state’, and today, ‘Cancer Alley’, for its polluted land and water. Colonial legacies have contributed to contemporary environment problems - including Hurricane Katrina - and continue to shape community planning and housing, a phenomenon known as ‘extractivism’.

Artist Imani Jacqueline Brown pushes back against the ‘segregation’ of human/nature, and Black humans from humanity, in her multidisciplinary practice. The artist shares how culture is too ‘entangled’ with public political action, and her ‘grassroots research’ in permit applications awarded to fossil fuel businesses like Texaco (now Chevron) and the Colonial Pipeline Company. The artist describes how she has collaborated to map enslaved peoples’ burial grounds, as marked by magnolia trees, highlighting pan-African traditions of ecological regeneration. Drawing on her work with Follow the Oil and Occupy Museums, Brown suggests that culture and capitalism are often closely linked - and the unique power of repackaging these projects in the form of artistic constellations.

Curator Folakunle Oshun links Peckham in the UK, and Lagos in Nigeria, with water and two centuries of shared colonial histories. Artist David Sanya captures European statues and lingering stereotypes in West Africa. Plus, Emeka Ogboh projects the sounds of the megacity onto the streets of south east London, and recreates the taste of migration with a brand new beer.

Often called ‘Little Lagos’, Peckham in south east London is home to one of the largest Nigerian diaspora communities. When the West African country declared independence after a century of British colonial rule in 1960, the flow of migration soon increased, with economic crises and civil unrest in the country. But individuals and families have long moved between both places. As a port city, Lagos became key to the transatlantic slave trade; its name meaning ‘lake’, after the Portuguese, the first Europeans in the area.

Using water as a channel to connect Lagos and London, a new exhibition at the South London Gallery brings together both Nigerian and British-Nigerian artists like Yinka Shonibare, crossing generations and diasporas. Its curator Folakunle Oshun, founder and director of the Lagos Biennal, describes growing up with CNN, navigating imperial architectures in Berlin and Paris, and why he’d never drive in London. Artist Emeka Ogboh takes us beyond the museum space, using loudspeakers to project the sound of Lagos’ Danfo bus drivers onto the streets of Peckham. We sip his ‘bittersweet’ beer made in collaboration with local brewery Orbit, a blend of English hops and Nigerian alligator pepper, and discuss how food and art can together capture the ‘multisensorial’ experience of migration.

Plus, closer to the River Thames, Birmingham-based artist David Sanya traces his travels from Nigeria to the UK, and how he combines the European artistic tradition of the sublime with Lagos’ distinctive lake and seascapes, creating contemporary photographs of his own environments.

In this bonus episode, brought to you with historicity Tokyo, Japan House London curator Hiro Sugiyama, and contemporary artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, ride the great waves of Japanese graphic design, commercial illustration, and counterculture, from the 1980s to now.

Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, heta-uma rocked the established conventions of Japanese art, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma challenges what is ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’ or skilled art - as well as what ‘subcultures’ mean in the context of a global mainstreaming in Japanese art, embodied by Hokusai’s The Great Wave.

Hiro Sugiyama, artist and co-curator of WAVE, has brought the annual exhibition in Tokyo to Japan Houses in San Francisco, Sao Paolo, and London. From his training at Yumura Teruhiko’s Flamingo Studios in Shinjuku, we return to the city’s Inari shrines with the surrealistic paintings of Suga Mica, and Showa period traditions with Tsuzuki Mayumi. Both artists also detail the long role of women artists in commercial illustration, the two-way exchanges between Japanese and Western European art traditions like ‘superrealism’ and ‘hyperrealism’, and how contemporary Japanese artists take as much from the concept of haziness (morotai), as David Hockney and the films of David Lynch.

Photographer Gregor Sailer exposes the neo-imperial scramble for resources in the Arctic Circle and the Polar Silk Road, with stills frozen in white cubes at the Natural History Museum in London.

Climate change is melting ice across the Arctic Sea, opening a channel known as ‘The Polar Silk Road’- and for traders, access to a wealth of natural resources. The term was defined by contemporary China, a nod to the long history of the the Eurasian Silk Road, characterised by the exchange of tea, spices, and disease. But these stark monochrome settings are contemporary sites of geopolitical conflict over the ownership and exploitation of oil, gas, and borders, all subjects of a new Cold War; the damage endured by local Indigenous people, animals, and plants has global impacts.

From isolated research centres to Icelandic geothermal power plants, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer captures man-made architectures across the region, but always avoids photographing people themselves. He talks about documenting the ‘surreal’, the sustainability of travel photography, and how taking one-shot analogue photographs makes him more present in his environments.

Artist Nil Yalter, a pioneer in 20th century video and multimedia installations, explores the often challenging experience of being an immigrant in a foreign country, through her transnational wallpapers, posters, and photographs of Turkish workers, in Exile is a Hard Job.

Born in Egypt in 1938, Nil Yalter moved from Istanbul to Paris in 1965. Since the 1970s, she has pioneered the practice of socially-engaged video art; working at the intersections of feminist, anti-racism, and labour movements, her media is always decided by the political issue at hand. But her contemporary practice has always been historically-informed, drawing on literatures and languages from the Ottoman Empire.

Pasted up in global cities from Valencia to Mumbai, ‘Exile Is a Hard Job’ includes defaced photographs exposing the living conditions of illiterate ‘guest workers’. Navigating between private, intimate spaces, and public displays, the artist also considers the ethics of photography, using her practice to reflect the loss of identity felt in these communities. She talks about its latest installation at Ab-Anbar Gallery in London, the parallels between her ‘illegal’ practices and subjects, and why women are often ‘doubly punished’. Plus, Yalter describes her motivations for migration from Turkey to France - ‘to learn’ - why MENA artists produce the most exciting work today, and how she feels about her status as the ‘grandmother’ of viral, video art.

