What we have attempted to do here is offer a ‘Sector Snapshot’ that highlights the lived experience of artists from the Global Majority in the Yorkshire and Humber region.
It is never possible to be comprehensive. There is always a voice unheard, an important story still to emerge, an issue left unexplored, a critical angle not covered. This selection of talented creatives is as much about what is left out, who is not here, what is not spoken. However, we hope the work done here is a step towards somewhere better. YVAN will support the next step in every way we are able. Perhaps this will be a better understanding of the networked nature of artists’ practice, or a new connection, or helping to inspire the next generation of practitioners to set up and work together. Whatever it is, we hope that it will surprise and empower, and help readers to see Beyond the Obvious.
Our strategy here was to use a networking approach to focus a critical eye on the relationship between artists and the cultural and educational environment in the region. It is designed to highlight lived experience in the region through art practice and writing as well as address specific challenges that, at least in part, can be traced back to cultural and educational provision.
Practitioners Glynis Neslen, Yuen Fong Ling and Zanib Rasool, from the YVAN Research Working Group, have led on the project. They invited a selection of artists and writers to contribute based on the themes of heritage, social and cultural space, and education. They are also sharing their own work in Beyond the Obvious 2 . The publication forms part of YVAN’s ‘Beyond the Obvious’ programme for 2021/22, funded by Arts Council England in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University. It will include two new Dwell Time podcasts to accompany this publication.
The YVAN Team
Beyond the Obvious 2 is a collaboration between the artists and writersoftheregion,YVANandSheffieldHallamUniversity,designed by Azizah Raghib and with editorial support from Corridor8. YVAN is the Yorkshire and Humber Visual Arts Network
Terminal BBeyond the Obvious 2
When we want to go Beyond the Obvious, we try harder. Look out from, and around, what is right in front of us, and take an uncertain and sometimes challenging way forward.
What links the contributions in this publication are the experiences of people who came to the UK from other countries and cultures, deciding to make a new life. They didn’t know what encounters, opportunities and challenges lay ahead; which parts of their lives would be left behind, and which ideals, ambitions and possessions would carry forward. The courage to embrace uncertainty and challenge, with all its hopes and fears, began well before many contributors were born.
In JJ Chan’s cover image, the airport terminal becomes a waiting space for the possibilities of what can be, and what is left behind. Transition and dislocation come with a restlessness that never stills. In Chan’s accompanying text, speaking English (in a Yorkshire accent) develops a currency, asserting a sense of place and belonging that simultaneously holds a space for their own, and their parent’s voices.
Holding space for one’s self and others is essential to the practice of equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, as well as in the family. The making of this publication, part of Yorkshire Visual Art Network’s strategic programme ‘Beyond the Obvious’, began with the ambition for artists of colour to meet, share and connect with each other, and to challenge feelings of invisibility and isolation. The challenge of how to begin this process was shaped by discussions about what makes our personal relationships with families and communities strong. We reflected on the qualities that establish our sense of self and belonging, often through our shared social and cultural traditions and conventions, through our love, care, nurturing and support.
Accordingly, the artists, designers, poets and writers featured in this publication recognise and appreciate the importance in each others’ contributions. They form new conversations, associations and future speculations across artworks and art forms, and share in the lived experiences of being artists of colour living and working in the Yorkshire and Humber region. Often personal, sometimes confessional, this selection of perspectives attests to the diversity and complexity of expression and thought, points to the challenges faced in the arts and education sectors, and suggests how changes can be made.
Access to positive role models and connections with established creatives that have experienced similar barriers to practice are pivotal to realising a career in the arts. Peer-to-peer working can offer new insights and knowledge, and creates
informal networks of support, crucial to accessing the often impenetrable and exclusionary structures of organisations and institutions, and their networks. Guided and supported by another leading the way, each encounter is an opportunity to grow, and eventually take our own lead.
The process of bringing these stories together in one place, began as an extension to the lead artists, Yuen Fong Ling, Gylnis Nelsen and Zanib Rasool, exploring the role of education and research in the development of talent in the region, asking how is it nurtured, sustained, and able to thrive independently. Each lead artist, having had experience of educational settings, either as student, teacher, and/or researcher, developed a series of interconnected decolonising themes based on their artistic interests and activism including public art and space, memorial making, archives and museums, colonial histories, social engagement and ecology, and environment. Through these themes, they invited contributions from fellow peers to explore the dialogue between the perspectives of their own enquiries and how they drew parallels with others.
Although the selection here is an incomplete picture, a snapshot, it acts as a starting point to a process of looking harder and reaching further, beyond the obvious networks. It is also a fresh look at the Yorkshire and Humber region, and a growing urgency in the wake of Black Lives Matter to expose colonial histories, years of institutional racism hiding in plain sight, and the inequalities endemic to the UK arts sector. This publication acts as a spotlight on new or familiar faces, voices, stories and practices. It is a prompt to make a connection with someone; to act now and make a change for the future.
To truly understand this publication, imagine the meetings, the studio visits, the group trips, the creative interactions, and even the partying and celebration, of every physical body behind each story, that never happened (not quite yet!). Imagine the potential energy and atmosphere of a room that fizzes, the human connections, the creative sparks, the laughter and joy, when bringing together a diversity of knowledge and experience in one space.
The imagined space, here in your hands, is right now.
The lead artists, Yuen Fong Ling, Gylnis Nelsen, and Zanib Rasool wish to thank the YVAN team for their critical engagement and support, and in creating the circumstances to generate rich content and exciting opportunities that have become tangible and real. Special thanks to the Department of Art & Design at Sheffield Hallam University for providing insight and knowledge of the educational context for student development and change within the sector. Thank you to all the contributors — Yuen Fong Ling, JJ Chan, Ashley Holmes, Kedisha Coakley, Zanib Rasool, Sile Sibanda, Uzma Rani, Debjani Chatterjee, Shaheen Shah, Glynis Nelsen, Jade Montserrat, Gretchen Sandiford, Chinwe Russell, Janet Wallace, Alistair Gittens, Sunshine Wong, and graphic designer Azizah Raghib (mentored by Ashleigh Armitage, Dust Collective) — thank you for your creativity, openness, trust and generosity.
Yuen Fong Ling
‘Mo(nu)mentaries’ is a limited-edition postcard collection by Yuen Fong Ling, designed by Jon Cannon and commissioned for the exhibition Towards Memorial and Mo(nu)mentaries, 16 October 2021 to 22 January 2022.
These postcards bring together selected artworks and artefacts from Bury Art Museum’s permanent collection, Bury Archives, Sheffield City Archives and Local Studies Library, and artworks including ‘My Days with Edward Carpenter’, ‘Towards Memorial’ and ‘The Human Memorial’.
The postcards, to be used and worn in your shoes, develop a visual narrative across thousands of years, relating to feet, sandals, shoemaking, public gatherings, protest, the commissioning of public statues and monuments, and forms of memorial making. They ask: ‘What do you stand for and, importantly, when and where?’
Towards Memorial and Mo(nu)mentaries is supported by Arts Council England, Art Media Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, Making Ways (Sheffield Culture Consortium), Platform 2018, Freelands Foundation and Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre.
‘Mo(nu) mentaries’
From a very early age, I would encounter people’s perceptions and assumptions of me, before I was even aware I was culturally and racially different. Developing a career as an artist, I became accustomed to how my dual British and Chinese heritage played out in the art world, the artwork itself, and people’s expectations of the work I made. Artist Susan Pui-San Lok summed up this thinking as a ‘tactical ethno-nationality’, a type of identityas-method in constant revision, based on context, environment and political situation. This thinking has inspired me to extend my art practice to curating, researching and lecturing, and to think critically and strategically about the structural biases artists of colour encounter on a daily basis.
on public work
Recently, my awareness of omitted histories, racial inequality, intersectional identities and narratives has led me to draw upon my own personal and professional experiences as the basis for organisational and institutional change. Since 2020, there has been a “reset” in my art practice, a call to action, resulting in contributing as artist part of the Artist Working Group for the re-visioning of Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art (CFCCA), advisor to the Sheffield City Council’s Decolonising Street Names and Monuments Group, commissioner for Sheffield’s Race Equality Commission leading on the Culture Hearing, and commissioned artist for Social Art for Equality Diversity and Inclusion (SAFEDI). My involvement has hightened the urgency of strategic development and policy, through and led by artistic practice, and how there continues to be a representative lack of critical voices in these institutionalised spaces.
My aim is to highlight the historical imbalance of representation and opportunity for artists of colour, and to develop practical, innovative, creative and challenging ways to shape our collective futures.
Heavenly Completion
THE ARCHIVE
Archive Rules
1. Scan the cover of all the books and magazines that I own, professing not to have read each cover to cover but enough to get the essence.
2. Thumb, flick, potluck, read to — ways of getting to page seven, then scan.
3. Reflect, on the unexpected connections, conflictions and re-reading’s that occur, which is dependent on how you navigate the text and images.
What does your archive look like?
As a simple way to organise/ sequence/ structure the archive, seven was chosen.*
I was born on the seventh day, therefore I have carried it as a lucky number. Having a religious upbringing, it stuck with me that seven represents Heavenly Completion.
*The work continues with groups of 7 drawings sentence/ word from page 7 Index, titles and word/ sentences on drawings.
