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.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life runs at the Tate Modern in London until 3 September 2023.

For more on theosophy, hear Jessica Albrecht’s EMPIRE LINES on the 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/2cf022e2ac70910d0741747e59f2f6f2

For more on Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern, listen to Carine Harmand, Keith Shiri, and Richard Gray on EMPIRE LINES: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/bc78f4df16a50055611d88aa812c7bfb

WITH: Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and a curator of Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life.

ART: ‘The Evolution, Paintings for the Temple, Hilma af Klint (1908)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South runs at the Royal Academy in London until 18 June 2023.

WITH: Raina Lampkins-Felder, Curator at the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is the curator of Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South.

ART: Quilts by the Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend.

IMAGE: Installation View.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

As My Reality is Different moves from the Holburne Museum in Bath to London, curator Priyesh Mistry explains how Malani’s ‘endless paintings’ speak to historical continuities, from the economics of slavery, to contemporary violence, and the treatment of women in ancient Greece as Cassandra and Medea. He explores the artist’s use of Instagram as a ‘democratic platform’, and how the exhibition radically changes our realities, in how and what we see in these paintings, and museums as products of imperial exchange.

Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the National Gallery in London until 11 June 2023.

For more, listen to the artist Nalini Malani on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/74b0d8cf8b99c15ab9c2d3a97733c8ed

And read my article in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review

WITH: Priyesh Mistry, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London, and a curator of Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different.

ART: ‘The Experiment with the Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) and My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

The three exhibitions of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art run at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands until 14 May 2023. For more, you can also read my review of Cobra 75 in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/a-triptych-of-danish-modernism-cobra-and-degenerate-art-in-denmark.

WITH: Pim Arts, curator of We Kiss the Earth - Danish Modern Art 1934-1948. Winnie Sze, curator of Je est un autre: Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov. Both exhibitions are part of Cobra 75: Danish Modern Art.

ART: Works from ‘We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948’.

IMAGE: Peter Tijhuis.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense runs at the Design Museum in London until 30 July 2023.

For more, read my article in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/making-sense-ai-weiwei-at-the-design-museum

WITH: Rachel Hajek, Assistant Curator at the Design Museum, and a curator of Making Sense.

ART: ‘Spouts, Ai Weiwei (2023)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire runs at the Freud Museum London until 16 July 2023.

For more on Freud’s Asian objects, listen to Professor Craig Clunas, curator of Freud and China, on EMPIRE LINES: pod.link/1533637675/episode/44861b4a5e6a32380693ec6622210890

WITH: Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London (UCL). Daniel Orrells, Professor of Classics and Centre Director for Queer@Kings at King’s College London (KCL). They are co-curators are Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire.

ART: ‘Red-Figure Hydria, Greece (380-360BCE)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Could the state of state-lessness mean a more continental, inclusive sense of belonging? The contemporary Southeast and East Asian artists of the collective Kakilang certainly think so. Challenging their conflation as ‘Chinese’, their joint exhibition in London spans the historical migration routes of Vietnamese refugees, to audio maps of Taiwan, and post-Tsunami Japan - regions rarely considered by Western audiences, and rarely from local perspectives. Yet these diverse artworks really speak to similarities, rather than distinct identities, between Asian countries, connecting built and natural environments across the continent. Take Law Yuk-Mui’s 2021 video ‘River Atlas’, which follows the flows of rivers with the same name in Hong Kong and India, two former colonies in the British Empire.sh

Curator Ling Tan reveals how photographic art can refocus our attention from the coloniser/colonised relationship, onto common experiences between artists in Asia, in diasporas, and in the UK. They also speak of the role of language for the 46 million people who use Hokkien, and why their captions read in traditional Mandarin, not the simplified form common in China. Drawing on their own practice as an artist, we see how comforting foods could break down the stereotype of Asian countries as environmentally destructive - and why the exhibition combines new scaffolding and neo-Gothic architecture, to reconstruct shared colonial pasts.

State-less 無國界 runs at Two Temple Place in London until 9 April 2023. (You’ll find all the links in the episode notes.)

WITH: Ling Tan, curator of State-less 無國界. They are an artist and the Associate Artistic Director of Kakilang (formerly Chinese Arts Now, CAN), an annual festival which celebrates the work of artists from across the wide spectrum of East and Southeast Asian heritages.

ART: ‘River Atlas, Law Yuk-Mui (2021)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery runs at the United Nations Headquarters Visitors’ Lobby in New York until 30 March, then across UN offices throughout 2023.  You can also access the entire exhibition online. 

WITH: Dr. Valika Smeulders, one of the four curators of Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery, in Amsterdam (2021) and in New York (2023). She is the head of the Department of History at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

IMAGE: Richard Koek.

SOUNDS: Rijksmuseum.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Japan House 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’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.

KUMIHIMO: Japanese Silk Braiding by DOMYO runs at Japan House London until 11 June 2023.

For more, read my review of KUMIHIMO in gowithYamo: https://www.gowithyamo.com/blog/visit-japan-for-free-from-london

WITH: Hashimoto Mari, curator of KUMIHIMO: Japanese Silk Braiding by DOMYO. She is the vice-chairperson of EISEI BUNKO, and a writer and editor who specialises in the Japanese arts. Eyre Kurasawa is an interpreter, writer, and researcher in Japanese and English.

ART: ‘French Army Tunic, Hasegawa Akira (2021)’.

SOUNDS: DOMYO.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

Peter Doig runs at the Courtauld Gallery in London until 29 May 2023.

WITH: Dr. Barnaby Wright, curator of Peter Doig. He is the Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art.

ART: ‘Painting on an Island (Carrera), Peter Doig (2019)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

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.

Banned. runs at the Turner Contemporary in Margate until 8 May 2023.

WITH: Sabina Desir, curator of Banned. She is the Artistic Director and Creative Producer of the Ramsgate-based Freedom Road Project. Anita Stokes, Mark Mahan, and Julie Wing are all children of Manston US Air Force Servicemen, working with the Banned. project.

ART: Children of the Manston US Air Force Servicemen Print Series, Richard Birch (2023)

IMAGE: 'Anita Stokes, Mark Mahan, and Julie Wing, in front of their portraits in Children of the Manston US Air Force Servicemen Print Series, Richard Birch (2023)'.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines 

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.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

MUSIC: Combinación // The Dubbstyle

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic

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.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines 

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.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

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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.

We Came Here runs at Van Gogh House London until 18 December 2022.

PRESENTER: Vaishnavi Mohan, Community Engagement Guide at Van Gogh House, and science communicator.

ART: We Came Here, Harold Offeh, with voice actors Abel Enkelaar and Nkara Stephenson (2022).

IMAGE: 'Van Gogh's Bedroom.'

SOUNDS: Extract from We Came Here, Harold Offeh.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines 

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.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

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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.

PRESENTER: James Marriott, writer and activist at Platform. He is the co-author of Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation with Terry Macalister, published by Pluto Press in 2021. He is executive producer of THE OIL MACHINE (2022), a documentary film screening across the UK in November 2022.