Curators Osei Bonsu, Jess Baxter, and Genevieve Barton cross the diverse landscapes, borders, and generations of contemporary African photography, exposing how the past, present, and future can co-exist on camera. Plus, contemporary artist Ndidi Dike revisits the ‘living archive’ of colonialism in Nigeria, from Independence House in Lagos, to London.

Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, Africa’s cultures and traditions have often been seen through Western lenses. By 1914, European powers had colonised 90% of the African continent, often using the media to construct Africa and Black diasporas, in opposition to whiteness. But photography - and photographic traditions of preservation - has long been used by artists on the continent, whether in the pioneering work of studio photographers like James Barnor in pre-independence Ghana, as a means of anti-colonial resistance and political protest in the 1950s, or powerful shots of modern Nigerian Monarchs.

Tate Modern’s A World in Common platforms how artists are reclaim Africa’s histories and reimagining its contemporary place in the world. Curator Osei Bonsu connects show how masks, removed from their ritual context for display in European museums, can also address contemporary questions of restitution, highlighting Edson Chagas’ passport-style photographs connecting Portugal and Angola. Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton look at how globalisation, inequality, migration, and urbanisation, are differently experienced across the continent, and how their ‘hopeful’ exhibition focusses as much on climate activism as climate change. Moving beyond Afrofuturism and pan-Africanism towards ideas around ecology and global solidarity, we see how artists exercise agency in ever changing cities, and through boundary-pushing practices of ‘expanded photography’. Plus, moving from the diaspora London to practice in Lagos, multimedia artist Ndidi Dike explains what discarded files and archive documents from Nigeria can reveal about the post-colonial government.

Curator Florence Ostende visualises how violence against African Americans has been perpetuated throughout history, and challenged with contemporary art, by developing Carrie Mae Weems’ radical photographic practice from the 1980s to now, and how she reframes whiteness, and ‘Anglo-America’, in relation to Black subjects.

Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary US artists, and interest in her films, installations, and performance artworks is rising in Europe too. From her first UK exhibition with Autograph, founded in Brixton to support Black photographers, Weems returns to London with her largest UK exhibition to date, spanning three decades of her multidisciplinary practice, and over 300 years of American history.

Curator Florence Ostende talks about how her ‘direct intervention’ in daguerreotypes taken from the Harvard Museum archives - with colour, tints, and text - challenges their use in perpetuating systemic racism, inequality, and violence, whilst blurring the boundaries between past and present to reveal how colonial stereotypes still linger today. Alongside these ‘appropriated photographs’, she details the artist as art historian - and her bid to expose the Black Abstract Expressionist painters hidden in plain sight. Beyond her iconic Kitchen Table (1990) series, we see Weems’ political activism, with works addressing women’s position in domestic spaces and Marxism, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the murder of George Floyd. Ostende reveals why Weems literally puts the muse in Museums, the complex relationship between artist and institution, and what it was like to work with the artist - and ‘win over’ the Barbican’s brutalist architecture.

Curator Morad Montazami assembles the revolutionary artist-professors and students of the Casablanca Art School who constructed the post-colonial state of Morocco in the 20th century, and how North African crafts were part of both transnational networks, and local traditions, pre-dating Western European modernism.

The Casablanca Art School proposed a bold, revolutionary new wave of Arab visual culture following Morocco’s declaration of independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in 1956. Reflecting a new social awareness, Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi looked beyond Western European academic traditions - and demanded the removal of all Greco-Roman sculptures - sending students to travel more locally, where they encountered traditional arts and crafts more modern than Klee and Kandinsky.

The Tate is the only institution in the world to hold works by all three of the Casablanca trio. Morad Montazami, a curator of a landmark new show in St Ives, explores how the School’s many artists worked across painting, sculpture, graphic design, and architectural murals, integrating art and infrastructure, and artists and the economy. Plus, why we should decentre the Bauhaus as a Western European school, how artists incorporated modern abstract influences alongside Mexican, pan-Arabic, and Marxist revolutionary politics, why a Dutch anthropologist coined the phrase Afro-Berberism, and how the absence of museum spaces after empire provided an opportunity for more public, accessible art - for the nation to ‘build itself’.

Artist Shahrzad Ghaffari replies to orientalism in the Arts & Crafts Movement, William De Morgan’s Arab Hall, and the new contemporary architecture of Leighton House in London, in her Persian poetry-inspired mural paintings.

Since reopening in 2022, Leighton House has commissioned contemporary, often SWANA-based artists, to respond to its interiors and collection - particularly, the vivid ceramic tiles collected from Turkey and Greece, Egypt and Syria, which shroud its 18th century Arab Hall. Iranian-born, Canada-based Shahrzad Ghaffari was the first invited to contribute to the museum’s redesign. A new exhibition, Journey to Oneness, follows her process to construct the helical staircase which now sits at the House’s core – a ‘totem of union’, connecting East and West, the historic and the contemporary.

The artist details how Islamic patterns and Persian poetry permeates her practice, interests shared with the House’s creator, Lord Leighton. Shahrzad describes her movement back to abstract, calligraphic painting after studying graphic design, and why making public art is a physical, constructive act. Plus, she details Iran’s contemporary political landscape which informs Lion and Sun (2010), painted in response to the women-led protests which followed the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan - and its continued resonance amidst global attention on the death of Mahsa Amini.