Ashley Holmes
Even Myself
Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub) is a reference to a line from the song ‘Bad to Worse’, released in 1978 by Burning Spear and is a continuation of Ashley Holmes’ current explorations into the language, sound, movement and foundations of Black musical tradition. An ode to his guiding voices — to ancestors, to the legacies of the Blues, of Reggae, Rocksteady and Dub — through experiments in space and sound. The performance combines installation, moving image and DJing, navigating disparate but connected geographies across the Black Atlantic through musical encounters with expressions or acknowledgements,of feelings of sorrow,aspiration,fear,hope,love,and dread.
knows that too
Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub), 2021
Performance at Frieze LIVE, commissioned by Languid Hands at Raven Row, London Image credit: photos by Deniz Guzel. Courtesy of Deniz Guzel / Frieze
undations
ofBlackmusicaltraditi
When I was eighteen, I moved out of my parents’ home in Doncaster. A lot of my friends did the same, and most of us didn’t move back. I meet others from Doncaster all the time, wherever I am and wherever I go, so it seems we weren’t the only ones to leave. Throughout its long history, Doncaster has been a place for passing through; a staging post, a rest stop on the way to somewhere else. The great roads and rails from city to city were built through it and today it is a hub of national distribution centres where millions of packaged goods arrive to await the rest of their journeys. I had always wondered how my parents had come to choose such a place as their home, a place to settle and a place to stay — a place many consider to be only halfway there, or halfway home.
Whenever I was asked where I had come from, ‘Doncaster’ was never an adequate enough answer from a child of Chinese migrants. I wasn’t sure if I was really being asked the right question and I had a stubborn reluctance to offer the desired answer to badly posed questions. This was a trait born of a kind of forced precociousness, the result of having to speak on behalf of my parents so often in shops and restaurants, to lawyers and doctors, whilst their English developed a few steps behind mine. My small voice had to carry theirs too. To be articulate in English, I realised, was the only way we might all be heard. The Yorkshire in my voice became more credible than even a passport. I learnt not how to speak properly, but only how to be heard. Later my voice would learn to shape-shift, adopting certain vocabulary and tones for different contexts.
where it is we might be going, but also to ask what and from where it is we are leaving; is there anything we might take with us?
‘What of Donny did I take with me?’, I asked myself.
The first invitation came from Sunshine Wong at Bloc Projects. Like my parents, she too had come to Yorkshire from Hong Kong. The invitation was to join Bloc as artist-in-residence, to think together on notions of critical care and arts organisational practices, to invent through praxis a better way to work together as artist and curator. When Covid-19 first emerged, Mark Rappolt, the editor of ArtReview Asia, wrote that ‘the devastating impact of Covid-19 makes art, and the communities that engage with it, more worthy of preservation than ever’ 1 . I responded some months later via an essay in another magazine, ArtAsiaPacific, by asking: ‘what’s worth preserving?’ 2 . I wasn’t sure what Mark wanted to save about contemporary art and the communities that engaged with it. Is the art world that we currently have really something we want to keep? What kind of art was he talking about, I wondered, and who comprised the communities that engaged with it? His statement seemed to separate those who did engage with art from those who didn’t, and left me wondering whether the people he had in mind really were the ones that needed support. As many talked about a return to ‘normal’, I wondered whether the normal is really where we want to be, if the normal is anything like what we had before. ‘As we start to rebuild our normalities’, I wrote, ‘we need to ask ourselves what our past normalities had neglected, what they had marginalised, and what we might bring with us into the newly emerging’. As we emerge from lockdown, what normalities are we going to accept?
I was surprised when my work brought me back to South Yorkshire. I was excited, nervous, delighted and unsure about what I would say or do, what place I might have as an artist at home. I had come back several times this year on invitations to establish new imaginations; to imagine
This is a question I have been asking all year and will continue to ask. Later invitations came from David Gilbert and Roger McKinley of the Yorkshire and Humber Visual Arts Network to imagine a ‘commons forum’ via a performance lecture at the Artists Journey Conference, hosted by Rose Butler; from Eelyn Lee to join Clare Devaney and Bipolar Abdul, Doncaster’s favourite drag queen, to imagine Doncaster as a ‘Parallel State’ 3 where
all citizens are equal through a speech later described by Duncan Whitley as an ‘essay-address’ 4; words later carried by Olivia Jones into Doncapolitan Magazine; and from Yuen Fong Ling and his brilliant students to imagine emergence via Paul B. Preciado’s notion of a parliament of vulnerable bodies 5 at Sheffield Hallam University. The essay-address became a new way to be heard. I have since essay-addressed at several other lecterns, on the picket line, in the classroom and in the bathroom mirror. An Instagram caption became an essay-address via the provocation of artist and local councillor for Adwick and Carcroft, Sarah Smizz, to save the community space of Brodworth Miners Welfare Hall 6 , which sits right across from my former primary school.
I’m sorry I didn’t come home sooner.
What you’ll find throughout the rest of this text are a few more questions, already spoken words, and new ruminations pulled from my visits home, for us to carry with us as we emerge. All of these questions are rhetorical and by the time they are not, we’ll need to come up with some new ones. Rhetorical questions do not demand answers, but aim to provoke reactions, we might, for example, ask: ‘Is this a joke?’ These kinds of questions are undeniably critical, demonstrative of critical engagement in the everyday. This text does not attempt to offer answers either, offering instead elaborations on questions already asked, thoughts at the stage of thinking, — a blueprint that is yet to be fixed, trying to run away from the certainty of the scorching sun.
I’ll start with these…
Is it normal for contemporary art to be exclusive? Is it normal for contemporary art to rely on inequality? Is it normal for contemporary art to be creative?
Contemporary art is open to the public again, we are told. Welcome, we are told.
But who is really welcome here; who feels welcome here? Is art as inviting as it claims to be? Can everyone take part, and take part to the same degree? Whose normal might we want to return to? Are we not tired of normal by now?
The art world is a set of relations of which we are a part, that Donny is a part of too. All of our worlds are formed of sets of relations of which we are a part, and what exists tomorrow we all help to construct in the present.
In the past two years, it has become clear to us that we experience ourselves not as isolated entities: our breath has become toxic to other bodies; our proximity a danger to strangers around us; our contact is sometimes unavoidable. We know that no one of us acts alone – our actions in the world don’t only affect ourselves. We know that others can easily implicate us and our actions implicate others, our words implicate others, our breathing and even our thinking implicate others.
Who do our thoughts affect?
Who do we think with? Who do we think for?
We have been implicated. ‘Breathe me in’, he said, ‘breathe me out, I don’t know if I can ever be without’ (these are words I nicked from a Harry Styles song 7).
As we emerge from lockdown, do we want to bring anything with us into the emerging world? What parts of ourselves should we keep hold of? I’m not sure my body is holding its shape. How many of the words leaving my body right now as silent whispers past my lips, and choreographed taps of my fingertips, will become words that form beneath a new tongue, as a dance upon another keyboard that speaks and dreams and shares, building worlds to come? What and whose questions will come from these questions I ask, here?
What are the parameters of these words? What logics define my speech? What systems organise the books from which I learn, the voices in my head? Can we blame our problems on our institutions? Somehow it’s not personal, is it? Institutions are larger than life, imagined and mystified. Where is the start? Who forms a part? Who is the institution? Through whom does the institution have its words, its rules, its systems, and what do they become in the realities of the everyday, what do they become?
A punch in the face, A pinch at the waist
A tear, A puddle
A bubble (are we in a bubble?) fake news bad news good news too
So mething’s on fire (I h ope it’s ok).
Can you see me? (c an you hear me?)
Can’t you see me?
CCTV PPE
Blueprints for the Otherwise Something new Something old Break out room
Feedback loop
I am always late to these things... 15
Do you believe in racism? Black square Yellow Ribbon Pride Flag Clap for the NHS. Put me on your insta story An inventory of info-graphics
Here I am trying to find my place, still in the meantime looking for myself. What does tomorrow look like? What does the emerging look like? What utterances today might be worlds tomorrow? What did England end up bringing home?
This is a critique, a moan, a whine, a whinge...
How can we transform critique, our words and our questions, into a praxis of optimism, action and change? How do we leave inequality out? How do we operate within structures that rely on it, without working for them?
Energy prices are rising; our teachers are striking; health workers are worried. Apparently, there’s a new must-watch TV series.
Will you step up, speak out, say no, let go, lift your friends up?
Speak up, speak now, speak soon, speak later
What does it mean to be emerging?
Could emerging be our method, is it a process? Is it to embody the work-in-progress, an ‘identity (or ontology if you will) as in-process’ as Annouchka Bayley suggests 8, an ontology of a being-in-practice, lingering at the rest stop, only halfway there, and halfway home, seeking a momentary glimpse of (absolute) contentedness in the face of aggression, that of a capitalist time 9, to undermine the now, to leap into tomorrow. We are all emerging and emerging together. Coemerging, co-creating, forming the relations that will support one another (or not)...
We might be co-creating relations that exclude, that support some and not others. We might be imagining our tomorrow as a time and space in which some people are absent from our spaces and places. Where will they instead be present? Why are they absent here? What is not in our forums and in our magazines; who is not in our news and our newsletters — missing from our conversations? What words are missing from our books; what imaginations are missing from our worlds? Who isn’t in our minds today, in our thinking, in our research, and how are they implicated?
