Over the last few months, our library volunteers have been breaking the number one library rule – silence – and joining our curatorial trainee Chloe Austin for some quality conversations in the Stuart Hall Library.

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the library, now is the perfect chance to hear from our volunteers who know it best. Every few weeks a new volunteer will be sharing their favourite finds from the collection and discussing how the library supports their research interests.

Chatting in the Stacks

DRIFT

The More-Than-Human-Care Research Network expanded on the previous series Duties of Self-Care with artists looking deeper into the complexities of our relationship with ourselves, each other and the earth. Knowledge and affect are spun between humans and non-humans, resources flow and power is abused. We exist in relation to each other, ancestors, elements, spirits, computers, bacteria, planets and plants. Self-care necessitates collective care. More-than-Human Care challenges structural oppressions and enables us to understand our intersecting existences.

Research Network: More-Than-Human-Care | 2019-2020

Revolving around how artists attend to self-care in an economic climate of austerity and instability, this Research Network addressed tactics for reclaiming control and responsibility as a way of rejecting institutional exploitation, when financial, mental and physical precarity is the accepted state of being for artists.

Research Network: Duties of Self-Care | 2018-2019

The series broadly explores the thesis that contemporary art may produce the conditions for decolonisation, which relate to virtuality in the Deleuzian sense of an emergent potentiality.

Research Network: Virtualities | 2017-2018

Created by live loop artist Xana during a CPD workshop commissioned by Inspiring Futures, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham exploring emotional learning and responses to the Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. March 2021

Workshop Loop - Teachers Emotions by Xana for Inspiring Futures CPD

This piece is an example for teachers of sound poems created using a live loop app, following the workshop commissioned by Inspiring Futures, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham in March 2021. 

For more work by Xana: 
https://soundcloud.com/xa8na

Overtune by Xana

The DRIFT podcast is part of iniva’s postnational digital pavilion reflecting on the entanglement between land, water, movement and m/otherlands.

This first episode explores imagination and borderlessness, with questions like how do you unbuild a nation, who gets to imagine borderlessness and how multiple imaginaries of nations can coexist?

We’ll be weaving these questions alongside conversations and interviews from curators, artists, and creative practitioners invited by iniva, in order to explore, What is Nation?

This episode features contributions from (in order as they appear): 
Sonia Boyce 
Yuki Kihara
Catherine Chiang (Hyun Seo) 
Kirsty Flockhart  
Tsherin Sherpa 
Stan Douglas 
Zineb Sedira  

Hosted by: 
Tobi Alexandra Falade (Curatorial Trainee)
Kaitlene Koranteng (Archivist and Engagement Producer)
Beatriz Lobo (Curator)

Edited and mixed by: 
Lucia Scazzocchio

Also available to listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & more. See here.

DRIFT : Imagination and Borderlessness

Artist Sheela Gowda discusses her exhibition Therein & Besides at Rivington Place, including new commission with Iniva's Senior Curator Grant Watson. The artist is known for creating large-scale sculptural installations which take everyday materials as the starting point for works that combine abstract forms with references to society.

Sheela Gowda exhibited work at Rivington Place from 19 January until 12 March 2011.

Artist Sheela Gowda in Conversation

The DRIFT podcast is part of iniva’s postnational digital pavilion reflecting on the entanglement between land, water, movement and m/otherlands.

This second episode explores M/otherlands, and considers: what does it mean to belong to a diaspora? How can you create space for yourself in spaces where you are othered? and what does it mean to have the archipelagic as a part of your practice? 

We’ll be weaving these questions alongside conversations and interviews from curators, artists, and creative practitioners invited by iniva, in order to explore, What is Nation?

This episode features contributions from (in order as they first appear): 

Stan Douglas
Zineb Sedira  
Andrius Arutiunian
Sepake Angiama
Yuki Kihara
Lola Olufemi
Rahila Haque
Yang Li
Sonia Boyce

Produced by: 
Tobi Alexandra Falade (Curatorial Trainee)
Kaitlene Koranteng (Archivist and Engagement Producer)
Beatriz Lobo (Curator)

Many thanks to Anthony Badu and Chloe Tayli for their contributions to the production of this episode.