Curator Najlaa El-Ageli explores how Colonel Muammar Gaddafi colonised Libya’s character and identity from the 1960s to its post-Arab Spring present, and how contemporary artists play with the totalitarian props he used to perform and enact control.

During the 20th century, Libya became the main stage for much social change across the ‘Middle East’ and North Africa, including anti-colonial resistance. Armed with his Third International Theory, and strong words against Western imperialism, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi truly sought total power, control, and mass surveillance of his public - to become King of his own ‘United States of Africa’. Still today, ten years after the Arab Spring and Gaddafi’s death, the legacy of the leader and his dictatorship continues to shape national identities.

Najlaa El-Ageli, curator of Totalitarian Props, points out his signature sunglasses, headgear, and use of the colour green, contrasting the leader’s ‘performance’ - or pantomime - with lived experiences of his authoritarian regime. Beyond Libya, we look to the British colonisation of Egypt, and the ideals embodied by solidarity movements like pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism. Through the work of Tewa Barnosa, El-Ageli’s details the role of humour in social coping - and what it was like to curate an exhibition with the younger artist, creating an exhibition which spans generations and diasporas.

Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum, unpacks how the artist encountered Japan in Europe, and how woodblock prints shaped his perspectives in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, an ‘artist’s colony’ on the outskirts of Paris.

Unlike other post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh never travelled outside of Europe. He didn’t need to; for him, the idea of ‘exotic’ places was often enough to inspire his vivid practice. van Gogh found ‘foreign’ inspirations in cities like Paris and London. His paintings were displayed at the same time as the Paris Universal Exhibition (1889) and as an avid collector of Japanese prints, he also attended the city’s new Asian art exhibitions. Exposure to artists like Katsushika Hokusai shaped his perspectives on his own local environment, his elongated forms, and his surprising use of the colour blue.

But it was in the countryside - and the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise - where Vincent van Gogh realised these various influences in their most vivid visual forms. Here, he spent just 74 days before his death, but produced a painting per day - and was close to the global recognition he gets today. Following their landmark Van Gogh and Japan (2018), Van Gogh Museum curator Nienke Bakker talks about their new exhibition, the first ‘serious’ study of the end of his life, how Vincent’s landscapes combined both local and global images, plus the often unequal relationship between rural and urban spaces.

Curator Isabella Maidment steps into Hurvin Anderson’s studio and barbershop, a point of cultural connection between Birmingham and the Caribbean, reconstructed at the Hepworth Wakefield.

Curators Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble unwrap the underrepresented history of Indian indenture in the British Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries, through Richard Fung’s 2012 documentary film, Dal Puri Diaspora. Plus, artist Salina Jane, and Chandani Persaud, tuck into contemporary Indo-Caribbean and Trinidadian food and culture in London today.

In Dal Puri Diaspora, filmmaker Richard Fung travels from Toronto to Trinidad, and Guyana to India, tracing the migrations - and many variations - of a dish often called Caribbean or West Indian roti. After the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British and Dutch Caribbean plantation owners still required cheap labour and, having successfully petitioned the British government, recruited indentured workers from India. Over 450,000 men and women would make the five month journey by boat, working for three to five years in return for transport, a minimal wage and some basic provisions, until the scheme’s end in 1917. Yet whilst 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Windrush migrations, these stories of Caribbean migration remain comparatively overlooked in British histories.

Shereen Lafhaj and Makiya Davis-Bramble, curators of Indo + Caribbean, explore the reasons why workers decided to leave India, and how we can curate complex histories of opportunity, restriction, and resistance. They share personal experiences informed by caste, gender, and women’s agency, and how museums might use AI to fill the gaps in the archive. Artist Salina Jane highlights how Indo-Caribbeans connect with their heritage today, sharing sugar cane and cocoa drawn from her own growing allotment, and Kew Gardens in South London. Plus, Chandani Persaud looks at the evolution of food and labour in the local community - from suppression to celebration and commercialisation in Western cultures - highlighting how colonialism still shapes tastes and identities.

Artist Musquiqui Chihying brushes up the history of displaying sick and strong Asian bodies, from the Formosa Hamlet or human zoo at the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, to COVID-19, both connected to their own contemporary exhibition in London’s Tabula Rasa Gallery.

Musquiqui Chihying’s multimedia installation, ‘Too Loud a Dust’, delves into two events from 1910: the construction of t he Formosa Hamlet by the Japanese Empire at the Japanese-British Exhibition in London, and the publication of ‘Diseases of China’ by the British missionary James Laidlaw Maxwell. With soil ‘stolen’ from the Japanese Garden, which remains in White City today, and dust from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, he considers how indigenous Korean and Ainu Japanese bodies were represented then and now, and how transparent glass has been used to separate - and - other viewers and subjects.

The artist connects the contemporary and the historic, sharing how archive colonial postcards recalled the Dragonball cards he collected in his home in Taiwan, pan-Asian influences including the Japanese proto-feminist poet, Masano Akiko, and why his research during the COVID pandemic, revealed continued racism and prejudices against Asian people, and contemporary ‘neocolonialism’ between China and Africa. Whilst cleaning a museum may be a necessary task, Chihying describes how dust in display cabinets also carries valuable information, challenging concepts of ‘purity’, and how anthropology and natural history museums ‘function’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rijksmuseum curator Valika Smeulders polishes and personalises our understanding of the Dutch Golden Age, from their joint exhibition with the UN, Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery.