The relations that will form the arts of tomorrow are ours to make. The quorum is ours to decide.
What will replace the future when the future goes away?
What will we imagine instead? What might come after, that will not mimic, replicate or recreate this practice of the colonial? Who should have control, agency, power? Who forms a part? Who is the institution?
Being late is also sometimes early.
The tear, the puddle, the bubble, the news. Leigh Ann Naidoo writes of the pain that the present causes, the pain that comes from ‘being forced back into the present world after a premonition of a different one; like a trap or a curse’. 10
The world is ticking, work is calling,
emails emails emails
The world is scared of the otherwise. Who’s gonna pay the bills?
What can artists do all day? Who’s time it anyway?
This normal won’t do.
We’ll have to talk about it next time... in new time. Let’s make time to ask these rhetorical questions, time to dream. Let’s take the time to dream?
Imagine a new time.
We are early.
Welcome home to Doncaster; somewhere having always been considered halfway there or halfway home; an identity (or ontology if you will) as in-process. Where do we wanna go from here, then? Where will Donny go from here, then?
1. Rappolt, M, ‘Can’t touch this’, ArtReview Asia 8:1 (2020), p9.
2. Chan, JJ, ‘The Year of the Rat [鼠年]’, ArtAsiaPacific 119 (2020): pp 28-29.
3. The Parallel State is a series of provocative events which collectively imagine a ‘breakaway state: a space to collectively imagine alternative solutions to life on earth free from the oppositional constraints of the failed states in which we live’. #ParallelState
5. Preciado, P. B., ‘Learning from the Virus’, Artforum, 58:9 (2020).
6. The Brodsworth Miners Welfare Hall is a Grade II listed community building that opened in 1924. The funds for the building were crowdfunded by the community. Right up into the 2010s my sister was still performing there with her troop (an internationally award-winning dance troop that charged their students £1 and trained them entirely in community centres and church halls), alongside boxers and a football team. The trustees announced their intention to sell the building for redevelopment and in October 2021 the building was listed for auction. The local community set up a crowd-funder to purchase the building but did not reach their financial target. Despite this, negotiations with local stakeholders in the days before the sale resulted in the pause of the sale, and the property was withdrawn from the auction. The sale of community-owned spaces is a penultimate gesture of the privatisation of social space, a shifting from public place ownership towards space as a private commodity. It displaces creativity embedded in community. It displaces dancers, and boxers, and artists. It joins an attack on creative and critical thinking, on imagination and innovation. It ends our stay in the halfway there, halfway home. Instead, some may never be there, and others will always feel at home. Creativity in our society is not equally accessible.
7. Harry Styles’ 2019 song about a joy so sweet he can imagine the taste interestingly shares its name with the American postmodern post-apocalyptic novel, In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (1968). The novel is set in the aftermath of the fall of civilisation, in a kind of Garden of Eden in a state of constant flux.
8. Bayley, A. C., ‘Elemental journeys: A domestic ice cube’s journey towards transformation’, Performance Research 18:6 (2014), pp 29–35.
Our ideas will matter worlds.
9. Chan, JJ, ed., Momentary Glimpses: An Anthology of Contentedness, London: Folium, 2019.
10. Naidoo, L. A., ‘The 15th annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture’, published in Mail & Guardian, 17 Aug 2016. mg.co.za
Dr. Barnardo’s Kid.
Grew up in Great Yarmouth.
Excelled in Art, but did Science.
I A WOMAN
T'NIA
My favourite piece of work as a statement as a book by Bell Hooks as a piece of work by the college student women getting up courage being brave reclaiming the streets wearing what we want and skilled in self defence and confidence Builders, mechanics and plumbers Artists, filmmakers and town planners DJs and Drivers
Women safe transport Community transport Positive images of women Being capable African, Asian, Chinese and Caucasian Pushing against poverty Thatcher and despair SUS Laws, beatings rape and murder
The black and brown people Criminalised, ganga psychosis Peckham Black Women’s Group sent in spies. To the Maudesley Hospital To find out.
Glynis Neslen
GOD & ME
Everywhere
I see Trees are being slain
It’s as surely that the rope is upon their necks
Squeezing the sap, so precious for life
Out of existence, quick as a knife slicing
Through Mother Nature’s strength
She flinches once more With the hatred of her powers of life and death
Can it be retribution for nature’s passive sins
That the mighty oak lays felled without limbs
A reminder of my forefathers and Foremothers too that swung, Lynched, persecuted for the colour of their skins
It hurts when I see this iceman made country
Living on the brink of Europe’s ecstasy
They’ll kill the planet of all life
But more than that, the precious, ancient knowledge of their kin.
We’ll all become machines or computer microchips
Mother nature and technology
Can’t live in harmony
If the people in power don’t respect spirituality
The souls of machines are a hollow place
Is that the destiny of the human race?
Every day I want to listen to the earth before she dies
Try to banish all pollution, not live any lies.
I feel drawn to the source of the great earth mother
Buried deep in unconsciousness
She comes from Africa
Where the lines of DNA from the female line
Flow back to very first woman in time
Eve she was called and she was black and proud
The bible never mentioned it but she was around
And when I look at the written word of the bible’s history
The great, bad deeds of men repeat to infinity
And Christian and Muslim men fight over what is truth and destiny
Rasta men travel to the seat of ancient Christendom
Ethiopia and holy grails to unravel those mystery dem God was only saying And she had trouble being heard
Mother Africa I go to the woods. Sit on the sand by the sea. Meditate. Try to get back to. Just. God and Me…
Emerging into consciousness
Right to the source of the great earth mother
Rhythms of Nigeria drawing me East
The Ebo vibes pulsate right through me
Try to banish all pollution, not live any lies.
Every day I want to listen to the earth before she dies
So it’s back to theology
But man would listen to none of it
That peace and love really was the word Nurturing the earth and practising ecology
2009-2022 HULL
In Hull I decided to get an allotment and learn to grow food and learn to compost and make soil.
While campaigning continues for less waste in our textiles, food, and energy consumption, as well as cleaning up the industrialised world’s negative impact on the rest of the planet, food growing programmes are a grounded way to combat poverty and improve wellbeing — looking after plants is meditative and focussing. At its heart community gardens are a way to bring communities together, purposefully, for healthy, fresh, plant-based food.
The Ital diet is reinvented as vegan.
Our intuitive knowledge displaced.
Little respect or concern for indigenous and sustainable methods of farming, fishing, or building and the cultural/spiritual knowledge of the universal interconnectedness of all things has been split asunder with the spiritual leadership of Imperial faiths which have condoned slavery and expounded inequality.
The increasing sterility of soil, contamination, pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity,droughts, and flooding are disproportionality affecting poorer and Black and Brown people’s lands.
In turn, this affects the ability for those who nurture and grow from the land to define their own destiny, and continues segregation, incarceration, indebtedness and economic migration as a form of modern slavery.
Production and consumption, fuelled by desire, manufactured by the media, shapes our lives to value the unnecessary. Encouraging us to be oblivious of the health of the Soil, minerals, plants, animals, marine life and trees of Earth and the interconnectedness of everything we consume which we deem as essentials for life.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES KNOW
Now the world cannot un-know and Black and Brown people are taking it into their own hands alongside their European counterparts to challenge to dream and create a new world.
Chinwe Russell
Papa and
The painting ‘PAPA and MAMMIE — THE GENERATION’ is a labour of love and longing. It was created in 2019 at a time when I was missing my family. I had not seen them for a long time due to Covid-19 and decided to recreate them on canvas. The painting depicts three generations from my parents at the heart of our family, to my siblings, our spouses and our children. The first version in this painting titled ‘Mammie — Story of a Life’; was exhibited and sold at the 2019 Royal Academy summer exhibition.
mammiethe
Generatio
House
I started life in Harrogate and my parents felt it best to send me to a prep school as I had fallen behind in my reading. I fi nally got sent to Ashville College in Harrogate. By 1979, I had completed a foundation course in Scarborough and was offered a place at Manchester Polytechnic studying sculpture. I worked as a photographer for four years before stopping to pursue a new career in teaching. I moved to London, teaching at Latymer School where I set up dark rooms, built pinhole cameras from old tins, and taught children about the history of photography. Working in such a multicultural environment was a joy and a revelation after my early life in North Yorkshire.
Latymer School had pottery facilities that I used to teach pottery to students. I got interested in Raku work and students responded well to the different techniques I brought to my teaching.
I started doing this Raku work after I was given an old gas-fired kiln and a collection of raw materials and started reading about the process. I made a pot 1 that broke in the glazing process and was then
reconstructed and re-fired multiple times. I was so pleased with it, I gave it to my parents. I even made a stand for displaying it from wood that it was fired in.
I used clay to build this large vase 2 which was inspired by Adinkra symbols and African pottery. I made it thick and carved into it. I used shoe polish to colour it. My mother used it in a Church event in Harrogate and kept it.