ART: Vinyl Record of Drive My Car, The Beatles (1965).

IMAGE: 'Women at the EMI factory packing the Rubber Soul album'.

SOUNDS: Atlas Sound.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

Nalini Malani: My Reality is Different runs at the Holburne Museum in Bath until 8 January 2023, and then the National Gallery in London from 2 March to 11 June 2023.

For more, read my review of My Reality is Different in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/nalini-malani-my-reality-is-different-review.

PRESENTER: Nalini Malini, Mumbai-based artist. In 2020, she became the first-ever artist to receive the National Gallery Contemporary Fellowship.

ART: My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani (2022).

IMAGE: 'Nalini Malani in front of Caravaggio’s 'The Supper at Emmaus' (1601) at the National Gallery'.

SOUNDS: Extract from My Reality is Different, Nalini Malani.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

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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.

PRESENTER: Dr. Peter Good, Lecturer in Early Modern Europe and the Islamic World at the University of Kent. He specialises on cross-cultural and diplomatic exchanges between Europeans and Asian states in the Indian Ocean. He is the author of The East India Company in Persia: Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Eighteenth Century, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022.

ART: Queen Anne Wine Bottle, Shiraz (1708).

IMAGE: 'Saddle Flask - Type II PC-078 Queen Anne Flask'. 

SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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'.

Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning runs at the Turner Contemporary in Margate until 25 September 2022.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Malangatana Ngwenya and Althea McNish.

PRESENTER: Ingrid Pollard, Guyanese-born British artist, photographer, and researcher. She uses portraiture and traditional landscape imagery to explore social constructs like Britishness, race, and sexuality. She was Stuart Hall Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex (2018), and has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2022.

ART: Self Evident, Ingrid Pollard (1992).

IMAGE: 'Self Evident'.

SOUNDS: Water Features.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Malangatana Ngwenya and Ingrid Pollard.

PRESENTER: Rose Sinclair, co-curator of Colour is Mine, and Lecturer in Design Education at Goldsmiths University.

ART: Batchelor Girl's Room, Althea McNish/Studio Nyali (1966/2022).

IMAGE: 'Althea McNish: Colour is Mine'.

SOUNDS: The Up Beat.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

Surrealism Beyond Borders runs at the Tate Modern in London until 29 August 2022.

The Africa Centre in London reopened on 9 June 2022.

Part of EMPIRE LINES at 50, featuring three exhibitions ahead of their final weekend. See the episode notes for links to the last tickets, and the other episodes on Althea McNish and Ingrid Pollard.

PRESENTERS: Carine Harmand, Assistant Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, and of Surrealism Beyond Borders. Richard Gray, postgraduate research student at SOAS University of London. He was the co-curator of Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution at the Brunei Gallery, and formerly a 'cooperante internacionalista' (internationalist co-worker), contracted as a teacher by the Mozambican government in the late 1970s. Keith Shiri, film curator, founder, and director of Africa at the Pictures, the London African Film Festival, and the Africa Media Centre at the University of Westminster. He is the curator of the Icons of the Africa Centre Series at The Africa Centre, and is a BFI London Film Festival Programme Advisor.

ART: Untitled, Malangatana Ngwenya (1967).

IMAGE: 'Untitled'. 

SOUNDS: Adlina Tatana // Alda Ngwenya, Vasco Sambo.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Nalini Iyer.

PRESENTER: Dr. Sonal Khullar, W. Norman Brown Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations (2015) and completing a book manuscript The Art of Dislocation on conflict, collaboration, and contemporary art from South Asia.

ART: Memorial to Lost Words at the Lahore Museum, Bani Abidi (2016/2018)

IMAGE: 'Memorial to Lost Words'.

SOUNDS: Bani Abidi, Saad Sultan, Ali Aftab Saeed, Harsakhian.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Partition Season, marking the 75 year anniversary of the Partition of British India in August 1947, which led to the formation of India and Pakistan. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Sonal Khullar.

PRESENTER: Dr. Nalini Iyer, Professor of English at Seattle University and Editor-in-Chief of South Asian Review.

ART: The Dark Dancer, Balachandra Rajan (1958).

IMAGE: 'Balachandra Rajan'.

SOUNDS: G. Las.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

PRESENTER: Dr. Piotr Puchalski, Assistant Professor of Modern History at the Pedagogical University of Kraków. He specialises in the history of Poland, colonial empires, international relations, and contemporary tourism. He is the author of Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939, published by Routledge in 2022.

ART: Colonial Days: We Demand Colonies For Poland Poster, Maritime and Colonial League (1938).

IMAGE: 'Colonial Days Poster'.

SOUNDS: Gary War.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

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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.

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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.

PRESENTER: Dr. Jared Ross Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is the author of Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate, and EMPIRE LINES listeners can get 30% off the text with the code RISINGSUN30.

ART: Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, John Greenwood (c. 1752-1758).

IMAGE: 'Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam'.

SOUNDS: MG Studios.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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For EMPIRE LINES’ 40th episode, Professor Craig Clunas dials in from London’s Freud Museum to tell me about curating their latest exhibition, Freud and China, and shrinking the international networks of psychoanalysis.

Smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Austria before World War II, Sigmund Freud's Chinese jade screen was amongst his most prized antiquities. Much like his chow dogs and cherry blossom trees, these modern objects were taken as historic, decorative and academic goods, exposing European ideas about Asia in the 19th century.

Practicing from the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, Freud became a global celebrity as the founder of psychoanalysis, a mental health therapy which went international during his lifetime, But how much did Freud really think about China, and how did these objects help him curate his academic environment?

Curator Craig Clunas uses this jade screen as a window into everything from Edward Said's Orientalism, the two-way flows in thought between Freud and Asia, and contemporary efforts to broaden and decolonise art history.

Freud and China runs at the Freud Museum in London until 26 June 2022.

PRESENTER: Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, and curator of Freud and China.

ART: Pierced Jade Scholar's Screen, China (19th Century).

IMAGE: 'Pierced Jade Scholar's Screen'.

SOUNDS: Bernd Burnson.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 

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Anna Ghadar turns back against colonial archives of Native American peoples, via Fred Wilson's 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society, Mining the Museum.

Amidst precisely whittled arrowheads, and expertly crafted tools, five Cigar Store Indians in feathered bonnets stand dressed for battle. But beyond confrontation, they turn away from their viewers, engaging in conversation with portraits of modern Native American individuals instead. These figures comprise some of 100 objects in Mining the Museum, artist Fred Wilson's 1992 exhibition at Baltimore’s Maryland Historical Society. Established as one of England's thirteen colonies in 1632, the state has struggled with a fraught narrative which prioritises post-settler narratives, and others pre-contact, Native, and non-white histories. Redressing their absence in the archive, these objects reveal how European settlers relied on Native peoples as educators, leaders, and guiders, turning their backs against outdated visions of the past. Understanding the exhibition itself as the artwork, Mining the Museum also pushes the boundaries of contemporary curation, and speaks to modern legacies of colonialism in Baltimore's racial and environmental politics today.