When Slavery opened at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2021, it was one of the first exhibitions of its kind. Spanning 250 years from the 17th to the 19th century, it told Dutch colonial history as a common, national history, centred on lived experience. Its ten stories travel from Brazil, Suriname, and the Caribbean, to South Africa, Asia, and the Netherlands, featuring those who were enslaved, those who profited from slavery, and those who resisted the plantation system. These personal stories connect us as individuals across space and time, asking difficult questions. Were European abolitionists so important in ending the transatlantic slave trade? And what does it mean to be a descendant of plantation owners today?

As an adapted version of the exhibition opens at the United Nations in New York, curator Valika Smeulders explores how material and immaterial cultures together reveal ‘what you don’t see’ in museums, why museums must collaborate, how temporary exhibitions can change permanent collections, and the power of personal storytelling in spaces of contemporary political power.

Japan House London curator Hashimoto Mari and translator Eyre Kurasawa unravel kumihimo, the ancient craft of Japanese silk braiding, and how its contemporary reconstructions connect Edo-era samurai armour with French military fashions from the 19th century.

Literally translated as ‘joining threads together’, kumihimo is the intricate Japanese practice of cord braiding. Its strong and flexible ‘structure’ has lent its use to everything from samurai sword scabbards and handles, tying high-fashion kimono and haori following the restoration of the Emperor Meiji in 1868, to origami, solar panels, and aerospace engineering today.

Japan House London’s new exhibition highlights the work of DOMYO, a Tokyo-based workshop established in 1652 which still practices and researches this traditional craft, with the Shōsōin (Imperial) Repository in Nara. Curator Hashimoto Mari unravels the simultaneous evolution of braiding in China, Asia, and South America, its surprising overlaps with Western textile designs like tartan, and how contemporary modeller Hasegawa Akira reconstructs Napoleonic army jackets, replacing ‘Russian braids’ with kumihimo to hint at the common threads between Japanese and European military histories.

Curator Barnaby Wright transports us from the Courtauld Gallery in London, to the Caribbean island of Trinidad, as seen - and heard - by Peter Doig, one of Europe’s most highly valued contemporary painters.

Peter Doig’s vast figurative paintings pay homage to the many places where he has lived and practiced - though never really called home. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, his career has been characterised by constant travel and movement, and his status as Europe’s most expensive living artist. But his landscapes are layered in with multiple, and more popular, inspirations - like found photographs, films, and above all, music - settings which move between figuration and abstraction, actuality and the imagination.

Trinidad is perhaps the unlikely focus of the Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition, which shows works painted since Doig’s recent return to London from the Caribbean, where he has lived since 2002. Mainstream art markets often prize Doig’s isolated Canadian mountain scenes, influenced by the likes of Edvard Munch, but here we see the artist as an active participant in Port of Spain’s local community, practicing with the BBC’s Boscoe Holder, poet Derek Walcott, and prisoners on the island of Carrera. Curator Dr. Barnaby Wright delves into Doig’s loving depictions of the Mighty Shadow, a titan of Trinidadian calypso and soca, why Carnival keeps him working all night, and how the self-portrayed ‘outsider’ both draws from - and challenges - exotifying gazes on non-European subjects from post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin.

We're back offline, and inside Banned., a new exhibition blending archive and present-day photography at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Curator Sabina Desir joins Anita, Mark, and Julie - three children of Black and Indigenous American airmen stationed at RAF Manston in the 1950s - to imprint their portraits of racial identity and ambiguity in Britain.

Between 1951 and 1958, 2500 US Air Force servicemen and women were stationed at RAF Manston, near Margate. 200 were African American, and others were from non-white Indigenous and ethnic groups. After finding a 1957 newspaper article in the East Kent Times which downplayed the level of segregation imposed on British soil - and the furious responses this triggered from residents at the time - curator Sabina Desir began to reach out to those in the community today. Anita, Mark, and Julie, portrayed on the walls by local artist Richard Birch, share their lived experiences of tracing their ancestry - some, all the way back to Cherokee chiefs. Plus, Sabina exposes the different perceptions of the post-war Windrush generation, new connections in Charlie Evaristo-Boyce's pop art series, and the power of representing these people in the same place where they were banned.

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’.

Now, EMPIRE LINES is moving offline for good - with even more exclusive interviews recorded on location with the world's leading curators, historians, and artists, bringing museums and exhibitions to meet you.

Dr. Sarah Longair unseats European powers' efforts to control the East African coast, through a Kiti Cha Enzi, or Swahili Chair of Power, produced in the 19th century.

Intricately decorated with an ivory inlay, a large, wooden throne sits proudly - not in its place of production of Witu, Kenya, but the stores of the British Museum. Kiti cha enzi, or seats of power, were used as thrones by Swahili rulers from the 18th century. Their distinctive form incorporates myriad cultural influences, highlighting the vibrant pre-colonial trading history of the Swahili community, while their symbolic use speaks to shifting patterns of power on the African coast. Produced as Germany and Britain competed for colonial control on the East African coast, this chair is a material symbol of how a small Swahili community resisted European expansion. Its seizure from the Swahili Sultan Fumo Bakari, and subsequent relocation by Admiral Fremantle to the National Maritime Museum, and later British Museum, speaks to our current interests in the colonial origins of museum objects. But it also reveals the complex rivalries between Western imperial pofwers, and how East African leaders exercised their own agency by playing them against each other.

PRESENTER: Dr. Sarah Longair, Senior Lecturer in the History of Empire at the University of Lincoln.

ART: Kiti Cha Enzi (Swahili Chair of Power), East Africa (19th Century).