In London I worked across school key stages, taking sixth form students into primary schools. This led to a project building a willow sculpture in their grounds and working with Key Stage 1 pupils to make a garden from a piece of wasteland 3
‘Happy Dancing People’, inspired by African art, chalk pastel 4
When I left London I was keen to continue the fruitful and enthusiastic relationship I had with students from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds. I headed up to the North East to teach as Head of Art at Ferryhill Comprehensive. I went there as a confident
young Black art teacher. I very soon found this confidence eroded by the lack of understanding that people in this small ex-mining community had. Multicultural education was not considered to be necessary, appropriate or desirable in this white working class environment. I was subjected to blatant racism from both staff and students and eventually suffered a mental health crisis and was signed off as long-term sick with depression and anxiety.
‘The Frustrated Man Wanting To Be Let Out’, chalk pastels 1999 5
While still on sick leave I was asked to apply for a job in a Hull school covering the Head of Art’s maternity leave (Hymers Hull 2001). I found myself again in a multicultural environment with supportive staff and enthusiastic students. At the end of my temporary contract I was kept on as a part-time teacher. In my spare time I returned to working in ceramics. Recent work has involved making small pots from Earthenware clay using underglaze,
which decorates each pot individually with a series of different shapes and patterns, inspired by Aboriginal and African art 7. I cover the underglaze patterns with a transparent glaze which protects the painting underneath. As I continued to work, other small modifications began to emerge. I began to make lids. The lids got handles and the handles were of different shapes.
I have also made tea light burners from porcelain imprinted with Indian printing blocks 8
I have found that helping friends and neighbours to do pottery has been satisfying and rewarding. I now have three different ways of working; Earthenware, Raku and Naked Raku. I have recently taken a pottery class in Harrogate through East Riding Pottery. This has given me courage to work in porcelain. All the skills I have gained I am happy to share with young and old. From time to time I invite friends and neighbours to share the skills I have learnt.
Gretchen Sandiford
away
I grew up in a household of creative people, namely my parents and extended family. My interests stem from their rich nurturing stories, music and philosophies to life.
The majority of my elders migrated to Britain in the early 1950s from the Caribbean. Their African Caribbean diaspora influences shaped my perspective on life. Environment, culture, the clothes they wore, the foods they ate fascinated me. As a Black child growing up in a world that seemed very hostile their history and culture surrounded me like a warm protective coat. I loved their songs and stories of life back home.
Coming into formal art education later in life added immense value to my life. The other students were generally younger than me but their knowledge, skills and talents were breath-taking. I loved the energy at art college, and the creative environment empowered me in my own work. I was ready to listen, participate and learn. Each day of my art education brought a fresh adventure fi lled with fun, questions and learning. It gave me time and opportunities to follow my fi ne art specialism through African Caribbean history and cultures.
Woman humming the spiritual song ‘Steal Away’ while holding a palm branch in her hand. She thoughtfully ponders on a depth hard to imagine. The Fisk Jubilee Singers are an inspiration to this artwork as they sing Steal Away
Women
Nubian Woman 2, 2020, watercolour on paper
Later developed the work in digital art. I was attracted to this ancient stone relief carving of a Nubian woman from Sudan, African history of KUSH NUBIAN WOMEN. I loved the idea that this image could.
The Early Morning Catch 3, 2021, watercolour on paper and photography
A woman buying fish by the River Nile, in South Sudan. Her face is silhouetted by the morning sun shadows. I’m hoping to relate the vastness of this portion of the River Nile beach and the business of a woman buying fish for her family in this environment.
Bark and Basketry, 2021, watercolour painting
My painted version of a Reliquary Guardian Figure (Mbulu Ngulu) belongs to the Kota people of Gabon. The backdrop woven design is illustrating traditional cultural uses of local resources such as grasses and tree bark to create a container for ancestors’ bones. The bones would be surrounded by woven grasses. The Guardian figure carved out of wood was used as an identifying feature.
The Moorish Moor, 2021, watercolour painting on paper and photography
The Moorish Moor lowers his eyes from the sandy dust of his travels.
The Moors as a people contributed a significant part to world history. Throughdefinitions of their identity — comes the famous sentence, ‘ I am that I am.’
Pon De Water, 2021, Watercolour
I entitled this watercolor painting
‘Pon De Water’ because I love the African/Caribbean expression of this sentence. Furthermore, it captures the concept of what the work is presenting.
In a backdrop of sky and water, the central ancestor figure is being transported by water to faraway lands from its earlier existence.
Janet Wallace
Energy Dancing in Dreams 2021
The piece I share with you is that of light. The title is a testament to our future selves. If we allow ourselves to be in nature, for a sweet moment, we integrate ourselves back into the goodness of life.
To become magic once again. And it’s not so diffi cult to immerse ourselves back into nature, as it’s the nature that we understand. But nature does not only exist in trees, our DNA is bound with the same abundant life force that creates planets, supermoons, galaxies and gigantic stars. There is an essence here within us.
An animation in movement, the growing of new flowers…‘Energy Dancing in Dreams’ is where we go when we sleep. Where we go to understand and fi nd answers. It’s also the allowing and acceptance of our waking dreams to have the room to grow into original thought. For our dreams to turn into visions of a new day, a brighter future.
I want to leave behind a legacy of selfexploration, human connection and belief in the possible. We have so much to discover. We all want the same things, to live, love, laugh. Our abundant energy allows for the possible, the positive, for original thought. Our dreams are our vision, our blueprints to change. A legacy of belief in our future selves to rise in fantastic bursts of colour.
The suitcase of
memories
I remember that battered leather suitcase you kept under your bed for years and each time you opened it you felt a dagger go through your heart, but you carried your pain well, Mother.
A treasure trove of precious memories of home that you could never forget, nor did you want to forget.
You left behind your beloved family a lifetime ago, clinging on to this single suitcase for strength as you boarded that plane.
Once in a while, you would open the lonely old suitcase when you were feeling homesick, and everything got too much for you.
Inside were reminders of a home far away out of your reach which made you sigh, made you cry, and I cried with you, Mother.
You kept in there
A scarlet red scarf with fine gold laceedged around it that you wore to cover your beautiful face on your wedding day, Mother.
Bright multi-coloured glass bangles you said I could have when I was a bit older.
A passport that brought you to this land, which was to become home one day, but in your heart, you missed the old home.
The letters you kept in there that you received from your beloved parents.
Along with a black and white photograph of a mother and father you never saw again.
In the suitcase were six small brown clay pots that were decorated with delicate white and yellow flowers that your children broke one by one along with your heart.
A packet of henna powder which you would mix with water and decorate my hands every Eid until it was gone.
A plain green prayer mat which was your father’s and every time you took it out of the suitcase you cried uncontrollably.
30
Grandmother’s gold ring with a single ruby red stone which you could not bear to lose, you lovingly wrapped it in tissues and kept it in that old suitcase.
I could hear the yearning in your heart every time you opened the suitcase, dear Mother, my heart yearned with you.
I often wonder what happened to that old brown suitcase.
One day it was gone, as your memories of home faded slowly with the passing of time.
I never had the courage to ask about the suitcase in case it made you sad again, my dearest Mother.
My background is community development and I have worked in Rotherham for the last thirty years. I know what inequality feels like being from a minority community background and having to work harder to get to where I want to go. Diaspora communities are also resilient communities despite poverty and everyday racism. As a Muslim woman of Pakistan heritage, I find my own sense of place through art and poetry. I can challenge being the ‘Other’ and the injustice. I can create my own identity and agency to articulate who I am. It is important to me as a community artist from a diaspora community to find space in the mainstream for my work.
My recent collaboration with Shaheen Shah and Mariam Shah led to ‘the suitcase’, an intergenerational project about cultural transmission that tells our mothers’ stories, and their generation, through the perspective of daughters.
‘The suitcase’ was exhibited at Wentworth Woodhouse and Clifton Park Museum in Rotherham in 2021 and captures South Asian communities’ journeys through objects, narratives, and poetry. It is emotional work to tell the diaspora communities history, our stories so our children know where they come from and for the wider community to recognise our contribution to Britain.
and GaLLeries
On
There is a paradigm shift in recent years within the cultural sector (driven by postcolonial studies and museology) to decolonise heritage spaces and allow minority artists to exhibit their work in white spaces, without adequate payment and with the assumption that this ‘exposure’ and ‘experience’ is enough. Artists from diaspora communities cannot undo the harm caused by colonisation within the limitations of small, unpaid or underpaid commissions. It is frustrating that there is still racial inequality in the arts and heritage sectors, and that it continues to be difficult for artists to publicly showcase their work whilst earning a living. The language, context and content of commissioning practices continues to favour white artists in many cases. The experiences of artists of colour are essential to understanding the power relations between themselves and white heritage institutions, and the specific barriers that they have faced and continue to face. As Audre Lordes argues in her essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984; reprinted 2007, Crossing Press), the arts needs to dismantle its house by developing new systems and structures that are less oppressive.
The suitcase
The suitcase is an object that represents the migrant diaspora and the journey from one place to another. It carries the visual memories and nostalgia of first-generation women through the everyday objects they brought with them from Pakistan, serving as reminders of their old home as they navigated a new life in a different place. Through objects, diverse communities sustain and preserve their histories and traditions. An owner could open the suitcase during moments of intense loneliness and hold those beloved objects tightly, and for a short while return to an old familiar place — perhaps running barefoot in the sunny valleys of Kashmir, as if they were young and free again. The suitcase and its contents bring them closer to those who are not with them; it keeps the memories of their loved ones alive.