Edited and mixed by: 
Lucia Scazzocchio

www.iniva.org

DRIFT: M/otherlands

The DRIFT podcast is part of iniva’s postnational digital pavilion reflecting on the entanglement between land, water, movement and m/otherlands.

This third and final episode explores Migration & Movement, considering the relationship between movement of people and sound, and the role of sound in community building, particularly in the diaspora.

We’ll be weaving these questions alongside conversations and interviews from curators, artists, and creative practitioners invited by iniva, in order to explore, What is Nation?

This episode features contributions from (in order as they first appear): 
Yuki Kihara
Sonia Boyce
Rudy Loewe
Ana Victoria Bruno
Shenece Oretha
Meera Shakti Osbourne
Sepake Angiama 
Zineb Sedira
Stan Douglas

Produced by: 
Tobi Alexandra Falade (Curatorial Trainee)
Kaitlene Koranteng (Archivist and Engagement Producer)
Beatriz Lobo (Curator)

Edited and mixed by: 
Lucia Scazzocchio

You heard music and sounds from the works of Yuki Kihara, Sonia Boyce, Shenece Oretha, Zineb Sedira and Stan Douglas.

DRIFT Podcast Episode 3: Migration & Movement

A presentation at the Stuart Hall Library clothes, Cloth & Culture Group 24.07.2014 byDr Denise Noble - Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University
Crochet Doilies and Meanings of Caribbean Immigrant Women's ‘Domestic Work'
Dr.Denise Noble's presentation explores the layers of meaning woven into the intricate and colourful doilies handcrafted by Caribbean women immigrants to Britain in the 1950's and 60's and how they reveal the complex intersections and ambiguities of gender, race, class, nation and empire in the post-war politics of ‘women's work' in Britain. 
Dr Denise Noble was born and raised in London of Jamaican parents living for most of her childhood in Shoreditch in the East End. Since 2010 she has been an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University, following several years of teaching Sociology . Media and Cultural Studies at a number of London universities. Dr. Noble's research specialisms are:- the social history of race, gender and embodiment in the cultural politics of freedom in the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas; race and postcoloniality in Britain; diasporicity, transnationality and neoliberal cultural globalization.

SHL Denise Noble - Clothes Cloth And Culture Group 24 07 14

'Troubles Textiles' recordings of Dr. Karen Nickell talking about  her doctoral research 'Embroidery in the Expanded Field: Textile Narratives in Irish Art Post-1968’ with a response from Professor Catherine Harper at Stuart Hall Library, Iniva, 26 March 2015.
This talk explores textile practices and outcomes that responded to the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. The two speakers also discuss personal textile artefacts that they brought along to stimulate conversations with the audience

Karen Nickell Presentation

30 Apr 2015 Stuart Hall Library  Dr. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss. Althea McNish is a painter and textile designer. She came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s to study at the London College of Printing and the Royal College of Art.

Althea McNish And John Weiss - Q&A

Althea McNish And John Weiss - Clothes Cloth And Culture Group April 2015

Sound artists John Wynne, Ain Bailey, Chris Weaver talk about their practice and research which engages in different ways with identity, space, field recordings and representation. 

Sound Place And Identity - Chris Weaver

a discussion of the issues and experiences behind setting up pavilions for two previously unrepresented nations at the Venice Biennial. The first Roma Pavilion was established in 2007 and the first Seychelles Pavilion in 2015. What are the implications of participation in and recognition by an international art exhibition for national and cultural identity?

With Curator Timea Junghaus (via Skype) and artists Nitin Shroff, Léon Radegonde (via Skype), Daniel Baker and Delaine Le Bas.

Pavilions Track 1 Nitin Shroff & Leon Radegonde

Staurt Hall Library (Iniva) Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, 28 April 2016 . Artist Godfried Donkor in conversation with Dr Christine Checinska about his work and his sustained engagement with the social life and circulation of lace and textiles. 