IMAGE: 'Sketch of Kiti Cha Enzi of the Sultan of Witu, British Museum Af1992,05.1. Drawing: S Longair'.

SOUNDS: Radi Cultural Group.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Dr. Chris Spring tears up stereotypes of African textiles, through Araminta de Clermont's 2010 photograph, Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx.

Three young men wait at a bus stop near Cape Town in South Africa, clad in blankets of brilliant blue and rose red. Historically, these 'African' woven textiles were originally manufactured by Europeans during the colonial period. Dutch imperial traders, who first entered the Indian Ocean trade in the mid-seventeenth century, only added to the existing vigorous trade in textiles which had been carried out by Indian, Arab, and Chinese traders for many centuries before the arrival of Europeans. From indigo resist-dyed blauwdruk, to Swahili kanga, and South African shweshwe, these ‘authentic’ products are truly the hybrid product of places and peoples working across and within empires - from factories in Manchester, to migrant merchants from Kutch, and businesses within the Japanese Empire.

This confident photograph speaks to how patterns and designs had always been dictated by African taste, aesthetics, and patronage, and utilised by women to communicate across gendered and religious social boundaries. Now representative of diverse African identities and indigeneity, these fabrics unsettle ideas of what an 'African' textile should look like, revealing innovation and modernity - all the way to the Marvel film, Black Panther.

PRESENTER: Dr. Chris Spring, artist, writer and former curator in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum  He was the curator of Social Fabric: African Textiles Today, at the British Museum and William Morris Gallery.

ART: Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx, Araminta de Clermont (2010).

IMAGE: 'Thabo, Thabiso and Blackx'.

SOUNDS: Chad Crouch.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

We're back offline, and in the artist's bedroom at Van Gogh House in London, as Vaishnavi Mohan pins down Harold Offeh's sound installation, We Came Here, an imagined conversation on migration between Vincent Van Gogh and the Jamaican-born, Brixton-based community leader, Olive Morris.

In 1873, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh arrived in Stockwell in South London. Almost a century later, Olive Morris, a Jamaican-born community leader, was actively campaigning for feminist, Black, and squatters' rights in nearby Brixton. Researching the lives of these two 20 year olds, Harold Offeh, Van Gogh House's then artist-in-residence, became intrigued by the idea of the artist as a ‘migrant’ in London. His sound installation, We Came Here, is an cross-generational conversation between artist and activist, exploring their shared and common experiences of London, housing rights and social justice, and the development of their individual sociopolitical awarenesses. Community Engagement Guide Vaishnavi Mohan shares narratives of young migrants arriving in London today, delving into questions of access and decolonisation of the museum space.

Deborah Lee-Talbot exposes the political agency of Indigenous women in British New Guinea, through a photograph of the Papuan Geua, taken in the 1880s.

In her European 'Mother Hubbard' dress, and necklace made of local shells, Geua's status as a powerful, 'Big Woman' of Papua New Guinea is without question. A politically motivated Indigenous intermediary, she collaborated with the British missionaries and explorers that visited Port Moresby during the late nineteenth century, when the island was known as British New Guinea in the British Empire. Geua' prominence is evidenced by her repeated presence throughout the London Missionary Society's (LMS) archives, photographed by the likes of George Lawes. Her images serve in part as mission propaganda for European audiences, revealing what it was like for religious missionaries in the tropical Pacific region. Yet rereading Geua’s photograph from her perspective challenges the idea of Papuans' evolution as Christians, exposing Geua’s own agency as an Indigenous woman, and her critical role in bridging two distinctive cultures - as well as the unique role colonial photographs play today.

PRESENTER: Deborah Lee-Talbot, doctoral candidate in Australian-Pacific and archival history at Deakin University, Australia.

ART: Indigenous Intermediary Geua in ‘Photographs Mainly of Port Moresby’, George Lawes, (1880s).

IMAGE: 'Geua'.

SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Dr. Helen Paul bursts the South Sea Bubble, tracing the triangular trade of slavery between London and Britain's colonies in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, via John Cleveley's 18th century painting, The Luxborough Galley on Fire.

Sailing into the dark green waters of the mid-Atlantic Ocean, the Luxborough Galley is in imperilled. Consumed by flames, with no land in sight, its white passengers frantically firefight - to no avail. Commissioned by one of the ship's few survivors for display in Greenwich, John Cleveley's six oil paintings recast the story as one of British heroism - erasing the history of the South Sea Company's colonial profiteering, catastrophic South Sea Bubble of 1720, and scapegoating its enslaved Black passengers for carelessly causing the blaze. Still housed in the National Maritime Museum, on the southern bank of the River Thames, John Cleveley’s rendering exposes London's vast investment into the international slave trade, linking British colonies across the world. By focussing on cannibalism, it unintentionally commemorates the inhumanity, lack of civislisation, and crimes against humanity committed by its white colonial benefactors.

PRESENTER: Dr Helen Paul, lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of Southampton, and Honorary Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at UCL.

ART: The Luxborough Galley on Fire, 25 June 1727, John Cleveley the Elder (c. 18th Century).

IMAGE: 'The 'Luxborough Galley' on fire, 25 June 1727'.

SOUNDS: One Man Book.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

James Marriott traces the flows of Britain's global oil empire in the 20th century, from a village in Nigeria to The Beatles' 1965 vinyl, Drive My Car.