I remember the suitcase that my mother kept under her bed. Some evening she would go quietly upstairs while we children played downstairs and in those moments of homesickness, she would open her suitcase and sigh and often cry silently. I would go up and peek through the door, and then sit on top of the stairs feeling very sad. I now write about the suitcase some fifty years later when my mother’s memory has faded and she cannot remember what was in it. I remember my mother’s pain and the suitcase as if it was only yesterday, and become that child again who did not understand why her mother was so sad. Wherever in the world our feet travel, the suitcase comes with us, our journey never ends. The suitcase carries our hopes, dreams and aspirations, as my mother’s did when she came to England at the age of twenty.
The suitcase exhibition consisted of items the first generation of Pakistani women brought with them in their suitcases, such as the Quran, a prayer mat, glass bangles, wedding scarf, henna, photos of the family left behind, and practical objects like a rolling pin and Tawa for making chapatis. In the suitcase were kept letters from family members, and in moments of intense loneliness, the suitcase was opened to read the letters.
For myself and my collaborators, objects, poetry, oral stories and visual images bring to the forefront the hidden lives of our mothers’ generation and offer them a rightful place in history. We have a responsibility to find a place for their stories so our children know the sacrifices their grandmothers made for us.
(Zanib collective with Shaheen Shah and Mariam Shah)
Museums and art galleries are keepers of our collective history
They keep the fire of our history alive
Allowing us to be warmed by it, remember what our ancestors did. Learn from it
So it’s important that this fire holds a fuller flame of our history
Flames that are stories from all aspects of our society, All races and faiths that contributed the wood to burn the fire
Be interested in artists who come from different backgrounds
Give them the opportunity to tell their stories,
To tell their community’s history
Inspiring others like them to share their stories
To be proud to visit their local museums and art galleries because they see their history in the collective fire.
Museums and art Galleries are the history keepers. They are places that hold memories for a very long time — for generations to come. Encyclopaedias of old and new, they create a place where diversity and diverse histories can be shared, compared, and celebrated. Young people from diverse backgrounds are more likely to want to become artists and work at museums and art galleries if they see that other artists who look like them are there.
Artists can bring alternative voices to a community’s history, enriching perspectives for future generations. They can help the community understand difference, both in terms of what makes us unique and the similarities that unify us. Artists of colour can show what representation means to the community of colour, how they can relate to the art galleries and museums, and how to make them feel like they are welcome. Coproduced work between artists and local residents helps people to be together, feel together and work together, and can reduce discrimination and racism.
Museums and art Galleries are the history keepers.
Art is a good way to engage communities because it is visual and memorable and can make people return to a place again and again, to feel at home because they know that their stories are also told. Newcomers to an area will feel confident to get involved in museums and art galleries if they visit and see people of colour and art works that they can relate to. Children of future generations will feel a part of the community if they know their parents and grandparents felt welcome there and have work on display. It brings a sense of pride and inclusion.
There are historical imbalances of representation and opportunity for artists of colour. Here is a simple checklist for museums and galleries that begins to address these imbalances.
Ensure you are paying all artists at professional rates, reflective of stage of career and experience. Volunteer opportunities can exclude artists of colour and those from underprivileged backgrounds.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 34
Have a database of artists of colour who are willing to be contacted directly, and details of the type of artist and art you are looking for when sending out commissions. Encourage them to send it to other artists or people in the community that they know, to ensure a wide reach.
Provide feedback to unsuccessful applicants whenever possible and build this time into your organisational budgets. It can help the artist understand how they can evolve their practice so they can be successful next time.
Whenever possible, have a person of colour in the commissioning board, who can interpret the artwork or project being considered and how it might appeal to a wider audience.
Create opportunities for artists of colour to work together and learn from each other, to allow them to expand and strengthen their networks, and to spark new projects and ideas.
Splendour of the Sea’, Shaheen Shah, 2000 — 2001 Mixed media, pastels, wax, fi bres, procion dyes, salts
‘The
The images I am sharing are part of my Sea Life Collection series that I produced at University. The images were created using mixed media and vibrant colours — bright yellow, orange and blue. These images have become important decades later to remind me of the damage being caused by pollution to our rivers and seas and the destruction of our sea life. They were displayed at the University and I remember getting a merit for my work. Since then, the collection has been in my attic and has not seen daylight.
The Splendour of the Sea
All images by Shaheen Shah produced between 2000 — 2001 Mixed media, pastels, wax, fibres, procion dyes, salts
Shaheen Shah
DebjaniChatterjee
The Indian Museum in Kolkata’s historic Chowringhee neighbourhood was the first Western-style museum in India. My poem ‘The Madwoman by the Jadughar’ touches on its history, beginning life as it did during the British Raj: first as the Asiatic Society Museum, then the Imperial Museum, and finally the Indian Museum. But, in the country’s indigenous languages, it was always called Jadughar (‘House of Magic’) and Ajabghar (‘House of Strange Sights’) in popular language.
It was also the first museum experience that I remember. My maternal grandfather took my sister and I to see it. He had a rented flat in a very old building on Chowringhee Road. From the veranda faced one side of the monumentallooking Jadughar across the side road leading to Chowringhee Road. But, looking immediately downwards, I could see footpaths on either side of the road to Chowringhee. The tube-well on the pavement adjoining the Jadughar attracted all manner of people and I never grew bored of witnessing the daily tableaus played out there. The madwoman of Chowringhee was one of its staple sights.
On the subject of Museums
the madwoman by the jadughar
The madwoman chose her own space close to massive museum walls. Like the relics within, she too was on display. Interactive! She reeked, and barked at her viewers if they came near; she seemed to say: ‘this prime location is private property; gaze, but don’t trespass! It is my palace, so beware!’ Insanity is survival.
And within her neighbouring walls, a two-headed foetus floated in formaldehyde, an ugly carbuncle one sneaks a peek at. A reek as of stale vomit hung in the air around the object: travelling-freak-show escapee, displayed to greet the curious few, who wander in to avoid monsoon rain or hide from the day. Classical columns, solid door and high ceiling proclaimed it: first Asiatic Society Museum, next Imperial Museum, and now Indian Museum... New rulers have kept an inherited name. But all the while the brown natives called it Jadughar or ‘House of Magic’, Ajabghar or ‘House of Strange Sights’.
Was the madwoman a relic of the Raj? Was she a subject of Bharat Sirkar*? Her own space was the footpath in Chowringhee. She owns no place in History.
*Bharat Sarkar: Government of India
Museums have always been a magnet for me, and I have visited many in cities such as Cairo, Delhi, Lahore, London, Sheffield, Derby, Wakefield, Edinburgh and Glasgow. But they also give me a sense of unease, the sort of feeling that I would get when visiting traditional zoos and circuses. It is a fascination, coupled with the knowledge that in very many cases, the objects I am viewing should not be there — they have been removed from their original settings and those responsible were sometimes robbers, invaders and disrespectful heretics. Of course, in the case of British museums, many items were spoils of war and had been brought from all corners of the globe. Many were ‘gifted’ to the reigning monarch or to the invaders’ representatives.
The fabulous Kohinoor diamond, for instance, had been left by bequest by Maharaja Ranjit Singh to the ancient Jagannath temple in Puri. However, when the Sikh ruler, who was an ally of the British, died in 1849, the Punjab was annexed and his thirteen-year-old successor, Maharaja Daleep Singh, was forced to gift the diamond to Queen Victoria. It was added to the Crown Jewels and later worn by Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation. For Indians, the Kohinoor has great emotional and symbolic meaning; its place in the Crown Jewel collection represents Britain’s subjugation of India.
For all Indians who come to Britain, a visit to the Tower of London to view the Kohinoor is a must. When I took my mother, we joined a long queue of tourists, and when we finally reached the diamond a guard tried to hurry us along. My mother refused to budge, telling him, ‘That diamond is ours and you have had it for well over a century. So now I will stand here and look at it for as long as my heart desires!’. The guard looked taken aback, but he stopped trying to move us along. Successive Indian governments have asked Britain to do the honourable thing and return the Kohinoor, and successive British governments have resisted. In 2010, the then Prime Minister David Cameron was visiting India, and firmly refused to return the diamond. His justification was: ‘If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty. I am afraid to say, it is going to have to stay put’. He repeated this refusal on his next visit in 2013.
Cameron was right about one thing: Britain’s museums, galleries and historic buildings are full of treasures and relics belonging to countries all over the world. They are a blatant reminder of the legacy of colonialism in Britain’s heritage institutions. Part of that legacy is stereotyping. When a friendly sounding person from Sheffield Museums rang me about contributing a talk, I knew that I must write a poem about the experience…
animal
regalia
‘For the launch of our modest exhibition, we need an expert on animal regalia’, announced the enthusing gallery person. ‘Just a small audience, only local media — you volunteered to make a contribution — even ten minutes on animal regalia from you will sound authentic, gain attention, and spiced snacks can be ordered from the Light of Asia’, purred the telephone voice in expectation. I longed to plead a sudden total amnesia. Well, I work in community relations, so you think me a walking encyclopaedia on saris, surma, steel bands, circumcision, calypso, kosher, carnival bacchanalia, reggae, ragas, Rastas, race, revolution, multi-culturalese, sickle cell anaemia, equal opportunities, deportation, halal meat, Hinduism, hunger, third world hernia, visas, arranged marriages, immigration, ethnic monitoring and paraphernalia. I should be used now to this phenomenon, but confessed surprise at animal regalia and duly pleaded lack of all connection. ‘But elephants, horses, camels come from India, just like you!’ came the logical assumption. Well, so they do. I begin to get the idea!
