Arike Oke and Pelumi Odubanjo

Explicit content warning

10/11/21 • 40 min

Arike Oke is currently the Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, which is known as the leading institutional voice on the Windrush Generation and the home of Black British history.

Independent curator, writer and researcher Pelumi Odubanjo joins Arike Oke for a discussion about how their work with archival materials creates spaces to heal, discover new stories and find other ways of living and possibilities for making art.

The pair talk to Lucy Cowling from the Roberts Institute of Art about the importance of knowledge transmission between generations and community building within Black British cultures.

NOTES

At 7 min 51 sec Arike Oke refers to the Jamaican/Scottish nurse Mary Seacole as looking after troops in the Boer War, this should be the Crimean War.

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This episode is part of our ‘On Togetherness’ podcast mini-series, where we invite conversations between artists and practitioners in the cultural field, exploring collaboration and how to be together in all its forms. Find previous conversations between acclaimed photographer Hrair Sarkissian and curator Michaela Crimmin, plus academics Matthew Spellberg and Richard Sommer.

Arike Oke is Managing Director for the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. Arike has worked in cultural heritage for over 15 years, from the seminal Connecting Histories project in Birmingham, to building Wellcome Collection's archive, and co-convening Hull's first Black History Month. She is also a writer of short stories, which you can find on arikewrites.com.

Pelumi Odubanjo works as an independent curator, writer and researcher interested in diasporic black vernacular culture and image making, informed by decolonialism and black feminism. Pelumi works with artists, archives, and cultural artefacts to explore historical and contemporary links between the intersectionality of women, migration, and identity. as means to disentangle our understandings of archival practice. She was Curator in Residence at the Black Cultural Archives in 2020.

Have questions, comments or want to see more of what the Roberts Institute of Art does? Reach us via therobertsinstituteofart.com, @therobertsinstituteofart and subscribe to our newsletter!

The pair talk to Lucy Cowling from the Roberts Institute of Art about the importance of knowledge transmission between generations and community building within Black British cultures.

NOTES

At 7 min 51 sec Arike Oke refers to the Jamaican/Scottish nurse Mary Seacole as looking after troops in the Boer War, this should be the Crimean War.

MORE INFO

Have questions, comments or want to see more of what the Roberts Institute of Art does? Reach us via therobertsinstituteofart.com, @therobertsinstituteofart and subscribe to our newsletter!

Previous Episode

Michaela Crimmin and Hrair Sarkissian

Michaela Crimmin is an independent curator and co-director of the not-for profit agency, Culture+Conflict. For over 15 years she taught on the Royal College of Art’s curating contemporary art MA.

Hrair Sarkissian is a photographer who was brought up in Damascus and who now lives and works in London. His practice explores his own personal memories and histories and the relationship between visibility and invisibility.

In this podcast, our guests discuss Sarkissian's formative years working in his father’s studio in Damascus, the notion of home and identity and the aesthetic and political capacities of photography, especially in relation to trauma and personal and social histories.

This is the second in a new series of talks for the Roberts Institute of Art podcasts, where artists, cultural practitioners and other thinkers are invited to discuss a theme connected to our programmes and contemporary culture.

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We recommend you take a look at Sarkissian’s website where you can look closely at the photographic series discussed: ‘Home Sick’, ‘Unexposed', ‘Sarkissian’s Photo Centre & my father & I', and ‘Last Scene’, for example.

Michaela Crimmin works as an independent curator and is co-director of Culture+Conflict, a not-for-profit agency profiling and supporting artists whose work relates to international conflict. For over 15 years she taught on the Royal College of Art’s curating contemporary art MA, and most recently led a major EU-funded research programme that included a residency with Delfina Foundation by Noor Abuarafeh, an artist from Palestine; a forthcoming film commission that opens at Gasworks in October this year by Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer; and a symposium with The Showroom and Tate co-programmed with Elvira Dyangani Ose asking to what extent can art affect change when addressing issues of migration, displacement, and access.

Previously she was Head of Arts at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), a role that included initiating and directing the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre; and coordinating the first works of art on the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square.

Hrair Sarkissian is a photographer. Born and raised in Damascus, he earned his foundational training at his father’s photographic studio, where he spent all his childhood vacations and where he worked full-time for twelve years after high school. In 2010 he completed a BFA in Photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. He lives and works in London since 2011. He will be showing in the British Art Show 9 (2021) and his first mid-career survey, Hrair Sarkissian: The Other Side of Silence, curated by Dr Omar Kholief, will be shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and the Bonnefanten, Maastricht (2021-2022).

Have questions, comments or want to see more of what the Roberts Institute of Art does? Reach us via therobertsinstituteofart.com, @therobertsinstituteofart and subscribe to our newsletter!

Next Episode

Phyllida Barlow on Bethan Huws

We invited Phyllida Barlow, whose work is featured in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, to choose a piece from the collection as the starting point for a conversation about influences and objects of interest. She chose Bethan Huws’ Untitled, 2002.

Untitled is from Huws' Word Vitrine series and is a text-based work of sculptural form, using standard office word vitrines made from aluminium, glass, rubber and plastic letters. First created in 1999, her Word Vitrines reference Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, though they alter this concept with the addition of an evocative text.

Barlow discusses that what drew her to Huws' work is the sentience she imbues in her sculptures. She joins Ned McConnell from her London home for a conversation about memory, the ‘performativity’ of sculpture and the difference between someone and something.

British artist Phyllida Barlow takes inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. Creating anti-monumental sculptures, she uses inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim and cement. Her constructions are often testing the limits of a space whether through height, mass or volume and balance engage the audience by blocking straddling or precariously balancing in the space.

Have questions, comments or want to see more of what the Roberts Institute of Art does? Reach us via therobertsinstituteofart.com, @therobertsinstituteofart and subscribe to our newsletter!