Penned by Paul McCartney and John Lennon in 1965, ‘Drive my Car’ transported The Beatles on their way to international success. It is the soundtrack of the British empire of the 1960s, characterised by pop culture domination and high-powered men in business suits, rather than top hats and general's uniforms. This ‘late empire’ was built on petrol, plastics, airplanes and vinyl records - which permeated British homes and everyday lives. Tracing the crude oil connections between Ogoni in Nigeria to refineries in Wales, and the colonial heritage of businesses like Shell-BP, James Marriott exposes the pipeline politics underlying Britain’s global empire of oil.

We're back offline, and into the deep black exhibition space of Bath's Holburne Museum, where artist Nalini Malani coats fresh layers upon classical paintings from the National Gallery in her new installation, My Reality is Different.

Artist Nalini Malani disrupts Western linear perspectives – in art, and in history. In My Reality is Different, the viewer is engulfed within a dark cavern, a panoramic 40 metres of wall space, shot with nine overlapping video projections all playing in a continuous loop. With tens of iPad-drawn animations. she adds layers to classical paintings from the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum in Bath. Born in 1946 in Karachi, British India, and now practicing in Mumbai, Malani has always radically questioned conventions of painting and drawing. She talks about reworking well-known works of art from alternative, and critical, perspectives, highlighting histories of the subaltern, women, and the colonial and imperial sources of wealth behind contemporary art collections.

Dr. Michele Lamprakos reconstructs the imperial flows of Islamic and Byzantine architecture from 8th century Spain, through the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, or the Mezquita.

A strange, hybrid building dominates the southern Spanish city of Córdoba. Part mosque, part cathedral, the Mezquita was first constructed by the early Islamic Umayyad dynasty - then seized, 'purified,' and consecrated as a Christian church in the 13th century. This infamous Christianised mosque, complete with crucero, epitomised the imperial 'Christian universe' of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg dynasty's victory over Islam. Still, much of the Islamic fabric was politically preserved – and even reconstructed - in testament to Spain's long history of religious rivalry and reconciliation. Tracing these unending cycles of Christianisation and re-Islamification reveals Spain's imperial ambitions in northern Africa, and how the Mezquita remained a political tool through the 20th century General Franco dictatorship to today.

PRESENTER: Dr. Michele Lamprakos, Associate Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland-College Park.

ART: The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba (8th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Mezquita, Cornelia Steffens'.

SOUNDS: Gnawledge.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Dr. Peter Good traces the flows of Persian wine culture through precolonial India into Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, via the Queen Anne Wine Bottle from Shiraz.

No other alcoholic drink has inspired - or intoxicated - our imaginations quite like wine. Long considered the perfect gift from visitors, this striking sapphire blue bottle from Shiraz was presented to the English Queen Anne in 1708 - one of many bought and sold by the English from Persia, now Iran. Perhaps surprisingly common, this artefact of the Safavid Empire's multimillion pound wine industry reveals early modern Europe's obsession with Persian wine, from its mythical properties as an elixir of life, to the courtly manners of its taste and consumption. But it also speaks to attitudes towards non-European and Islamic powers before the rise of formal empires in the Indian Ocean. Far from imposing their 'superior' culture upon local powers, European elites adopted and mimicked the practices of their Asian counterparts, from cultivating grapevines and vineyards, to the paradisic Persian gardens of the English East India Company. Since swallowed into existing European tastes, the Queen Anne bottle brings Iran's unique viticulture to light, forcing us to reconsider our privileging of Western wines in popular culture and museum collections today.

We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the Turner Contemporary in Margate, for their latest exhibition Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning. Artist Ingrid Pollard explores her career of photographing Black experiences, beyond the city and urban environment, to the English countryside.

Since the 1980s, artist Ingrid Pollard has explored how identities of Britishness and Blackness are socially constructed, through history and the rural landscape. Drawing on British and Caribbean photographic archives, her works cross boundaries in photography, sculpture, film and sound, confronting complex, often racist histories. She discusses how pre-Windrush propaganda films inspired works like Bow Down and Very Low -123 (2021), her influences from Maya Angelou to Muhammad Ali, and exposing those Black experiences often 'hidden in plain sight'.

We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the William Morris Gallery, in London, for their latest exhibition Althea McNish: Colour is Mine. Co-curator Rose Sinclair unwrap McNish's bold textile designs, and Caribbean and British colonial connections, through her infamous Batchelor Girl's room installation

Althea McNish was one of the UK’s most innovative textile artists. Born in Trinidad, she moved to the UK in 1950, and became the first designer of Caribbean descent to achieve international recognition. Her bestselling wallpapers, interior designs, furnishing and fashion fabrics were commissioned by the likes of Liberty, Dior, and Hull Traders. Co-curator Rose Sinclair talks about meeting the artist, who was both a 'Citizen of the World' and part of the Caribbean Artists Movement, and McNish's transformative impact as a Black woman defining British design.

We're celebrating fifty episodes of EMPIRE LINES, with three specials recorded offline and in the museum space – this time in the Tate Modern, in London, for their latest exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders. Returning to EMPIRE LINES, Richard Gray joins curator Carine Harmand to explore the works of Mozambican artist, Malangatana Ngwenya. Plus, curator Keith Shiri unveils Malangatana's restored mural at the all-new Africa Centre in London.

White gnashing teeth, wide eyes, and clawed hands of humans and animals dominate Malangatana’s Untitled (1967). Otherwise titled How Long Will This Go On?, the overwhelming oil work is a horrifying visualisation of the violence endured by his native Mozambique, as it struggled for independence from Portugal's Estado Novo until 1975.