In the 2012 film The Currency of Ntoma Godfried Donkor relates the personal story of his Ghanaian mother's collection of Dutch Wax prints (a fabric with its own complex history of migration and appropriation) and the individual significance each design holds. The title of the work alludes to the circulation of textiles as a commodity and how by forming these collections West African women assert degrees of financial and cultural independence.
Godfried Donkor is an internationally renowned artist who has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, the National Museum in Ghana, Tate Modern and at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal where he won the 'Prix de la Revelation'. He was born in 1964 in Kumasi Ghana, the son of a dressmaker and moved to the UK as a child. His studies have included an MA in African Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies and a BA in fine art practice at Central Saint Martins and post graduate studies at Escolla Massana in Barcelona

Godfried Donkor 1 - Christine Intro

History of Black Arts Magazine workshop - with rare magazines from the Stuart Hall Library collection (Iniva). With Library and Information Manager Nicholas Brown and artists David A. Bailey and Joy Gregory. Held at Rich Mix, London, 29 May 2016 as part of the DIY cultures event.

May 2016 Black Arts Magazines Workshop (DIY Cultures)

As the first event in Precarious Decades, a series of three in-conversations between artists and curators held in Iniva's Stuart Hall Library between January and April 2017, this talk between artist Rehana Zaman and curator Amanprit Sandhu considered the role of dissent in interrogating issues of race and gender. The talk explored strategies of disagreement enacted by artists and curators using the socio-political arts and cultural movements of the 70s and 80s as departure points. The problems of performing politics in public and the tensions of collaboration and group activity was also questioned during their conversation. 

Read more: http://www.iniva.org/events/2017/rehana_zaman_and_amanprit_sandhu#

@iniva_arts

Precarious Decades: Rehana Zaman in conversation with Amanprit Sandhu. Thursday 26 January 2017

This conversation between artist Ima-Abasi Okon and curator Hansi Momodu-Gordon was the second in Iniva's ‘Precarious Decades' series of talks, which examined strategies of hope and subversion through collaboration and allegiance. In doing so, we ask: what are the new terms of reference for curatorial and artistic practice framed by the experience of the diaspora?

Read more: http://www.iniva.org/events/2017/ima_abasi_okon_and_hansi_momodu_gordon

@iniva_arts

Precarious Decades:  Ima-Abasi Okon in conversation with Hansi Momodu-Gordon. Thursday 9 March 2017

Recording of artist Ting-Ting Cheng in conversation with Stephanie Moran, Iniva's Stuart Hall Library Manager on Thursday 15 June 2017.

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Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and Stuart Hall Foundation are delighted to announce the launch of On the Desert Island, an interactive audio site-specific work by artist Ting-Ting Cheng which will be presented in Iniva's Stuart Hall Library (1 June - 1 December 2017).

Offering a unique way to explore Iniva's remarkable collection, a new artwork by Ting-Ting Cheng On the Desert Island takes its cue from Professor Stuart Hall speaking to Sue Lawley on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in February 2000. On the long-running radio show, the presenter asks the guest to punctuate their conversation with eight records they would choose to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Ting-Ting Cheng, the first artist-in-residence in the Library, draws on the recording of Professor Stuart Hall's interview to create an interactive audio guide which imagines the Stuart Hall Library as islands with its bookshelves and contents as land mass to be negotiated. Using the library's categorisation system that places exhibition catalogues according to their geographical location, the artist's tour encourages the listener to wander between Great Britain and Jamaica as if they were part of an archipelago. On this physical journey they will follow Professor Stuart Hall's conversation about identity and diversity 17 years ago in the context of Britain today. Revisiting Professor Stuart Hall's commentary, On the Desert Island casts a curious light on today's political, social and cultural realities where issues of sovereignty and the rise of uncontained xenophobia are as prophetic as he imagined:

‘Britain is facing these two possibilities as alternative futures and I want the British to consciously move towards a more cosmopolitan idea of themselves.'

Launch: On The Desert Island | Ting-Ting Cheng in conversation with Stephanie Moran |  15 June 2017

Gary Zhexi Zhang discussing his new film and research around bio-cybernetics, with respondent Beryl Graham(New Media Art Professor and Curator).

Erotics of the Interface

Research Network: Erotics of the Interface  | 29 June 2017

Artist, writer and curator Sonya Dyer presents aPOCalypso. 