PRESENTER: Anna Ghadar, History of Art and Visual Culture MSt graduate from Lady Margaret Hall College, University of Oxford. She is an art historian and contemporary arts administrator in New York.

ART: Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson (1992-1993).

IMAGE: 'Portraits of Cigar Store Owners'.

SOUNDS: Ketsa.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi fires up legacies of British colonialism in contemporary American consumption, through Johnson Brothers' Old Britain Castles Ceramic Plate, produced from 1930.

Manufactured for export to America, Old Britain Castles promised to connect consumers with their 18th century colonial origins. Produced by the British firm Johnson Brothers from 1930, designers used engravings of Blarney Castle in Ireland to target new immigrants, capitalising on class dynamics after the American Revolution. Miscalculated marketing strategies may have backfired, but the pattern remained in production for 84 years. Antiquated by design, these imagined heirlooms challenge the idea of the 'Roaring Twenties', revealing how many Americans longed to return to a time of perceived tradition, stability, and values. With their combination of fine art and function, they also speak to the neoimperial business practices of Staffordshire's Wedgwood pottery ever since.

PRESENTER: Dr. Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is the author of The Material Culture of Tableware: Staffordshire Pottery and American Values.

ART: Old Britain Castles Ceramic Plate, Johnson Brothers (1930).

IMAGE: 'Blarney Castle in 1792, Johnson Bros'.

SOUNDS: sawsquarenoise.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Tim Murray smashes imperial stereotypes of Asia through tastes and trades, in a 19th century Standard Willow Ceramic Plate from Josiah Spode's Staffordshire pottery.

Adorning dinner tables across the world, Josiah Spode's Chinese-inspired ‘Standard Willow’ rapidly became the world's most popular ceramic pattern. Produced in Staffordshire from 1790, its blue-and-white pines and pagodas speak to Asia's ascendant economic and cultural status - and imperial European efforts to imitate and overtake China in the 19th century. Excavated from former settler societies as far as Australia, such tea sets are testament to the mutual expansion of the British Empire and the global ceramics market, connecting colonial territories with cultural tastes through new trading tactics, and aggressively advertised chinoiserie.

Digging into the rise of mass-produced pottery unearths how European potteries came to provide the global standard and entry-point for England’s rapidly expanding consumer classes, subverting our contemporary stereotypes around low quality, mass-produced Chinese goods. But this particular porcelain also reveals the hairline cracks in imperial control in Asia, and Europe's fragile competitive edge in modern markets.

PRESENTER: Dr. Tim Murray, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at La Trobe University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

ART: Standard Willow Ceramic Plate, Josiah Spode (1800-1820).

IMAGE: 'Standard Willow Ceramic Plate'.

SOUNDS: Christian H. Soetemann.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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A. A. Bastian navigates the commercial and Christian aspirations of Euro-American trading empires in 19th century Asia, through a Water Splotch from the Bay of Bengal in Levi Savage's ship diary.

Hugging India's glistening Bay of Bengal, Euro-American ships like the Monsoon and Fire Queen carried goods and peoples to and from Calcutta, the meeting point of the British and Mughal empires. An emblem of the unique, long-distance aspirations of Euro-American traders, the ship speaks to the uneven distribution of knowledge and benefits in global supply chains. But a water-stained diary kept by one of the Monsoon's passengers, the American Mormon Levi Savage, reveals how such economic and religious missions were not all smooth sailing. Navigating these storms challenges the typical paths of European empires, exposing Asian traders’ power to attract and indirectly incentivise the construction of a European delivery network - their failure to fully foresee their rising racism and greed - and the very movements of empire.

PRESENTER: A.A. Bastian, author of 'The Other Bayonet: A New Source to Frame the Second Anglo-Burmese War' in the Journal of Burma Studies. She is a regular reviewer at the Washington Independent Review of Books.

ART: Water Splotch from the Bay of Bengal, Ship Diary of Levi Savage (1852-1853).

IMAGE: ‘Savage, Levi vol. 1, 1852'.

SOUNDS: Virlyn.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Mona Narain reimagines Britain through the eyes of the colonial Indian subject, via Elizabeth Hamilton's 1796 novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah.

Following the adventures of the fictional Indian Rajah Zāārmilla in London, Elizabeth Hamilton's Letters upends stereotypical narratives of the imagined east. Staged in a series of letters, her novel refocusses 18th century Britain through the eyes of the colonised, comparing cultures and challenges the Indian aristocrat's initial adoration of imperial Britain. From the 'benevolent' British East India Company to the Orientalist scholars of the Asiatic Society, Letters embodies Britain's bids to justify their presence in India, but also the public's ambivalence towards colonisation. Using Zāārmilla's outsider perspective, Hamilton scathingly satirises social ills closer to home, speaking to her own marginalisation as an Irish-Scottish, woman writer.

PRESENTER: Dr. Mona Narain, professor of English at Texas Christian University and Scholarship Editor at ABO Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830. She is a Consultant Chair on American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Women's Caucus, and co-edits the Bucknell University Press Transits book series.

ART: Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Elizabeth Hamilton (1796).

IMAGE: 'Translation of the letters of a Hindoo Rajah'.

SOUNDS: Blue Dot Sessions.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Desmond Manderson lashes new layers atop Australia's colonial founding myths, through Gordon Bennett's 1991 painting, Possession Island.

When Captain Cook planted the Union Jack on Possession Island in 1770, Australia was entirely subsumed within the British Empire. Colonial imaginings of this moment reinforced the legal myth around terra nullius, still propagated in constitutional classes today. Gordon Bennett whip-splashes alternative histories atop the time-worn tropes, exposing the hidden witnesses to violence at Australia's coming-of-age party. Possession Island perverts our expectations of empty, untamed lands, and collapses the strict divisions between aboriginal, colonial, and post-colonial art. Showing at the Tate Modern's 'A Year in Art: Australia 1992', the painting also challenges colonisation in the canon - from contemporary Australian artists like McCubbin, through to Jackson Pollock's American modernism.

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992. Listen to the other episodes with Jeremy Eccles.

PRESENTER: Dr. Desmond Manderson, Professor and Director of the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities at Australian National University. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

ART: Possession Island (Abstraction), Gordon Bennett (1991).

IMAGE: 'Possession Island/(Abstraction)'.

SOUNDS: New Weird Australia.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Jeremy Eccles etches out the colonial and continued denial of discrimination against Australia's Indigenous communities, through Judy Watson's 2005 series, a preponderance of aboriginal blood.

Sixteen black and white documents from the Queensland State Archives, dating back to 1866, map out Australia's discriminatory race-based system of citizenship rights. Now splattered with blood red ink by the artist Judy Watson, they stand central in the Tate Modern's latest show, 'A Year in Art: Australia 1992'. This little recognised year in Australian history witnessed the landmark Mabo Decision, in which the Indigenous Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo legally asserted his peoples' pre-colonial rights to their land. As a 'city Aboriginal', Watson's blood-stained book speaks to Britain's unique colonial aspirations for 'White Australia', the oft-silenced violence behind terra nullius, and the ongoing battle for social and historical inclusion still faced by Indigenous Australians.