A prominent political figure, Malangatana joined the Mozambique liberation movement FRELIMO in 1964, and was imprisoned by the Portuguese secret police. Neither a propagandist nor a 'pamphleteer', his works nevertheless embody his own politics and biography, from his artist's block after prison, to his efforts to memorialise the 'Mozambican personality'. Practicing in both colonial and post-colonial Mozambique, he straddled empire lines across Africa, contesting the notion of Europeanisation as civilisation.

Set against the exhibition and sounds of Mozambique musicians, curator Carine Harmand and Richard Gray reveal the two way flows between European modernism and Africanist art, and how the artist appropriated and benefitted from surrealism's international network. Plus, film curator Keith Shiri shares his experiences with the artist at the recent reopening of the Africa Centre.

Dr. Sonal Khullar sounds out how the Long Partition shapes Indian and Pakistani identities, through Bani Abidi's 2016 audio installation, Memorial to Lost Words.

Memorial to Lost Words has been seen and heard across Edinburgh, Berlin, Sharjah, and Chicago. But its installation at Lahore Museum in Pakistan, as part of the city’s inaugural Lahore Biennale in 2018, marked a kind of homecoming. Bani Abidi’s eight-channel soundscape recalls over a million Indian soldiers who served in the British Indian Army during World War I, through Punjabi music, an oversized statue of Queen Victoria, and the English-translated letters of those who never returned home. A counter-monument, it remembers ordinary civilians and soldiers, rather than the generals and rulers celebrated by architects like Edwin Lutyens. It also exposes the lingering imperial legacies of literature, like Rudyard Kiping's Kim and the Zam-Zammah, and how museum collections, like people, were partitioned between post-colonial India and Pakistan.

Dr. Nalini Iyer rereads South Indian and diasporic experiences of Partition, through Balachandra Rajan's 1958 novel, The Dark Dancer.

Born in British India but educated at Cambridge University, V. S. Krishnan finally returns to his home country on the eve of its independence in 1947. But after many years cut off from his family and culture, this South Indian civil servant has become a typical colonial product - the 'brown-skinned Englishman' and bureaucrat idealised by the likes of Lord Macauley. Krishnan's relationships with women reveal other Indias - of Gandhian independence and Hindu nationalism - that he has never known. Witnessing the bewilderment and gendered violence of the Long Partition through the eyes of the civil servant, writer Balachandra Rajan explores how the colonial experience caused existential identity crises. Drawing from his indirect experience, Rajan's novel platforms the perspectives of those diasporic South Indians, seemingly unaffected by the civil conflict, and how Britain too was irrevocably changed by the imperial experience.

Dr. Piotr Puchalski depicts interwar Poland's imperial aspirations, through the Maritime and Colonial League's 1938 poster, Colonial Days: We Demand Colonies For Poland.

Facing economic crises and the onset of World War II, Poland looked to Africa as a source of material wealth, potential place of alternative appeasement, and site of refuge for its Jewish population. With their abundance of 'exotic' fruits and peoples, propaganda posters advertised Poland's Colonial Days events in April 1938, improving public awareness of places like Cameroon, Madagascar, and Liberia, and bolstering national support for elites' ever-shifting visions for colonialism. Colouring Eastern European perceptions of Africa, this poster highlights how colonialism was a truly global phenomenon, attracting the interest of powers without colonies of their own. Today, Poland is more often considered a victim of imperial exploitation – most famously by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - than a historic empire or colonial power. But Colonial Days reveals persistent Polish cultural and socioeconomic insecurities, and how European political and artistic trends, from racial pseudoscience to modernism, were moulded by colonial interactions.

Hooda Shawa rewrites the fairytales in England's 18th century country houses, exposing the Indian and Palestinian foundations of Derbyshire's Kedleston Hall.

Nestled amidst acres of rolling hills, Derbyshire's Kedleston Hall boasts artistic masterpieces, Peacock dresses, and even an 'Eastern Museum' - all furnished from a fairytale. But this neo-classical mansion has a darker past, as the ancestral home of the English Curzon family, including Lord Curzon, who served as the Viceroy of India (1899-1905) and Foreign Secretary (1919-1924) in the British Mandate in Palestine. Now part of the National Trust's Colonial Countryside Project, Kedleston Hall speaks to the hidden connections between historic slavery and plantation ownership, and contemporary wealth and political power - including the collapse of India's textile industry, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement today. In the wake of her own childhood experiences, Hooda Shawa explores what Kedleston Hall means for her own British Kuwaiti heritage and, beyond the Raj, what Palestine's lesser-known occupation reveals about its continued struggle for independence now.

PRESENTER: Hooda Shawa Qaddumi, Founder and Managing Director of TAQA: Toward Achieving Quality in Art, a Kuwait-based company that produces and promotes independent cultural and artistic initiatives. They write for projects including 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object.

ART: Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (18th Century).

IMAGE: 'Kedleston Hall'. 

SOUNDS: Ergo Phizmiz.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Dr. Stephanie Porras carves out the Chinese connection between Spain's colonies in Mexico City and Manila in the Philippines, in a 17th century ivory statue of St. Michael the Archangel.

With gently curving wings, the figure of St. Michael the Archangel has stood watch over Mexico City, the former Spanish colony of New Spain, since the 17th century. But this particular statue was actually produced far across the Pacific, in the smaller Spanish colony of the Philippines by Chinese or 'Sangley' sculptors, themselves immigrants to the archipelago. Whilst initially produced to furnish Catholic churches for the recently converted, such statues were quickly appropriated by those seeking to monetise mass production in Asia. Carved from African imported ivory, and modelled on artworks from the Spanish Flanders, this St. Michael from Manila embodies the intertwining of devotional and transpacific trading networks within the global Spanish empire. Rather than cultural hybrids, these statues challenge the very concept of 'Chineseness', highlighting how artists appropriated imperial Spain's territorial and mercantile ambitions for their own ends.