Afrofuturism has reached a functional and conceptual obsolescence, requiring the development of a new terminology to describe emergent speculative, futurist and technocultural Afro-diasporic aesthetics, from Europe and the Caribbean as well as the USA.

How do we begin to describe a Black future that encompasses a greater diversity of diasporic influence and reference, as a means of decolonising the future imaginary?

Virtualities

Research Network: aPOCalypso | 25 May 2017

Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo introduces Unmaterialised, an archive that explores ancient sound practices to blur the lines between fact and fiction, which will unravel the narratives that form today’s society.

Sitting on the crux of political-sciences (humanities), social-fiction (fiction) & Historical-futurism (time travel), Unmaterialised confronts the negotiated rational bubbles we as individuals construct, with an intention to place doubt as a means to instigate an investigation.

Coming from a culture of oral storytelling, Christopher Lutterodt Quarcoo invites audiences to discover connections between objects, individuals and belief systems. This presentation will not only bring to the fore historical inaccuracies embedded in global narratives, but also the psychology of the individuals that construct them. Through innovative archival practices, it will explore methods of shape and recount histories within politics, which will be explored in collaboration with The Advrsry.

Forces at Work Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo

Research Network: Forces At Work | 27 Jul 2017

Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky investigate bootleg and copy culture, the poetics of mistranslation and nonstandard languages. The 'Shanzai Lyric'  is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics, and the phenomenon of supra-sensical text that often appears on counterfeit (Shanzhai) clothing.

Research Network

Research Network: DREPM THE WOELD The Shanzai Lyric | 08 February 2018

The first Research Network event of the new programme, ‘Duties of Self Care’. Artist Ada Xiaoyu Hao presents recent work, bringing together themes of bodily trauma, othering, technologies and her experience as a diasporic student, through a performance-lecture. With respondent,  independent curator and writer Annie Jael Kwan, whose current research centres around Southeast Asian women artists, performance and archives.

The Mask of Sanity

Research Network: The Mask of Sanity | 20 March 2018

As part of the Duties of Self-Care public programme, we screened Rehana Zaman’s 'Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena' (2016) and 2 episodes of Oreet Ashery’s 'Revisiting Genesis' (2016), followed by a Q&A with session organiser Dr Maria Walsh.

Dr Maria Walsh’s research project looks at artists’ moving image works that use the ‘performative’ in relation to therapeutic discourses and rituals so as to avoid solving social and political problems. These works, while not offering ‘talking cures’, nonetheless show practices that mitigate toxic effects without covering over their traumatic toxicity.

Research Network: The Difference That Difference Makes | 25 October 2018

For the first event of our More-than-Human Care Research Network, Angela Chan/Worm presented research on communicating climate change through contemporary Chinese science fiction, how these changes disproportionately affect people of colour and the Global South, and her own work as a person of colour in the Global North addressing these issues, creatively, through Worm.

In response to Angela, writer, curator and artist Ama Josephine Budge discussed speculative climate fiction from a West African perspective, temporal dissonance, translating creoles and queering traditional mythologies.

Research Network: Speculative Climate Stories | 24 April 2019

As part of the More-than-Human Care public programme, artist and researcher Dr Luiza Prado presented a performance-lecture “The Weeds Became Long Graceful Grasses”, with writer and Sexual and Reproductive Health Doctor, Dr Annabel Sowemimo as respondent.

Image credit: ©Luiza Prado, Decolonising Contraception

Research Network: Long Graceful Grasses | 13 June 2019

During our final Research network event, as part of the Duties of Self-Care programme, artist Helen Benigson gave a performative presentation on her research project Tongue-Tie followed by a conversation with Professor Lisa Baraitser.

“Tongue Tie” explores research on the economies of mothers, bodies and pain, online and in real life with particular reference to breastfeeding trauma, tongue-tie, public breastfeeding and mastitis.
Helen’s research (written and visual) sets up a dichotomy between a pre-Internet generation of mothers and that of a highly mediated Post-Internet age of breastfeeding (m)others.