Part of EMPIRE LINES' Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992. Listen to the other episode with Dr. Desmond Manderson.

PRESENTER: Jeremy Eccles, editor of the Aboriginal Art Directory in Australia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and a member of the International Association of Art Critics.

ART: a preponderance of aboriginal blood, Judy Watson (2005).

IMAGE: 'a preponderance of aboriginal blood'.

SOUNDS: New Weird Australia.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Lily Filson reroutes religious loot through the 6th and 8th centuries, via the Teak Column of al-Qalis, produced in Yemen, and plundered for Saudi Arabia.

A tall wooden column towers over pilgrims to the heart of the Islamic faith in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Installed around the 8th century as Islamic pious plunder, it is one the last surviving remnants of the Christian church al-Qalis, erected in Sana’a, Yemen over a century beforehand. Revealing unique religious motifs, mosaics, and materials from Yemen, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it stands as a silent witness to centuries of conquest and cultural exchange between the Christian Byzantine and Aksumite, and emergent Islamic empires. But as Saudi Arabia's campaign of aerial bombardment continues to destroy Yemen today, its tales of tolerance make a loud call to rescue the region and its historical records, before they are forever lost.

PRESENTER: Dr. Lily Filson, Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

ART: Teak Column of al-Qalis, Mecca (6th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Teak Column'. 

SOUNDS: Traditional Music Channel.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Tessa Murphy retouches European renderings of colonial Caribbean commerce in the 18th century, through Agostino Brunias' oil painting, Linen Market, Dominica.

Painted around 1780, Linen Market, Dominica depicts a Caribbean port town teeming with commerce. Great ships and local Kalinago canoes straddle the coastline, as people of all races and classes and barter for carrots, calabashes, and callaloo, the new global goods of imperial exchange. Italian artist Agostino Brunias' bustling waterfront conveys the convergence of cultures in Britain's so-called Ceded Islands, acquired from France following its success in the Seven Years War. Brunias' image of abundance depicts the extraordinary and everyday exchanges of empire for Western consumption. glossing over the realities of slavery, social hierarchy, and interconnected Caribbean colonies. The artist's paintings and own biography still hint at the island's intertwined indigenous and imperial, colonial and Creole histories.

PRESENTER: Dr. Tessa Murphy, Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her latest book is The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean.

ART: Linen Market, Dominica, Agostino Brunias (c. 1780).

IMAGE: 'Linen Market, Dominica'.

SOUNDS: Toybox.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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For EMPIRE LINES’ 30th episode, we’re heading offline and out into the museum space - to SOAS’ Brunei Gallery, in London. Richard Gray is co-curator of their latest exhibition, Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution.

Cashew nuts are a paradoxical symbol in Mozambique. Brought over from Brazil by 16th century Portuguese colonists, they were used to attract - and commit - Mozambican peasant farmers to compulsory cultivation. Yet they became a national icon for post-colonial Mozambique, peppering propaganda imagery from its independence in June 1975. Associated with abundance, Mozambique produced and processed over half the world’s cashew supply, which remained the state's greatest export until the 1980s.

Kept illiterate under Portuguese rule, Mozambique's masses were mobilised using vivid visual art. The Frelimo government celebrated the industry's revival with colourful posters, symbolising the post-colonial promises of plenty, socialist internationalism, and a new humanity. But beyond propaganda, these posters reveal how artist collectives appropriated communist and capitalist graphic design, including comics, creating a movement which threatened those who sought to destabilise Mozambique from the inside out, like South Africa and Zimbabwe. Set amongst the sounds of Nampula province, co-curator Richard Gray traces the colonial history of the cashew nut to the neoimperial practices of international financial institutions today.

Our Sophisticated Weapon: Posters of the Mozambican Revolution runs at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, London until 11 December 2021. Find out more about the exhibition online, read the catalogue of interviews with the surviving artists, and attend SOAS School of Arts' special seminar on 11 December 2021.

PRESENTER: Richard Gray, postgraduate research student at SOAS University of London. He is the co-curator of Our Sophisticated Weapon and formerly a 'cooperante internacionalista' (internationalist co-worker), contracted as a teacher by the Mozambican government in the late 1970s.

ART: Let Us Harvest All The Cashew Nuts, To Harvest The Nuts Is To Develop Mozambique, Alexandre Milhafre (c. 1979).

SOUNDS: TRKZ.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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*CORRECTION: The war with Renamo caused around one million civilian deaths and displaced five million throughout Mozambique. Around one million were likely displaced from Nampula province, from where many went to Malawi.

Dr. David Damrosch intertwines imperial expectations in 18th century Europe with Middle Eastern realities, in Antoine Galland's Les Mille et Une Nuit, or The Thousand and One Nights.

Filled with flying carpets and trapped genies, the tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Scheherazade might seem little more than bedtime stories. But the tales of The Thousand and One Nights iwere born out of the real experiences of 8th century Middle Eastern empires, evolving at the crossroads of Sassanid Persia, Abbasid Baghdad, and Ottoman Cairo and Damascus. Published in 18th century Paris, Galland's epochal French edition brought the tales beyond the Arabian peninsula, adding Aladdin and Ali Baba to his Syrian source manuscript, and transforming the tales into a work of world literature. A thousand years on, it too was informed by the imperial dynamics of the aging Ottoman Empire, the young French empire of Louis XIV and Napoleon, and their mutual rival, the Holy Roman Empire of the Austrian Habsburgs. Galland's edition is embedded with the turquoiserie and territorial ambitions of 18th century Europe. But retelling the tale of the tales reveals their subversive potential, seized upon by souk storytellers, European orientalists, and contemporary Arabic novelists alike.

PRESENTER: Dr. David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and founder of the Institute for World Literature. He is the author of Around the World in 80 Books, published by Pelican Books in November 2021.

ART: Fifth Edition of Les Mille et Une Nuit (The Thousand and One Nights), Antoine Galland (1729).

IMAGE: 'Frontispiece and Title Page of Les Mille et Une Nuit'.

SOUNDS: Lobo Loco.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Dorothy Armstrong untangles British efforts to redefine colonial Indian culture, through a 19th century knotted pile carpet woven in Lahore Central Jail.

Produced with the low-cost labour of Indian prisoners, jail carpets were big business in the British Empire. Beyond physical coercion, imperial authorities also trapped India in their vision of 'authentic' oriental aesthetics, privileging Persian patterns and Parisian market demands over traditional Mughal methods. This particular carpet was one of a pair, purchased at the 1881 Punjab Exhibition for what would become the V&A Museum. Riding the history of both carpets - one surviving, and missing - into mass manufacture reveals how South Kensington intervened in the crafts of the colonised, centralising control and defining expectations both in India and at home, then and now.

PRESENTER: Dr. Dorothy Armstrong, May Beattie Visiting Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. She was previously a lecturer and tutor in Material Histories of Asia for the V&A/Royal College of Art History of Design Programme.