PRESENTER: Dr. Stephanie Porras, Associate Professor and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University. She is the author of The First Viral Images, published by Pennsylvania State Press in 2023.

ART: Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Basilica of Guadalupe (17th Century).

IMAGE: 'Ivory Statue of St. Michael the Archangel, Chinese Hispano-Philippine Carvers'.

SOUNDS: The Anchorites.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Dr. Jared Hardesty picks up the party debris littered by New England's illegal imperialists, via John Greenwood's 1750s painting, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam.

Drinking, gambling, and debauchery reign in a private club in Paramaribo, then the Dutch colony of Surinam. John Greenwood's 18th century scene boasts of the illegal behaviour of ship captains and merchants from Britain’s New England colonies in North America, painted for proud display in their Rhode Island offices. This souvenir of a colonial gap year obfuscates the cruelty of Dutch colonialism. But its Black figures hint at the exploitation of enslaved Africans, which underpinned these excesses of empire, and generated the wealth which transformed New England into the birthplace of US industrial capitalism. Painted at a time when it was officially illegal for outsiders to trade on the island, Greenwood's image suggests of the lucrative interimperial trade networks open to individual exploitation, which gave rise to goods like the so-called Surinam Horse. As the sole surviving painting of the artist's time in Surinam, Sea Captains is thus a unique, unintentionally subversive artefact.

Dr. Caitlin Harvey maps out land transfers from Indigenous communities to European education institutions, through an 1873 Map of New Zealand’s 'Colonial' University.

Depicting the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, a vast map outlines the lands around the Kimihia and Hakanoa Lakes and Waikato River. It's largest feature, thousands of acres in size, is labelled 'Endowment for Colonial University' - referring to the British University of New Zealand, hundreds of miles away in Christchurch. Exporting the Oxford model, 19th century settler-governments across the world supplied higher education institutions with enormous tracts of Indigenous lands, sometimes violently seized, their lease and sale generating great income. Possibly the longest-lasting myth of the land-grant university is that its operations exist in one, fixed place. Indeed, students often nostalgically associate their university with its distinct city or campus. But this map exposes their mobile and broad territorial reach, how university-building was used as a tool of imperial expansion, and who was excluded from the production of new knowledge and wealth in these new 'progressive' institutions.

PRESENTER: Dr. Caitlin Harvey, Research Fellow in History and POLIS at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.

ART: Map of Endowments for 'Colonial' University, New Zealand (1873).

IMAGE: 'Endowments'.

SOUNDS: onion.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Dr. Saygin Salgirli mines the hidden link between four early modern empires, in a 17th century Painting of Silver Labourers in Potosí, Bolivia.

In a peaceful mountain landscape, three labourers in colourful turbans and tunics mine silver together in a metric, obedient rhythm. Likely painted for the first non-European text on the Americas, this idyllic depiction of labour has a more complicated past. Its novel, imagined imperial ideal of work is unlocatable to any specific context. Instead, it speaks to the interconnected economies of the Ottoman and Spanish Empires, South Asia, and Safavid Iran - all of which restructured their labour forces to mine silver or to produce goods to trade for it - and how wealth was really generated.

Previously part of the Inca Empire, Bolivia's silver output drastically increased under Spanish imperial rule. With widescale extraction, harsh economic reforms, and coercive and slave labour, Potosí’s silver mines became the gossip of global imperial capitals, as imported metals flooded their markets. 'No longer workers, but the human shapes of wage-labour,' these figures reveal the overlooked connections between these newly globalised markets, the abstraction of labour rather than art, and how labour and land were reorganised to meet demand in new, capitalist modes of production.

PRESENTER: Dr. Saygin Salgirli, Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia.

ART: Painting of Silver Labourers in Potosí, Bolivia, from Translation of the History of the New World (c. 17th Century).

IMAGE: 'Mining Silver in Potosí (Bolivia)'.

SOUNDS: CLOUDWARMER.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Aisha Hussain plays out tropes of Ottoman Turks in English Orientalist theatre, in two 17th century productions of The Tragedy of Mustapha.

In 1553, the Ottoman Sultan Soleyman ordered the murder of his eldest son and heir to the throne, Prince Mustapha. Stranger than fiction, his story speaks to the crises of succession, sibling rivalries, and infanticide that marred the imperial Ottoman Court. Though set in modern day Hungary, this true story was first - and most fully - staged by the English playwrights Fulke Greville and Roger Boyle over a century later. Greville and Boyle's Turkish tragedies closed the chasm between Ottoman Muslims and English Christians, drawing on the parallel crises facing the newly restored English King Charles II. Their characters challenged the tropes of violent, lustful Turks, revealing the merits of the Ottoman Empire, and making its people and politics more relatable for contemporary English audiences. The Mustapha story offered audiences an alternative to the monolithic view of Muslim power, asking human questions around weakness, political duty, and gender parity that apply to us all.

PRESENTER: Aisha Hussain, PhD student at the University of Salford and Events Editor at Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs). Her research focusses on Ottoman Turkish Otherness, Orientalism, and crusading and anti-crusading discourses in early modern English drama.

ART: The Tragedy of Mustapha, Fulke Greville (1609) and Roger Boyle (1665).

IMAGE: 'The Tragedy of Mustapha'.

SOUNDS: MWE.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.