12:00-16:00 - the furtility dancer in the wet dry technology desert, 2015 (the accompanying visuals can be found on Helen Benigson’s website - https://www.helenbenigson.com/)

Research Network: Tongue-Tie | 06 March 2019

As part of the More-than-Human Care public programme, multi-disciplinary artist Ayesha Tan Jones presented “Optimystic Dystopia” a performative talk in conversation with artist and writer susan pui san lok.

Image credit: ©Ayesha Tan Jones

Research Network: Optimystic Dystopia | 08 October 2019

As part of the More-than-Human Care public programme, Ali Nobil Ahmad presented research into historic and contemporary filmmaking practices and ecological struggles in the global South, with curator/researcher and lecturer Dr. Nicole Wolf as respondent.

The first half of their conversation can be listened to here.

Image credit: Screenshot from Waseb [Nation] (2015), writer and director. Ali Nobil Ahmad

Research Network: Film and Political Ecology in the South | 23 October 2019

Episode 1 of Chatting in the Stacks features Cheraine Donalea Scott, library volunteer and doctoral candidate at New York University. 

Cheraine joins our host to discuss grime, punk and politics while delving into the library’s collection, reading excerpts from Syd Shelton’s, Rock Against Racism, Race Today magazine and more.

Find out more about the series and the texts discussed here: https://iniva.org/programme/projects/chatting-in-the-stacks/

Chatting in the Stacks with Cheraine Donalea Scott

In the second episode of Chatting in the Stacks our host Chloe Austin chats with Stephen Weller about Net Art.

They chat about the emergence of Net Art, networked culture, exhibiting and archiving Net Art as well as touching on the work of Mendi and Keith Obadike, Devin Kenny, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, E. Jane, Olia Lialina and even Jennifer Lopez.

Chatting in the Stacks with Stephen Weller

Episode 3 of Chatting in the Stacks features Curator, I-Ying Liu.

I-Ying joins our host to discuss her projects By Way of Returns, and Infiltrating the In Between. They touch on topics including transitional justice in Taiwan, deconstructing the idea of Chinese Art and alternative forms of curation while exploring I-Ying’s main research interests: migration, language and translation.

Find out more about the series and the texts discussed here: iniva.org/programme/projects/c…tting-in-the-stacks/

Chatting in the Stacks with I-Ying Liu

Episode 4 of Chatting in the Stacks featuring Kaya Birch-Skerritt.

Member of mother tongues (an interdisciplinary and research-led project which applies decolonial, feminist and queer theory to explorations of language and identity) Kaya joins Chloe to discuss zine culture, DIY movements, Kaya’s use of zines as source material for her degree in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

Find out more about the series and the texts discussed here: https://iniva.org/programme/projects/chatting-in-the-stacks/

Chatting in the Stacks with Kaya Birch-Skerritt

Episode 5 of Chatting in the Stacks featuring Rashi Rajguru

Artist Rashi Rajguru joins our host to discuss her work in the Stuart Hall Library which was split between working to improve access to the audiovisual collection by transcribing materials and researching for her new publication which takes the first ever image of a black hole, created by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration as its starting point.

Find out more about the series and the texts discussed here: https://iniva.org/programme/projects/chatting-in-the-stacks/

Chatting in the Stacks with Rashi Rajguru

Curator Xiaoyi Nie joins our host Chloe Austin to discuss her research, titled ‘Collective Marching As A Curatorial Method’, focusing on the curatorial project ‘Long March: A Walking Visual Display’ (2002). In the library she worked on compiling a bibliography of the curator Hou Hanru and transcribing some of Hanru’s recordings of interviews with Chinese artists which he made during his trip to China in 1994.

Chatting in the Stacks with Xiaoyi Nie

As part of the Global Re-visions public programme, curator Jessica Taylor presents a reading of artist Helen Cammock’s 2016 video work 'There’s A Hole in the Sky Part I' and invites Helen to respond to a series of questions posed within that reading.

Image credit: Helen Cammock, There’s A Hole in the Sky Part I (2016), film still.

Research Network: The World Met Here – Global Re-Visions of the Caribbean Landscape | 8 October 2020

Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) creates exhibitions, digital initiatives, publications, education projects and undertakes research which engage with new ideas and emerging debates in the contemporary visual arts and reflect the diversity of contemporary society.

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