ART: Knotted Pile Carpet, Lahore Central Jail (c. 1880).

IMAGE: 'Carpet with woollen pile, palmette and leaf designs on a black ground with a red ground border, woven in Lahore Jail, c.1880'.

SOUNDS: V&A.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Jessica Albrecht busts the founding myths of 19th century Buddhist revivalism, through a Statue of Colonel Henry Steel Olcott at Fort Railway Station in Sri Lanka, the former British colony of Ceylon.

Known as the 'White Buddhist', US Colonel Henry Steel Olcott is celebrated for sparking Sri Lanka's Buddhist revival movement in 1880s. Golden statues scatter across the island in tribute to the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, the source of religious and educational reform and resistance to British colonial rule in Ceylon.

But these statues also pose complex post-colonial questions, like whether Olcott's book, The Buddhist Catechism, was anything but 'Protestant Buddhism', or his schools simply new institutions of external control. Instead of pulling Olcott down, his statues invite us to figure out those silenced in the archives, whether the non-white Buddhists of the Panadura Debate, or the women behind Ceylon's girls schools - without whom Olcott would not have the same standing today.

PRESENTER: Jessica Albrecht, PhD student at the University of Heidelberg and editor at EnGender Journal. She focusses on the colonial entanglements of feminism and religion.

ART: 'White Buddhist' Statue of Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Colombo (c. 1970s).

IMAGE: 'Statue of HSO in front of Main Railroad Station in Colombo, Sri Lanka'. 

SOUNDS: Kala Ketha.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Robert Larson replays the sounds of activism against apartheid and American neo-imperial hegemony, through Artists United Against Apartheid's 1985 song, Sun City.

Field recordings from South Africa's anti-segregation protests open Sun City, a single, album, and music video released in October 1985. Miles Davies, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Run DMC joined fifty Artists United Against Apartheid, a multicultural collective who boycotted performing in the racialised regime. Striking its Sun City casino complex, where capitalistic excess comingled alongside extreme poverty, these artists targeted the homeland seizures at apartheid's core. Their lyrics shine light on how apartheid accelerated British and Dutch colonial methods, and relied upon the United States' neo-imperial international hegemony. Yet Sun City's uniquely anti-West critique also speaks to American understandings of racial solidarity, questioning the role of Western musicians as political activists, fundraisers, and historians of Africa.

PRESENTER: Dr. Robert Larson, independent historian and knowledge producer. He received his PhD in history from the Ohio State University in 2019, specialising in the anti-apartheid movement.

ART: Sun City, Artists United Against Apartheid (1985),

IMAGE: 'Coretta Scott King, Little Steven, Julian Bond, and Vernell Johnson (Manhattan Records) at a press conference hosted by Mayor Andrew Young in Atlanta'. 

SOUNDS: Artists United Against Apartheid.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Juan Luis Burke reorders urban spaces in colonial Mesoamerica, through Cristóbal de Villalpando's 1695 painting, View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City.

The Plaza Mayor sits at the historical heart of the sprawling megalopolis of Mexico City. Previously the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, it became the Mesoamerican capital of the Spanish Empire in the 16th century. With his expansive, bird’s eye view, Cristóbal de Villalpando depicts everyday encounters between classes and clashes against the colonial urban order for the viceroyalty's eye. Now housed in England, this colonial commission shows the Plaza as a marketplace of imperial ideas, revealing co-option and cooperation between indigenous Mexicans, Asian merchants, and European and Spanish colonisers. Five hundred years after the fall of the ancient Aztec imperial capital, Tenochtitlán, the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City remains a site of protest today.

PRESENTER: Dr. Juan Luis Burke, Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the University of Maryland.

ART: View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, Cristóbal de Villalpando, (c.1695).

IMAGE: ‘View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City'.

SOUNDS: Victrola.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Deniz Karakaş follows the flows of water pipeline politics in the Ottoman Empire, through Mimar Sinan's 16th century Uzun Kemer Ottoman Aqueduct Bridge.

On the outskirts of Istanbul, the ruins of the Uzun Kemer Aqueduct symbolise the superhuman strength of modern Ottoman engineering. Yet, constructed on the foundations of old Constantinople, with methods drawn from the Roman and Byzantine Empires, these grand architectures really make visible the everyday actors of empire. Drawn from Serbia, Albania, Greece, and Armenia, the hired hands of suyolcu (water conduit experts) and lağımcı (diggers) were crucial in the transfer of knowledge, their skills often redirected for the imperial mines or military. Beyond the shallows, the pipeline politics of water supply reveals how power flowed within empires, exposing the Ottomans on - or under - the ground.

PRESENTER: Dr. Deniz Karakaş, visiting scholar in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University.

ART: Uzun Kemer Ottoman Aqueduct Bridge, Mimar Sinan (c. 1560s).

IMAGE: ‘The Aqueduct of Uzun Kemer near Belgrade Forest'.

SOUNDS: Daniel Birch.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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For the construction history of the Canal du Midi, see Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil sounds out stories of migration between post-colonial Kerala and the Arab Gulf from the 1960s, through S. A. Jameel's Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song).

'For the perusal of my most respected dear husband, your wife says with much love, assalaam'. Dubai Kathu Pattu is a letter song to a migrant labourer in the Arab Gulf, from his wife at home in India. By the late 1970s, 200,000 such migrants had left behind the post-colonial scarcities in Kerala, seeking cash from the crude oil industries of the Gulf. Jameel's ode obeys the strict formula of the Mappila tradition. Yet it speaks to Asia's 'cassette revolution', a time of transformation where tapes, telephones, and informal migrant networks challenged state-dominated cultural and gendered norms.

PRESENTER: Dr. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, assistant professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, India.

ART: Dubai Kathu Pattu (Dubai Letter Song), S. A. Jameel (1977).

IMAGE: ‘Keralan Migrant Listening to Tapes, 1980s'.

SOUNDS: S. Ambili.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Manuela Gressani checks out the Asian cultural and intellectual roots of gameplay, through an Indian Elephant Chess Piece from the late 17th to early 18th century.

Chaturanga was first played in 6th century India, a tabletop testing ground for court politicians' imperial tactics. Successive conquests carried the game across continents, leaving distinctly Persian and Chinese imprints, before arriving in Europe as chess. Adapted for local tastes and hierarchies, ivory was swapped with stone and jade, and elephants for bishops and castles. Still, shrunk down to the size of a tabletop board, the Indian Raja, the Persian Shah, the Chinese General, and the European King and Queen, all possessed the same agency as in their respective settings.

Picking up these pieces challenges our tendency to associate chess with western intellect and popularity, exposing the layers of European imperialist and orientalist bias that blur our understanding of Asian histories. Beyond a simple game, chessboards, pieces, and rules, are historically socially significant symbols, revealing the complexities of pre-modern global interactions outwith Europe - and the great debt we owe them.

You can also read Manuela's full article on the Indian Elephant Chess Piece in Things That Talk, a project exploring humanities through the life of objects.