[from I Was That Woman]
In another poem, ‘Meeting E M Forster’ [ibid], I question: ‘Cambridge! Not a museum?’ But actually the entire country can be said to be a museum! Numerous nations have petitioned Britain to return priceless objects that are important to their national psyche. The world knows of some of the more spectacular objects that the media has highlighted, such as the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles of Greece and the Benin Bronzes of Nigeria, and the fact that Britain has steadfastly refused to return them. But, in recent times, public support for such protests as Black Lives Matter and the toppling of statues of historic icons whom many now deem racists, has meant that Europe’s former colonial powers are rethinking their stance on many museum objects.
In 2021 Ethiopia received a collection of sacred objects that had been looted by British soldiers in the nineteenth century. The collection included a handwritten prayer book, jewellery, silver cups, a crown and a shield. Although Britain still possesses many more looted sacred objects, including slabs of stone and wood depicting the Ark of the Covenant, the Ethiopian ambassador to London welcomed the 38
very modest return as being of ‘enormous importance’. Many former colonies around the world are keenly watching the historic returns to Ethiopia, Nigeria and Benin.
Environmental lobbying has also become a powerful influence in recent years, and has enjoyed some success in pressing for museums to refuse sponsorship by multinational companies that support fossil fuel industries or are exploiters of tribal and indigenous communities in countries like India, Indonesia and Australia. Coverage by influential media platforms such as The Guardian and the BBC have supported some of this activity, although they are known for covering certain activist causes, even if only secondarily. The phenomenal rise of social media and online networking have also given them powerful backing.
Very many years after I first entered Kolkata’s Indian Museum or Jadughar, when I was writer-in-residence at Lord Curzon’s Kedleston Hall near Derby, I felt I had come full circle when I encountered another ‘Indian Museum’, this time within the stately home. In a long poem, ‘Curzon Holds...’, I described the motley collection of curios that Lord Curzon brought back from his time as Viceroy of India, and proudly displayed. His Indian Museum has been preserved to look just as it did in his lifetime, right down to an upside-down Quranic inscription!
You sit on the Maharaja of Benaras’s ivory sofa, A sheeshum wood screen unfolded behind you, and with your Lady you preside over a nightly durbar. The Chinese ceremonial staff behind the screen reads: Keep away...Make way for the Emperor, And all around are your collections of souvenirs and gifts From India, Nepal, Tibet, Burma and Bhutan, Egypt, Arabia, Turkey and Iran, Afghanistan, China, Korea and Japan.
It was a clutter you sought to collect, contain, catalogue –in your own way, on your own terms. Display cabinets flaunt talwars and daggers, a kukri with ebony handle, arrows, guns, Mughal helmet and chainmail armour, rhinoceros shield and a club with mother-of-pearl; conjuring images of Plassey and Kurukshetra, and so many wars with no lessons learnt.
[from Words Spit & Splinter]
Lord Curzon declared that if he could have, he would have carried away the Taj Mahal too! As it was, he had to be content with a tiny replica. Taking pride of place amongst his objects was the magnificent Peacock Dress worn by Lady Curzon at the Coronation Durbar in 1903. In ‘The Peacock Dress’ I describe it thus:
Each encrusted diamond reflects Lords and ladies, rajas, maharajas and nawabs, Business tycoons, soldiers of fortune And all who prop up the Raj. Each gold thread glitters with the sweat And skill of nameless Indian men.
[from Do You Hear the Storm Sing?]
Eduardo Paolozzi’s Magic Kingdoms exhibition toured several museums in 1988, and I viewed it in both Liverpool and Sheffield. It was an exhibition that fascinated and disturbed in equal measure. I quote from the middle section of my poem, ‘Paolozzi’s Magic Kingdom’:
Nothing lives or dies in this kingdom, but is metamorphosed, cannibalised. The accoutrements of cultures, centuries and fetishes press down, stratified with mud and humour, a lick of paint, a flick of glitter, history pitfalled with follies, sermons of silly profundities, white man’s burden, black man’s inheritance of this kingdom of magic and waste recorded on camera, displayed, entered in a little black notebook...
[from Namaskar: New and Selected Poems]
Many British museums and galleries have so many treasures from the past that they cannot all be exhibited at one time. Occasionally some objects are brought out from storage and shown to the public for a while. In 2012 Weston Park Museum in Sheffield did just this in the shape of the Precious Cargoes exhibition, and for a few months there were relics originating from India and other lands on display, some of which had not been seen for very many years. The museum commissioned me to write a poem inspired by one of the exhibits. I chose an Indian painting of an idyllic rural scene to write ‘My Village’. The poem’s narrator is a village maid for whom ‘life meanders on as always/ with its everyday chores’, but lurking just outside the picture’s frame are ominous hints of
feringees (‘foreigners’) whose coming will shatter the peace and harmony:
Portuguese pirates fled this land, they say. Hurray! But who now will haunt lullabies that frighten children in the dark?
Fazlul the fisherman returns from town with tales of uniformed sepoys drilling with muskets ready, marching beneath a red sky.
Feringees pass through — life goes on. They warn that cannons boom in distant Kolkata.
[from Do You Hear the Storm Sing?]
I have greatly enjoyed my interactions with galleries and museums. Writing residencies, especially at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Gallery, London’s Barbican Centre and Sheffield’s Millennium Galleries were wonderfully stimulating. When the Millennium Galleries purchased the Bill Brown Collection of Historic Cutlery in 2004, I was glad to be able to contribute in a small way to opening up what was very much a Eurocentric collection to the possibility of connections with empire (ivory-handled cutlery was an obvious link to elephants from India and Africa), and to introduce a South Asian dimension by drawing attention to traditional and contemporary kitchen cutlery from the Indian subcontinent. This was done mainly through the production of a bilingual illustrated anthology of creative writing and artwork, focussing on South Yorkshire’s South Asian women’s experiences with cutlery. In an introduction, my co-editor Rashida Islam and I wrote:
Wonderful as the exhibits in the Millennium Galleries are, the cutlery is entirely European. But in pieces like ‘Essential Cutlery’ and ‘A Sister’s Gift’, this book enables us to celebrate uniquely South Asian cutlery items like botis or Bengali kitchen knives, narkel kurnis or coconut scrapers, and jaatis or betel nut cutters. While we wished our book to be in some sense a tribute to the proud heritage of our adopted home, we wished also to record our other legacy with its own South Asian implements and no-nonsense take on table cutlery — to share this part of our culture with others and to transmit our now dual heritage to our next generation...As ‘East and West’ points out, an English teaspoon and an Indian chamchee should complement one another!
[from A Slice of Sheffield ed. Debjani Chatterjee & Rashida Islam]
The time is long overdue for museums and galleries to acknowledge their colonial legacies, and firmly abandon any outdated and passive position they may have inherited. Instead of being treasure houses supported by, and representative of, dominant culture, museums can and should epitomise an essential multicultural world; a society founded on true international cooperation and mutual respect — ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ should be their revolutionary motto. The English teaspoon and the Indian chamchee symbolise for me what the museum of the future needs to exhibit: an ethical, transparent and genuine partnership for the greater good of all.
Blooming II
A visual interpretation of colour and flowers (peonies) in an abstract form. Vibrant colours to infuse a sense of nostalgia that nature creates. A reflection of how nature changes and is seen differently through everyone’s eyes. We can see the same thing yet we see everything differently. I try to capture nature in my art because I see it as an integral part of our everyday life and something we take for granted.
Top Left to Bottom Right:
Uzma’s Writing December 2020
Uzma’s Writing February 2021
Sabr (Patience) Artwork June 2021
Palestine Artwork June 2021
Silhouette Artwork July 2021
Uzma’s writing July 2021
Arabic Calligraphy Workshop, Clifton Park Museum August 2021
Islamic Patterns & Calligraphy Workshop, Clifton Park Museum August 2021
Art Exhibition, Festival in the Square, Sheffield August 2021
Arabic Calligraphy One to One Workshop — September 2021
Floating Floral November 2021
Art Mindfulness Workshop with Children, Barnsley— December 2021
Uzma
Spilling over and
Too much
Hello, reader. You have arrived at this point of the publication having read all the stories and seen the artworks. Or maybe you haven’t, and you are skipping to these final words in hopes of a little hand-holding, a summary to give you a way in as the book makes its way out. Writing the outgoing text for this project has been an uncomfortable task, because I can tell you this: the stories you’re cradling keep spilling beyond the pages. There is so much more to what you’re reading. You might not know it, but your hands are full and I’m not sure I make the best guide.
