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Living Archives

Living Archives

By: Stuart Hall Foundation & International Curators Forum
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Summary

What happens when two artists sit down together to talk? How might their conversations and artistic practices map a living archive of diasporic relations in Britain?

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists.

The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a 'living archive', the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present.

Copyright 2026 All rights reserved. Art Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Rebecca Bellantoni & Gail Lewis

    Rebecca Bellantoni & Gail Lewis
    Oct 11 2026
    In the final episode of Season Two of Living Archives, Rebecca Bellantoni and Gail Lewis exchange ideas on home and belonging, the legacy of black cultural and social movements in pre-2000s Britain, and the ways everyday life shapes their work. Conversation transcript available here. Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists. The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘living archive’, the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present. Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi Edited by Chris Browne Original designs by Yolande Mutale Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik Music by LOX ------------------- To Whom It May Concern. I was a London child. Making alters to concrete long before the green. Tethered. To foundations laid long before. Do you see? My alters glow, depth dark. Looking forward, Rebecca Bellantoni Bellantoni’s recent projects/performances/exhibitions include her solo show Day and heavy, Judah leaves at De La Warr pavilion (2024), Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y), Tate Britain, London (2023); La Position de l’Amour, CNAC Magasin, Grenoble (2023); In the house of my love, Brent Biennial, London (2022); Frieze Live London (2021). She has been a recipient of bursaries and awards from Fluxus Art Projects, Womxn of Colour Art Award (2022), and Jerwood Arts (2020). She was shortlisted for the 9th Max Mara Art Prize for Women(2023). In 2025, she will launch The Institute of C.R.Y Gail Lewis is Visiting Professor at Yale University and Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist having trained at the Tavistock Clinic. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She organises her thinking through the category ‘experience’ which she conceives as a vector of both the felt senses and an analytic in the production of meaning and knowing otherwise. She is currently writing a book on Black feminism in Britain and has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, and the psychosocial dynamics of racialised-gendered experience. Her publications include 'Black Arsenal: Potentiality of being and becoming' (2024) in Black Arsenal, eds. Clive Nwonka and Mathew Harle; 'Whose Movement Is It Anyway?: Intergenerationality and the Problem of Political Alliance', Radical Philosophy, 2-14, Spring; ‘Race, Gender and Social Welfare: encounters in a postcolonial society’ (2000), Polity Press; ‘Citizenship: personal lives and social policy’ (2004), ed. Polity Press; ‘Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others’ (2009) Studies in the Maternal;, vol.1 ‘Where Might I Find You’: Popular Music and the Internal Space of the Father’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2012); ‘In the Absence of Truth, At Least Not the Lie: travels towards self, other, relatedness’, BPS, Psychology of Women Section Review (Spring, 2012); ‘Questions of Presence’, (2017) Feminist Review, Issue 117; ‘Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use’ (2020) Feminist Review 126 (1). ‘Unsafe Travel: experiencing intersectionality and feminist displacements’ (2013) Signs: journal of women in culture and society. She works alongside artists and other creative practitioners to explore, disrupt and offer alternatives to the violent and violating representations of black and queer lives. She, along with Barby Asante, Foluke Taylor and others, recorded a reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay ‘Caribana: African Roots and Continuities’ for the podcast Dipsaus (first available to coincide with the on-line version of London’s annual Nottinghill Carnival in 2020). She also participated in NourbeSe Philips Zong! Global 2020. She believes that intergenerational conversations, as part of process of ancestral connection and guidance, are among the most urgent in these times. She is a season ticket holder for Arsenal soccer club. ------------------- Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund and Arts Council England.
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    1 hr
  • Ebun Sodipo & Ain Bailey

    Ebun Sodipo & Ain Bailey
    Oct 4 2026

    The second conversation of Living Archives Season Two invites Ebun Sodipo and Ain Bailey to consider the creative potential of archives and imagination within the current social and political landscape, collage and fragmentation in building meaning and art-making, and how sound and performance shape an audience’s experience.