PRESENTER: Manuela Gressani, History of Art MA graduate from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialises in the art of the Safavid Empire in the 15th and 16th century.

ART: Indian Elephant Chess Piece (c. 17th-18th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Chess Piece, Bishop'.

SOUNDS: Karpov not Kasparov.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Lou Roper explores the uncharted history of enslaved Africans in England's 17th century colonies, via Philip Lea and John Seller's A New Map of the Island of Barbados.

In 1686, Lea and Sellers meticulously mapped the tooth-shaped Caribbean island of Barbados, England's central and wealthiest colony. Great detail was given to ‘every parish, plantation, watermill, windmill, and cattlemill…with the name of the present possessor’. Yet they wholly excluded the island’s most important element - the population of enslaved people of African descent. Peeling back the layers of the New Map uncovers how England's early empire was a private enterprise, with contemporary echoes down to Conservative MP Richard Drax. It also reveals how England's colonies were interdependent and detached from metropolitan involvement by design - and why seemingly distinct, competitive empires often overlapped and fuelled each other.

PRESENTER: Dr. Lou Roper, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York. He is the co-General Editor of The Journal of Early American History.

ART: A New Map of the Island of Barbados, Philip Lea and John Seller (1686).

IMAGE: ‘A new map of the Island of Barbadoes'.

SOUNDS: Tuk Band.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Sonia Ocaña Ruiz illuminates New Spain at the continental crossroads of colonialism, Catholicism, and Japanese culture from the 16th century, through a Mexican Enconchado of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Mexico City was beating heart of the Spanish Empire in the 16th century, connecting the continents of Asia and the Americas. Exclusively produced in 'New Spain', mother-of-pearl paintings, or enconchados, embody the artistic and religious standards imposed by imperial Europe. But their shimmering façades also reveal how cross-continental flows of goods and peoples informed a uniquely New Spanish cultural identity - perhaps none more so than Japanese lacquers. Few enconchados still survive today. This vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe is a rare final testament to how Mexican and Asian artists received and resisted European cultural hegemony, and how colonial territories were often more cosmopolitan than their imperial cores.

PRESENTER: Dr. Sonia Ocaña Ruiz, professor of history at Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco. She is a member of Japón y España: Relaciones a Través del Arte.

ART: Mexican Enconchado of the Virgin of Guadalupe (c. 1700s).

IMAGE: ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe'.

SOUNDS: Manuel de Sumaya.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Patrícia Martins Marcos maps out Portugal’s designs for imperial civilisation in the 18th century, through Carlos Julião’s Four Ports Panorama.

From urban slaves to street peddlers, the Four Ports Panorama charts the diverse peoples of the Portuguese Empire on a universal path to civilisation, via clothing and Catholicism. Administrators and military men like Carlos Julião used the visual language of mapping to enforce assimilation within an exclusive Portuguese identity. But such maps reflect their makers’ selective sight, revealing how Portugal really occupied a precarious, peripheral position by the 1780s. The Four Ports Panorama exposes the faulty design at empire’s core - that abstract ambitions could only ever be concretised in violence and resistance.

PRESENTER: Patrícia Martins Marcos, doctoral candidate in History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, Visiting Scholar at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Associate Editor at the History of Anthropology Review. She specialises in the history of race, medicine, and visual culture in Portuguese colonialism.

ART: Four Ports Panorama, Carlos Julião (c. 1780s).

IMAGE: ‘Four Ports Panorama’.

SOUNDS: Stealing Orchestra and Rafael Dionísio.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Mallika Leuzinger pictures post-colonial Indian perspectives, through Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy’s European photographs published in the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1959 and 1960.

In 1959, the Indian twin sisters Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy embarked on a six month tour across London, Paris, and Geneva. Keen amateur photographers, and members of the transnational United Provinces Photographic Association, they arrived with their cameras slung over their saris, pointed to capture new places, people, and perceptions for audiences back home. Reversing the dynamics of colonial subjectivity, their street photographs reframed what it meant to photograph and be photographed for pre and post-independence India. But they also exposed the enduring connections of these metropoles and former colonies, revealing how class and colonialism determined domestic expectations of Europe, and left them surprised and disappointed by the realities they viewed through their lenses.

PRESENTER: Dr Mallika Leuzinger, Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University, and Visiting Researcher in Gender and Media Studies for the South Asian Region at Humboldt University, Berlin.

ART: European Photographs in the Illustrated Weekly of India, Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy (1959-1960).

IMAGE: ‘A Negro Orator in Hyde Park’, Manobina Roy (c. 1960).

SOUNDS: Les Cartes Postales Sonores.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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Dr. Talinn Grigor sets light to the interimperial identities in 19th century Parsi architecture, through the Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple, Bombay.

Building Bombay was at the forefront of the religious, philanthropic, and political agenda of the Parsis, India’s Persian Zoroastrian ethnoreligious minority. Thousands of buildings like the Vatcha Adaran were commissioned in the ‘Persian Revival’, as the Parsis portrayed themselves as heirs of the ancient Persian Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires. But wealthy patrons also drew from European Gothic Revivalism to solidify their privileged position in the contemporary British Raj. Both foundational and forward-facing, the Vatcha Adaran’s architectural ambivalence reflects the Parsis’ efforts to interpret these particular - often conflicting - interimperial identities.

PRESENTER: Dr. Talinn Grigor, Professor and Chair of the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis. She specialises in 19-20th century art and architectural histories of Iran and Parsi India, through the framework of post-colonial and critical theories. She is the author of The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture, published in July 2021.

ART: Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple, Bombay (1881).

IMAGE: ‘Bai Pirojbai Dadabhoy Maneckji Vatcha Agiary 1881’. 

SOUNDS: Pedram Khavarzamini.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Aleksandra Stamenkovic constructs the struggle to unify post-imperial South Slavic identities, through Josip Seissel’s Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937.

The collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the First World War birthed a new European state – the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. National pavilions at international exhibitions, or Expos, became vital platforms to project the state’s internal unity and external strength on the global stage. Yugoslavia’s prize-winning pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937 fused contemporary European and classical aesthetics, projecting a progressively modern culture steeped in diverse, Slavic histories. But it was also an identity-construction site, exposing elites’ struggle to create a new, unified, post-imperial identity.

PRESENTER: Dr. Aleksandra Stamenkovic, Belgrade-based art historian and independent researcher. She specialises in contemporary Serbian and European architectural history.

ART: Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo, Josip Seissel (1937).

IMAGE: ‘International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life, Yugoslavia Pavilion’. 

SOUNDS: Paniks.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Alison Miller depicts the domestic and feminine faces of 19th century Japanese imperialism, in Kobayashi Kiyochika’s Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital (in Hiroshima).

The public-facing imperial family was a modern invention to Meiji Japan (1868-1912). Paparazzid in popular woodblock prints, Empress Shōken appeared in battlefields and blossom groves, symbolising Japan’s shifting political landscape. But beyond propaganda, Illustration of the Empress hints at the interplay between printers, publishers, and popular markets, revealing how the public invested and participated in the national, imperial project. Challenging our masculine and overseas stereotypes, this print unveils how different Japanese women constructed the scaffolding of empire on the home front and with soft power.