I had an inkling of this overwhelm even before I sat down with the publication, knowing in my head and bones that the intersectionalities represented in this slim volume would, in fact, merely hint at the kinds of (joyful, painful, intense) crashes we’ve all had in our lives. By ‘we’, I mean the contributors of the book, to be clear: ‘artists (and other art workers) of colour’. Or so we are called. When legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in 1991, she took pains to remind us that the collision of social categories such as race, class, gender and countless others make different realities. What I think gets underestimated now, as the term is revived in current political and cultural discourses, is how intersectional experiences show up in our bodies and worldmaking endeavours. Hence the aforementioned ‘crashes’, because for sure, that’s what ‘intersections’ feel like: things hitting us, coming at us from every which way. And us then hitting back, heightening defences, finding safety.
Bringing to bear the lived impact of intersectionality is to stay sober to the narratives in Beyond The Obvious 2, for they are but a few, small offerings amongst many. Too many. Let’s remind ourselves: we have been asked to submit something about our practice towards a ‘Sector Snapshot’ of Yorkshire because we are ‘artists’ and ‘people of colour’; these are the categories we have been assigned. The desire to
and things left
better integrate notions and practices of decolonisation, both in art and education sectors — this project being a partnership between Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) and Yorkshire and Humber Visual Art Network (YVAN) — has led to a more concerted effort to foreground the experiences of people marginalised by racism.
Perhaps this is why my main impression of the publication is that it is spilling over, that it elicits more questions than it answers. Regarding what it takes for us to navigate the UK art and education sectors, we have only scratched the surface. There just isn’t the space in the invitation, in this book or in a ‘snapshot’ to properly contend with the ways ‘artists of colour’ cope and flourish. But the spilling over is also connected to the limits of sharing: what do I want to share, with whom and how much? Will it actually change anything?
There is an assumption here about our willingness to share. Particularly when it comes to personal experience, each of us have our own limits. They are idiosyncratic, honed over the years by various degrees of hazing and support, personality erosion and nurture, and negotiating rules that apply to some but not to others. With the recent sharpening of political sensitivity came a correlating rise in ‘performative nonperformativity’ (Sara Ahmed, 2006), whereby repeated claims of allyship or anti-racism only serve to mask an institution’s — or a colleague’s, a friend’s — neglect of these in practice. Looking more closely at the questions posed by Beyond the Obvious 2, including how to address ‘the imbalance of representation’ or what ‘diverse artists’ can bring to heritage sites, they suggest that ‘artists of colour’ are being consulted for a future course of ameliorative action. The insight collated within this publication is the project’s first step, namely a scene-setting exercise that, as SHU and YVAN say, comprises ‘snapshots’ of a few complex issues that the (mainly White) sectors want to understand.
But I have to admit that this work doesn’t sit easily with me. The playing field has already been defined (art, education, heritage) and so have the problems
unsaid
(more ‘opportunities’ and ‘rewards’ for ‘diaspora artists’; ‘respect and compensation’ for ‘indigenous skills’). Have the commissioners of this project paused to think that the parameters may be part of the problem? That the process of decolonisation, if really left to ‘artists of colour’, would likely look otherwise: less remedial, more liberatory? What if, by delineating who we are (diaspora, people of colour, whatever — not White British, basically) and how we work (in visual art), they fundamentally undermine how far we can go? What we can achieve? Even as I write, I can sense the ‘we’ in the last two questions shifting, reaching beyond the contributors of this publication and evidencing a hope of a wider collective. ‘We’, as in all of us.
I hope it is clear that I am being critical not in order to cast doubt on Beyond the Obvious 2 as an initiative — in fact, I look forward to seeing where it goes — but to walk you, the reader, through my own reflections, to take stock of the collected stories and practices and the worlds just outside of them. I will now, indeed, hold your hand for the remainder of this text and show the ambivalence, the push-pull of spilling, (not) sharing and learned scepticism that I sense in my peers (and myself). I’ve chosen four moments out of this publication to discuss in greater detail. To help us critically feel and think through the observations, I’ve chosen to use ‘a line’ as an analogy in each case–drawing and crossing one, reading between many.
Alastair Gittens sums up a past teaching experience: ‘Multicultural education was not considered to be necessary, appropriate or desirable in this White working class environment’. He says that as a young, Black art teacher, he suffered from blatant racism and had ‘a mental health crisis’. Upon moving to a different school, he fortunately found himself in a multicultural environment with supportive staff and enthusiastic students. He does not elaborate, not on the racism, or on how he dealt with his mental health, or what he meant by ‘a multicultural environment’. What is left unsaid? Arguably not much more, but also so much more. Gittens is drawing a line there.
In ‘The Suitcase of Memories’ (2021), a story co-written by Zanib Rasool, Shaheen Shah and Mariam Shah, a mother keeps a brown suitcase under her bed. Told from the perspective of the daughter, she lists, almost inventory-like, some of the objects within it and anchors each one in meaning: ‘[b]right multi-coloured glass bangles you said I could have when I was a bit older’; ‘a black and white photograph of a mother and father you never saw again’; and ‘[o]ne day (the suitcase) was gone’. The narrator laments that she ‘never had the courage to ask’ for its whereabouts. I would conjecture that what stops her is not for want of courage, but an inherited diasporic longing: a grief that never lets up, always spilling over, unshareable. She understands that the loss cannot be hers to know. That is the mother’s line and therefore the narrator’s.
Faced with the question ‘where are you from?’, JJ Chan always answers ‘Doncaster’ and has been doing so from a very young age. And, they surmise, much to their inquirers’ chagrin. Even as a child, Chan could sniff out the darker undertones, the chief presumption being: ‘you are not British, you can’t be’. As lines go, this is a relatively polite one; Chan still gives a reply, though a (frustratingly) evasive one. You may choose to retreat, however, by accepting the answer and moving on. Yet you could also persist and cross the line: ‘No, where are you really from?’ This is how you leave a mark on us. That’s another thing about lines: you also need to read between them.
Chinwe Russell calls her work ‘PAPA and MAMMIE — THE GENERATION’ (2019)’, made at a time when she could not see her family, ‘a labour of love and longing.’ She is brief in her description, which consists exactly of one paragraph that introduces the people you see in the painting: ‘three generations,’ including my parents, my siblings, our spouses and our children’. In this case, the spillover of her story looks exuberant. There is festivity, found in the tender depictions of her kin, their bright clothes and the artist’s selection of playful memories, all of which consciously celebrate her ‘love and longing’.
The folk lineage of Russell’s painting style, the bold use of colours and the iconography ascribed to each household serve to fabulise her family, turning them into something so big and fantastic that they are no longer hers to own. Then I notice the disembodied hands winding between the bodies, reaching but failing to touch, at which point I feel her loss hiding in plain sight. Here, the line is physically drawn — painted — onto the work, meandering between the families: a thin black one adorned with white dots, separating them like regions on a map, betraying Russell’s much longed-for togetherness.
I keep circling ‘artists of colour’ and feeling its resonance as I write this text. Who we are, really, are legacies of British capitalist and colonial expansion. We embody different histories that are not properly acknowledged in the UK. I understand the utility of the term and how it enables a coalescing of efforts against racism. At the same time, I can’t help but feel how sweeping it is and how it may be a better use of our time to foster a more rigorous attunement to our emotions and a keener sensitivity to difference. I’d like to see more of a collective effort put towards the developing of patience and humility, just to take two examples, as they are both crucial to social organising. For all the attention given to ‘lived experience’ in different art, education and activist spaces, we should equally put towards practical, perpetually under-construction toolkits to learn how to live or talk with people you don’t ‘get’. But I digress: this should be a conclusion. The points of view collected here are a glimpse into some of our experiences as ‘artists of colour’ which, as you close this publication, I hope will mark you (back). I wish we could tell you more, but we can’t, or we won’t, and these pages aren’t the right place. Maybe if we ever meet and the moment’s right.
Contributors
Yuen Fong Ling is an artist, curator, researcher and lecturer based in Sheffield. His art practice explores intersectional identities, omitted histories and, more recently, alternative forms of public memorial responding to the removal of colonial statues and monuments. Recent projects include ‘Towards Memorial’ (2019 — ongoing), shown at Persistence Works, Sheffield (as part of Site Gallery’s Platform 2019), the Freelands Foundation (London, June 2021) and Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre (October 2021 — January 2022), including the representation of the permanent collections through themes of feet, footwear, protest and public memorial.
JJ Chan is an artist born in Doncaster who works across sculpture, moving image, and writing. Their work draws from lived experience and stories stolen from eavesdropped conversations, to explore the edges of our everyday realities and the ways in which we construct our identities. Through storytelling and world-building, the work (re) searches for an alternative space beyond aggressively progressive capitalist time, seeking new worlds from the ashes of the present. Since March 2021 JJ has been the Blueprints for the Otherwise artist-in-residence at Bloc Projects, Sheffield. They are currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art. Image used by permission of the artist.
index
Ashley Holmes is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Sheffield interested in the collection, dissemination and presentation of music and sound. Holmes’ work traces the nuances, legacies and unique authority of music from Jamaica and its political, social and cultural contexts. His practice encompasses audio-visual installations, collaborations, radio broadcasts, performances and ongoing research projects that make connections between public space, sonic fiction, memory and citizenship. He hosts Tough Matter, a monthly broadcast on NTS Radio, and also facilitates Open Deck — a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen and a discursive space about our relationships to music, sound and oral histories.
