INTERVIEW DEBORAH CHERRY AND ALEXANDRA KOKOLI ON FEMINISM, BRITISH ART, DIASPORA Deborah Cherry is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of the Arts London. She writes on contemporary and historical art. Her publications include Painting women: Victorian women artists (1993), Beyond the frame: Feminism and visual culture, Britain 1850-1900 (2000) and Maud Sulter: Passion (2015).
Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University London and research associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. Her publications include contributions to Companion to Feminist Art (2019) and Companion to Textile Culture (2020), and the monographs From the Freud Museum 1991–6 by Susan Hiller (Tate in Focus, 2017), and The Feminist Uncanny (2016). She is currently Leverhulme research fellow for a project on art and visual activism at Greenham Common. Here, Deborah and Alexandra discuss with BAN Convenor Martin Myrone their recent co-edited book, Tracey Emin: Art Into Life (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the intersections between British art history, curating, feminism and diaspora. MM. The book you have recently co-edited, Tracey Emin: Art Into Life foregrounds the intersectional aspects of the artist’s performed identities, including that involving her Turkish Cypriot heritage. It asserts, therefore, a crossing or connecting of feminism, British art and diaspora which hasn’t perhaps been much in evidence, at least in relation to British artists with a ‘mainstream’ presence like Emin. Would that be fair to say, and if so, what has prevented such discussion being more apparent previously? AK: There are many reasons why Tracey Emin has rarely been discussed as an artist of colour and of the diaspora, although she has repeatedly stated that she is descended from enslaved Sudanese people on her father’s Turkish Cypriot side and Roma on her mother’s side. While her art and writing are interpreted as neo-expressionist outpourings, she is simultaneously taken at face value and not 22