PRESENTER: Dr. Alison J. Miller, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She specialises in modern and contemporary Japanese art history, with a focus on representations of gender, women, and the imperial family.

ART: Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital (in Hiroshima), Kobayashi Kiyochika (1895).

IMAGE: ‘Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital [in Hiroshima] (Yasen byōin gyōkō no zu)’.

SOUNDS: Difondo.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Retrospect Journal is joined by Audio Producer Jelena Sofronijevic to unpack their ongoing series, EMPIRE LINES.

EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way flows of Empires through art. From the radical anti-capitalist cartoons of 1920s Southern Africa, to Eastern-inspired azulejos in seventeenth-century Portugal, interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith ‘Empire’.

But what are the ideas underlying EMPIRE LINES? And how do you go about podcasting the past? In this live event, Jelena offers a behind-the-scenes look at the series, along with some of the podcast’s most prolific presenters.

Listening to Empire: Making Podcasts with Producer Jelena Sofronijevic was held and recorded on Thursday 8 April 2021. You can read the full interview on Retrospect Journal.

PRESENTER: Jamie Gemmell, Editor-In-Chief of Retrospect Journal, the University of Edinburgh’s student-led History, Classics, and Archaeology journal. You can find Retrospect on Twitter (@retrospecthca), Facebook and Instagram (@retrospectjournal).

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Historian Gérard Besson uncovers the colonial foundations of Caribbean cosmopolitanism, through the Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), in Trinidad.

Seven magnificent buildings, each unique in design and craftsmanship, overlook Trinidad’s annual Caribbean Carnival along the Queen’s Park Savannah. Amongst them, a Moorish-inspired Corsican manor, a Scottish castle, a New England country house, an Archbishop’s Romanesque palace, and a French colonial complex stand side-by-side. Designed by European architects in the final days of the Trinidad Raj, and built with local materials and labour, the Magnificent Seven were yet the shared spoils of the island’s new cocoa economy. Their extravagance visually reflects Trinidad as the most cosmopolitan – though undervoiced – experiment in British colonialism.

PRESENTER: Gérard Besson, Trinidad-based historian, fiction writer, and author of the ‘Caribbean History Archives’. He is the Chairman and Publisher of Paria Publishing Company Limited, which has produced over 160 titles on the history and culture of Trinidad and Tobago. He holds a Lifetime Achiever Heritage Preservation Award from the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago, and an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies.

ART: The Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), Trinidad (c. 1902-1910).

IMAGE: ‘Killarney (Stollmeyer’s Castle)’.

SOUNDS: Nick Barrett.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Glaire Anderson traces artistic and intellectual interpretations of sovereignty within Islam, through two 10th century bronzes bearing the inscription, al-mulk.

Bronzes bearing the Arabic word for sovereignty, al-mulk, were popular luxuries traded across the medieval Islamic territories. But these two objects - a large basin, and a small bowl – were both discovered far from home at opposite ends of Eurasia, in Inner Mongolia, and southern Spain. Remote yet related, they reveal how cultural hegemony wrestled with adaptation, religion with secularism, and tradition with modernity, exposing a period of transhemispheric modernisation.

PRESENTER: Dr. Glaire Anderson, senior lecturer in Islamic Art and founder of the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections at the University of Edinburgh.

ART: Two Islamic Bronzes with Al-Mulk Inscription (c. 10th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Metalware Bowl (probably High-Tin Bronze) with Al-Mulk Epigraphy’. 

SOUNDS: Sherita.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Art critic Laura Gascoigne portrays the connections between British colonial and cultural opportunism, through George Chinnery’s 1840s Self-Portrait, of the Artist in Macau.

George Chinnery (1774-1852) was no oil painting. Escaping piling debts and parental duties, he pursued lucrative portrait markets in India and on the China coast. The Bengali and Macanese landscapes tucked within his final self-portrait hint at his remarkably transnational tale. But beneath Chinnery’s mischievous surface lie the less picturesque realities - of opium, orientalism, and overt exploitation of local populations. As British colonialism offered opportunities to those couldn't make it at home, so too did it often depend on such adventurers and rejects for its very survival.

PRESENTER: Laura Gascoigne, art critic and commentator, and member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

ART: Self-Portrait of the Artist in Macau, George Chinnery (c. 1844).

IMAGE: ‘George Chinnery’.

SOUNDS: Albert Glasser.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Angus Lockyer detonates bids to define imperial Japan’s historical and artistic identities, through Niiro Chunosuke’s 1930s replica of the Kudara Kannon.

6000 miles from home, in the British Museum, stands one of two replicas of a Japanese national treasure. But most visitors pass her by, in search of samurai armour, elegant pottery, and woodblock prints. Though carved in Japan, the original and replicas of the Kudara Kannon tell us much about the archipelago's relationship with the Asian continent and the wider world. Used over the centuries to cement power and identity, the Kudara Kannon shows us how even the proudest empires depend on ideas from elsewhere.

PRESENTER: Dr. Angus Lockyer, Visiting Scholar in the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He formerly taught Japanese, East Asian, and global history at SOAS University of London (2004-2019), and was a Co-Investigator in the SOAS-British Museum research project, Late Hokusai: Thought, Technique, Society.

ART: Replica of the Kudara Kannon, Niiro Chunosuke (1931-1932).

IMAGE: ‘Replica of Bodhisattva Kudara Kwannon figure, made of painted wood’.

SOUNDS: Pauline Oliveros, Miya Masaoka.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Ben Reiss exposes Britain’s colonial gaze, contrasting Edward Atkinson Hornel’s photography and painting, Ceylonese Tea Pickers.

Edward Atkinson (E.A.) Hornel’s Ceylonese Tea Pickers boldly depicts Tamil women working in their ‘natural’ Sri Lankan landscape. But looking at the painting through the lens of Hornel’s original study photographs exposes the distance between the artist’s fantasies and reality. Stitching together different shots, subjects, and sitters, Ceylonese Tea Pickers reflects the colonial mindset of an artist working at the height of the British Empire, with networks across Australia, Glasgow, and numerous colonies.

PRESENTER: Ben Reiss, Morton Photography Project Curator at the National Trust for Scotland, and co-curator of E. A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas.

ART: Ceylonese Tea Pickers, Edward Atkinson Hornel (c. 1907).

IMAGE: ‘Ceylonese Tea Pickers’.

SOUNDS: Trills.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Read Jelena’s review of E.A. Hornel: From Camera to Canvas, showing at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh until 14 March 2021: edinburghmuseums.org.uk/stories/review-ea-hornel-camera-canvas

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Céline Ventura Teixeira shines light on the fusion of Eastern motifs and European iconography, in a set of azulejos – or decorative tiles - produced for a church altar in 17th century imperial Portugal.