Kedisha Coakley is based in Sheffield and studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University (2020). Her work spans sculpture, photography and printmaking and explores depictions of Black culture and colonial histories. Kedisha uses her own experiences to explore conventions embedded in the social and historical narratives of objects across cultures. Her recent work includes a solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2021), Block Projects Billboard (2020 — 20 21), and Quench gallery, Margate (2021). She is recipient of the Janet Parry Bursary Award (2021), the Omni Artist Award 2020, and the Santander Career Capital Fund Mentoring Scholarship (2021). Image by Alwin Greyson Photography Ltd, used by permission of the artist.
Image used by permission of the artist.
Image by India Hobson, used by permission of the artist.
Zanib Rasool has worked in the voluntary sector for thirty years and received an MBE in 2012 for services to the community of Rotherham. She is currently undertaking a Doctorate in Education at the University of Sheffield and is co-editor of Re-Imagining Contested Communities, a book that brings together academic and community voices in Rotherham. Rasool has worked as a researcher on collaborative projects, including the ESR/AHRC Connected Communities programme and the AHRC-funded ‘Taking Yourselves Seriously: artistic approaches to social cohesion’ project, and has published in academic journals on co-production, arts methodology, and literacy practices of the South Asian community. Image used by permission of the artist.
Sile Sibanda is a spoken word performer, workshop facilitator, radio presenter, and events and stage host. She is an active member of the writing collective Hive where she hosts open mic nights and events and has been involved in numerous creative and community projects. She has hosted ‘Harms of Hate’ (Rotherham), the Diversity Festival at the Rotherham Show, and Q&As with former Sheffield Lord Mayor Magid Magid for the Off the Shelf Festival, and Munroe Bergdorf for SheFest. In 2019 she won the BBC ‘This is Me’ competition and subsequently became the host of the Radio Sheffield evening show.
Uzma Rani is based in Rotherham and worked for 15 years in the insolvency field, before finding herself unfulfilled with the corporate world. Art and writing became an important outlet for her, helping both heal and to fire up her creative passions. Working primarily in alcohol ink and acrylic, she has recently started to create mixed media pieces, taking commissions and conducting workshops in mindfulness through art and Arabic calligraphy. Uzma’s work has been showcased at The Great Sheffield Art Show. Image used by permission of the artist.
Debjani Chatterjee grew up in India, Japan, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, and Egypt before settling in the UK. She is a poet, children’s writer, translator, creative arts psychotherapist, Olympic torchbearer and storyteller, and is the recipient of an MBE, Sheffield Hallam University’s honorary doctorate and a Lifetime Achievement in Poetry award (Word Masala Foundation). Chatterjee led numerous projects as former Director of Community Relations for Sheffield and was Chair of both the National Association of Writers in Education and Arts Council England’s translation panel. She has held poetry residencies at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, Ilkley Literature Festival, the Barbican Centre and several universities.
Image used by permission of the writer.
Image used by permission of the artist.
Image used by permission of the artist.
Shaheen Shah is an artist of South Asian heritage based in Rotherham. She studied for her BA in Interdisciplinary Art and Design, specialising in Graphic Design and Textiles and works now as an Interdisciplinary Art Practitioner. Shaheen works as a freelance artist in schools and in community settings delivering holiday programmes and after-school clubs. Shaheen was one of the lead artists on the ‘The Imagine Project’ a five-year collaborative research project that connected communities to research through art practices, storytelling, writing, poetry, and visual images. Shaheen is currently working with the Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance (ROAR) supporting the establishment of a BAMER creative network.
Glynis Neslen grew up in Great Yarmouth and moved to London in 1979, becoming a State Registered Nurse. She gained a BA in Photography in 1985, specialising in social documentary. As a member she exhibited with Brixton Black Arts Group, and at the Black Art Gallery in 1988. In Leeds she joined Kuffdem Theatre and the Black Expression gospel singing group, performing at Leeds Playhouse between 1993 and 1994. In Hull, while working at Hull School of Art and Design, she won a BBC script competition after joining Script Yorkshire, and went on to develop a performance called “Black Whalers”. Working with musicians from Sierra Leone, they performed the piece at the Ferens Art Gallery during the Humbermouth Festival of 2006. A retrospective solo exhibition at Kingston Art Group (KAG) on Humber Street in 2014 featured photography, ceramics and painting.
Jade Montserrat was brought up in Scarborough and studied the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Drawing (2003) and at Norwich University of the Arts (2010). She works at the intersection of art and activism through drawing, painting, performance, film, installation, sculpture, print and text, interrogating these mediums with the aim to expose gaps in our visual and linguistic habits. Jade is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship for her PhD at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research, University of Central Lancashire. She was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, (2018), a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover.
Gretchen Sandiford grew up in Leeds where, as a mature student, she studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 1995. She progressed into teaching African Caribbean History across the UK and in Africa, attaining her teaching certificate from the University of Huddersfield in 1995. A child of the ‘Windrush generation’, Gretchen is inspired by the culture and stories around her of the African/Caribbean diaspora. She works in both figurative and abstract styles through a variety of medium including painting, wood print, linocuts, photography, batiks, tie-dye, jewellery making, sewing, collage, and greetings cards. Image used by permission of the artist.
Image from East Street Arts, 2020, by Anthony Chappel Ross, used by permission of the artist
Image used by permission of the artist.
Chinwe Russell is a Nigerian-born, painter, ceramicist, and curator with 30 years of professional experience in Management and Community Development. She is the project originator of the Doncaster Art movement and Art Fair in her adopted town, and director of the D31 (est. 2018) art gallery.
Identified as a ‘Raw Talent’ by Arts & she has exhibited in York’s Nea Gallery in 2018. Her work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 2019 and 2021. She was commissioned to create a triptych in a Doncaster council project titled ‘Treasury of Local wisdom’ and for CAST Theatre in Doncaster as part of the ‘HERE and NOW’ project in 2020 — 2021. She is currently creating a ceramic collection of sculptures and vases entitled ‘Gods of Africa’. Image used by permission of the artist.
Janet Wallace is a mixed media abstract artist and muralist based in Doncaster. As a child she had a love for dance, colour and music that influences her work to this day, She cites Moe Brooker, Sam Gillam, Callen Schaub, Jono Dry, Esther Mahlangu, Jean-Michel Basquait, Diamitra & Elli Milan as influences. Janet recently collaborated with an initiative creating murals in a response to stop fly tipping and reintroduce gardening back into communities, connecting kids, adults and neighbourhoods again. She states: ‘The universe, astronomy, sacred geometry and Creation are nature’s truest form and is in each one of us and will always be my inspiration’.
Alastair Gittens lives and works in Hull, where he moved 20 years ago after his son and himself suffered racial abuse. He was welcomed there by Hymers College, where he taught art for several years before retiring in 2012 for health reasons. Alastair started life in Harrogate before completing a Foundation Course in Scarborough in 1979 and going on to complete a BA in sculpture at Manchester Polytechnic. Alastair has taught photography, sculpture and ceramics across all age ranges, his own work spanning these disciplines as well as painting and print. He is currently experimenting with smoke firing, Saggar firing, glasswork and naked raku. Image used by permission of the artist.
Sunshine Wong is an art worker, researcher, and facilitator. She was an art teacher in her native Hong Kong and later moved to Berlin where she worked as a curator of live and discursive art events. Her recently completed doctoral thesis examines the ambivalences of social practice art through affect and embodiment. Current practice and research interests include artmaking infrastructures, critical care approaches, and co-vulnerabilities in urgent times. She is Curator at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, Regional Editor (Yorkshire and Humberside) for Corridor8 and irregularly convenes a TL;DR, a slow reading group for anyone who has a complicated relationship with working in the arts.
Image used by permission of the artist.
Image used by permission of the writer.
Special Acknowledgment
YVAN’s mission is to be a voice and advocate for the artist, and the visual arts in Yorkshire & Humber, delivering a programme that affects change in the profile, reputation and sustainability of the visual arts sector in Yorkshire & Humber and beyond. YVAN is part of the national Contemporary Visual Arts Network (CVAN).
YVAN would like to express our gratitude to the team at Sheffield Hallam University who have supported the publication throughout its journey, specifically Roger Bateman (Head of Art and Design), Dean StanfordPalmer (Senior Lecturer Design), and Rose Butler (Senior Lecturer Fine Art)
The YVAN Team
Sue Ball — Executive Chair / Director
Sharon Gill — CEO
Roger McKinley — Research, Education, and Learning Lead
Header 1 / Logo Font Diversity — distillery Studio created the Diversity Typeface as a way of combining the efforts of 308 creatives from 56 countries to create the most diverse typeface in the world. Profits made from the typeface are donated to Disasters Emergency Committee, The Diversity Trust, and UN Women.
“Diversity is shown in this typeface through the variety of people who have contributed, inclusion is then how we weave the typeface into society and give those people a voice.”
Steve Wheen, Founder of distillery.
Header 2
Misto — Katerina Korolevtseva
Body Copy
Fungis — Milena Leimig
Cover Image
Front Cover — JJ Chan, ‘B Gate, Hong Kong International Airport. JJ and Jennifer Chan with Mum and Aunts on New Year’s Day 2001’ (Photograph)
Back Cover — Jade Montserrat, ‘Native son could not have really owned it’ (Watercolour, Ink and Pencil Crayon on Paper, 2021)