    Conversation transcript available here.

    Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists.

    The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘living archive’, the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present.

    Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

    Edited by Chris Browne

    Original designs by Yolande Mutale

    Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

    Music by LOX

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    Ebun Sodipo makes work for black trans people of the future. Guided by black feminist study, with a methodology of collage and fabulation, her work locates and produces real and imaginable narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future. In doing this, Sodipo fills in historical gaps to create moments of archival pleasure for black trans people. This work takes place across multiple spaces: galleries, festivals, theater, digital, and print; in varied forms such as sound, performance, text, installation, video, and sculpture.

    Sodipo’s work has been shown, read, watched, and performed at Frieze London, Cubitt, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, SHOWStudio, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s ‘How To Sleep Faster,’ Auto Italia, Institute for Contemporary Arts, Tate Britain, Text zur Kunst, Bergen Kunsthall, Wasafiri, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, and Camden Arts Centre.

    Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops exploring identity, memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London. Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ programme for the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. Other recent commissions are the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: (Our Wedding)’ for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA; ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany and the installation ‘Four’ (2024) for FACT Liverpool’s ‘Resolution’ research project. She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Newer works for 2026 are ‘The Jamaica Project’ at Camden Arts Centre, London, UK and ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’ with Elaine Mitchener for Art On The Underground at Waterloo Station, London, UK.

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    Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund and Arts Council England.
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    1 hr
  • Niki Kohandel & Alia Syed

    Niki Kohandel & Alia Syed
    Sep 28 2026

    In the first episode of Living Archives Season Two, Niki Kohandel and Alia Syed reflect on the stories we inherit from our families and communities, the importance of bringing different histories into relation, and how cropping, translation and ambiguity can inform narration in film.

    Conversation transcript available here.

    Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists.

    The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘living archive’, the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present.

    Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

    Edited by Chris Browne

    Original designs by Yolande Mutale

    Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

    Music by LOX

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    Niki Kohandel (b. 2000, FR) is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator based in London. Her practice is nourished by intergenerational transmissions, Farsi oral traditions and engagement with broader sonic histories. She employs film, sound, printmaking and expanded drawing processes, working in collaboration with family members, friends and young people to re-write personal and collective mythologies.

    Her work has been presented in a solo exhibition at LUX Moving Image, London (2025) and in group shows at Dar Bellarj, Marrakech; Bow Arts (2026); Cubitt Gallery, London (2025); Metroland Studios, London (2024); Greatorex Street Gallery, London; Projet Casa, Tioh- tià:ke/Montreal (2023); The Toy Museum, London (2022); Octagon Gallery, London; Noorderlicht Photo, Groeningen; Gulf Photo Plus, Dubaï (2021); Lethaby Gallery, London (2019). She holds a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London.

    Alia Syed was born in Swansea, and works between London and Glasgow. For over 40 years, she has made experimental films that disrupt traditional narrative structures to create complex explorations of migration and colonialism, identity and place. Her work navigates geography, memory, and the fragmented nature of diasporic identity. Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world including, BBC Arts Online (currently), Tigers an Dragons: India and Wales in Britain, Glynn Vivian, Swansea (2025); CCA Glasgow (2025); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Courtisane Festival, Belgium (2019); WKV, Stuttgart (2019); Yale Centre for British Art (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012-13), 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); XV Sydney Biennale (2006); Hayward Gallery, London (2005); Tate Britain, London (2003); Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Scotland (2002); Iniva, London (2002); The New Art Gallery in Walsall (2002); and Tate Modern, London (2000). Syed’s films have also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi. She was nominated for the Film London Jarman Award in 2015 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2020. She is currently part of the Film London Jarman Award shortlist for 2026 and currently showing work in the Hayward touring exhibition Small Wonders: Reimagining British Art.

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    Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund and Arts Council England.
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    56 mins
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