Azulejos – or decorative tiles – were the crowning glory of Portugal’s church altars. Known as ‘ceramic carpets’, they borrowed motifs from Indo-Persian and Oriental textiles, which flooded Lisbon’s markets with the expansion of the Portuguese Empire. More than mere mimics, the Portuguese tile-makers reinterpreted these symbols in line with existing European religious traditions. From pagodas to the camellia Japonica, these tiles fuse Oriental ornaments and European iconography, revealing a global network of associations.

PRESENTER: Dr. Céline Ventura Teixeira, associate professor of Modern Art History at Aix-Marseille Université.

ART: Frontal of a Three-Section Altar, Carmelite Convent in the Coimbra Region (17th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Frontal of a Three-Section Altar’. 

SOUNDS: TRG Banks.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Paulina Banas unravels the purported Persian roots of 17th century Polish identities, through the Czartoryski Polonaise Carpet.

Imported from the Safavid Persian Empire, Polonaise carpets were highly prized across the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – so much so that they were often mistaken as Polish-made. But beyond symbols of wealth, these textiles served a particular purpose for the Polish upper-classes, who looked East to consolidate their domestic rule. Weaving together Persian patterns with a Polish coat of arms, the Czartoryski Carpet challenges theories of exotic consumption, exposing transimperial textiles and identities.

PRESENTER: Dr. Paulina Banas, post-doctoral fellow and faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

ART: The Czartoryski Polonaise Carpet (17th Century).

IMAGE: ‘The Czartoryski Carpet, 17th Century’.

SOUNDS: Metastaz.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Henry Dee uncovers the global footprint of radical black activism in 1920s South Africa, through the cartoons of James Christie Scott.

James Christie Scott’s cartoons illuminate black experiences of 1920s colonial capitalism. Commissioned by South Africa’s first major black trade union, his works subvert contemporary ideas of race, and imagine transformative moments of emancipation. ‘Scotty’ is best known today for his towering Black Samson mural. But arguably, his miniatures - his striking cartoons for the widely circulated The Workers’ Herald – had an even bigger global impact.

PRESENTER: Dr. Henry Dee, post-doctoral research fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State.

ART: Cartoons for The Workers’ Herald, James Christie Scott (1920s).

IMAGE: ‘When He Awakes’ in The Workers’ Herald (1926).

SOUNDS: Uhadi.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Akemi Luisa Herráez Vossbrink depicts relations between imperial Spain and the Americas, through Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings, The Tribes of Israel.

From Seville’s most acclaimed religious artist, Francisco de Zurbarán’s portrait series The Tribes of Israel (1640s) depicts the Old Testament patriarch Jacob and his twelve sons. The only such painting series to be found in Europe, de Zurbarán’s works inspired colonial reinterpretations in Peru and Mexico.  Produced in Spain, destined for Latin America, and currently housed in the north of England, The Tribes of Israel reflect global artistic exchanges and power dynamics.

PRESENTER: Akemi Luisa Herráez Vossbrink, doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, and Meadows Museum Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow.

ART: The Tribes of Israel (Jacob and his Twelve Sons), Francisco de Zurbarán (1640s).

IMAGE: ‘Joseph, from Jacob and His Twelve Sons’.

SOUNDS: Gnawledge.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Laura Fernández-González explores the circulation of visual trends between imperial Lisbon and India, through the design for the Bengali Colcha with Triumphal Arch of the Flemish.

Numerous Indian colchas, or wall hangings, were made for the orientalist markets of imperial Portugal. But this unique Bengali Colcha depicts a triumphal arch – the same temporary arch designed and erected in Lisbon by a foreign community of Flemish merchants, to welcome the Spanish king Philip II of Portugal (and III of Spain) into the capital in 1619. The mesmerizing architecture, figures, and flora depicted speak of several coeval artistic traditions, spaces, empires, and cultures.

PRESENTER: Dr. Laura Fernández-González, senior lecturer in Art/Architectural History and Theory at the University of Lincoln.

ART: Bengali Colcha with Triumphal Arch of the Flemish (Mid 17th Century).

IMAGE: ‘Indian, Bengal: Wall Hanging: Triumphal Arch, Mid 17th Century’.

SOUNDS: Sultan.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Alex Bremner navigates London as the powerhouse of British technological imperialism, by looking at Electra House.

Home to the Eastern Telegraph Company, London’s Electra House became the centre of Britain’s global telecommunications empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The regulated mesh of its architecture similarly ensnared global geographies, submitting it to the whims of commercial and imperial prerogative. Electra House persists as an important artefact of corporate and technological empire, and a stark precedent for contemporary geopolitical struggles over 5G broadband.

PRESENTER: Dr. Alex Bremner, professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh.

ART: Electra House, London (1902).

IMAGE: ‘Electra House’ in Electra House: The New Home of the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies (1902).

SOUNDS: Silicon Transmitter.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Emile Chabal navigates the contemporary echoes – and explosions – of French colonialism, through Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine.

Through the dangerous escapades of the young Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, La Haine explicitly depicts life in the French banlieue (‘suburbs’, or ‘projects’) - from aggressive altercations with the police and everyday racism, to social marginality and spatial exclusion. Kassovitz shows France as a damaged, post-colonial nation, unable to fulfil its promise of liberation and integration, echoing the fundamental contradiction at the heart of French colonialism.

PRESENTER: Dr. Emile Chabal, reader in History and former director of the Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History (2016-2020) at the University of Edinburgh.

ART: La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz (1995).

IMAGE: ‘La Haine (1995)’.

SOUNDS: Adrian Beentjes, David Cunliffe, Anthony Donovan, and Hopek Quirin.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Journalist Megan Kenyon explores imperial relations between Britain and Ireland, through George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 play, John Bull’s Other Island.

Ireland was England’s first colony, and the first colonial state to become independent from imperial rule. Yet, with its cutting depiction of Anglo-Irish relations, John Bull’s Other Island famously made the observing English King Edward VII break off the arm of his chair with laughter. George Bernard Shaw depicts Ireland on the precipice of its emergence from conventional British imperial rule, and glimpses at the new forms of commercial imperialism to come.

PRESENTER: Megan Kenyon, journalist.

ART: John Bull’s Other Island, George Bernard Shaw (1904).

IMAGE: ‘George Bernard Shaw’.

SOUNDS: Audio Library.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines

Dr. Peter Clericuzio observes complex imperial hierarchies between Mali and France, through the Great Mosque(s) of Djenné. 

Population 32,000, Djenné is a small city in Mali, itself one of Africa's less famous countries. Yet, the (third) Great Mosque of Djenné attracted international attention in the twentieth century, extolled as a symbol of the power and diversity of the global French Empire. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the architecture and complicated history of the Great Mosque(s) reveal the nuances of the French colonial enterprise during a stark transitional period. 

PRESENTER: Dr. Peter Clericuzio, professor of architectural history and heritage at the University of Edinburgh.

ART: The Great Mosque(s) of Djenné, Mali.

IMAGE: ‘The Great Mosque of Djenné’ in L’Illustration (1911).

SOUNDS: Andrew Oliver Kora Band.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES at: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines