the Roberts Institute of Art
27 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 months ago -A place to explore, reimagine and exchange ideas about culture through conversations.
We invite artists, cultural practitioners and other thinkers to discuss themes connected to the Roberts Institute of Art (previously DRAF) programme and works in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Through dialogue, research and personal stories this podcast series dives into those elements that shape contemporary culture and the ways we see the world.
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Episodes
Close Looking: Osman Yousefzada on Prem Sahib
November 27, 2023 18:22 - 3 minutes - 2.86 MBOsman Yousefzada’s poem, Untitled (for Prem), is written in response to Prem Sahib’s User_01 (2016), a panel of black aluminium covered with drops of resin that look like sweat and moisture, smudged in one part as if by a hand. The work’s eroticism, inspired by the sweaty walls of clubs, is framed by Yousefzada’s evocation of memory, longing and sensuality. The text was commissioned as part of our exhibition Close Looking: Collection Studies from the Roberts Institute of Art at Cromwell Pla...
Close Looking: Marina Warner on Paula Rego
November 27, 2023 18:19 - 16 minutes - 9.59 MBMarina Warner’s Pentimento is written in response to Paula Rego’s drawing in pencil and conte, St Mary of Egypt (2011) and tells the story of the little-known saint from fragments of reports of those who knew and remembered her. Knowing Rego’s love of storytelling and character studies, Warner has written a fictional account of a professor who has discovered Rego’s drawing and has pieced together memories of the saint gathered from a fictional fourth-century palimpsest she is researching fro...
Close Looking: Heather Phillipson on Emma Talbot
November 27, 2023 18:16 - 8 minutes - 7.44 MBHeather Phillipson’s The Creeps is written in response to Emma Talbot’s How the Web was Woven (2009), an acrylic on canvas work with a variety of vignettes, spider webs, texts and mysterious figures. Reflecting the haunting, unsettling atmosphere in Talbot’s painting, Phillipson considers how an artwork can never be fully understood or described, but is something we can continually think with and learn from. The text was commissioned as part of our exhibition Close Looking: Collection Studi...
Close Looking: Julie Ezelle Patton on Eva Hesse
November 27, 2023 18:11 - 26 minutes - 15 MBJulie Ezelle Patton’s Three Phases of Eva, 1965 is written in response to Eva Hesse’s Three (1965), a triptych of gouache and oil on paper collage. Patton takes Hesse’s triptych and title to structure the poem in three, imaginatively exploring Hesse's name, work and life, from Patton's first memory of hearing the artist’s name to once assisting Hesse’s partner, artist Tom Doyle. For Patton, the encounter with this work becomes a point of departure to play with language just as Hesse experime...
Close Looking: Imani Mason Jordan on Ellen Gallagher
November 27, 2023 18:08 - 15 minutes - 14.5 MBImani Mason Jordan’s 1:1 is written in response to Ellen Gallagher’s Untitled (2005). Gallagher’s intimate work shows two silhouetted figures etched onto a gold leaf background. The figures, posed as if in conversation, recall nineteenth-century portraits of authors found in narratives of slave emancipation. Jordan’s couplets of words and sounds, pulsing and intimate, fragmentary and accumulative, reflects Gallagher’s own process of gathering, erasing, cutting and collaging materials. The t...
Close Looking: Renee Gladman on Ayan Farah
November 27, 2023 17:59 - 7 minutes - 7.26 MBRenee Gladman’s All These Not-Places for Wandering is written in response to Ayan Farah’s Stardust (2011), a work dyed and bleached by UV light and painted with acrylic paint. Gladman approaches the work and the project of writing about it questioningly. Taking the encounter with the work as one of ‘wandering’ through it, Gladman follows the different lines of thought that Farah's atmospheric work prompts, reflecting on the relationship between thinking, seeing and sensing. The text was com...
Liliane Lijn on Bernd and Hilla Becher
June 26, 2023 14:05 - 35 minutes - 32.7 MBIn this podcast, we invited Liliane Lijn, whose work is featured in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection to choose a piece from the collection as a starting point for a conversation. Lilliane is one of the curatorial collaborators for Deep Horizons, our exhibition with MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and she selected Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work Water Towers, 1972-2012 which features in the exhibition. Liliane describes her early encounters with Bernd and Hilla Becher’s wor...
Valerie Asiimwe Amani
June 12, 2023 11:07 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBIn this podcast, artist Valerie Asiimwe Amani discusses her first live performance To dismantle a house which was jointly commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art and South London Gallery and presented in June 2022. RIA and South London Gallery invited Valerie to participate in a new five-week performance residency at South London Gallery. The work she developed whilst in residence presented a multisensory installation and performance that explored the intersection of cultures, reflecti...
Dora García on Ida Applebroog
December 02, 2022 12:02 - 53 minutes - 48.8 MBIn this podcast series, we ask an artist represented in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, and who was also part of one of the Evening of Performances, to select a work by another artist represented in the collection as the starting point for the discussion. We invited Dora García, an artist who often draws on interactivity and performance in her work. At our 2008 Evening of Performances, García performed The Game of Questions, a performance that blurred boundaries between spectator an...
Nkisi and Tiran Willemse
November 22, 2022 15:00 - 46 minutes - 42.8 MBIn this podcast series, we ask an artist who performed in one of the Evening of Performances to choose someone to be in conversation about collaboration, their respective practices and the future of performance. In this edition, DJ and producer, Nkisi, aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo, who was commissioned as part of the 2017 Evening of Performances, invited artist and choreographer Tiran Willemse, to chat about performance, their collaborations, and their most recent work (bb), which looks at the...
Grace Schwindt and Katleen Van Langendonck
November 09, 2022 11:22 - 53 minutes - 48.9 MBGrace Schwindt is a German artist working with film, live performance, sculpture, and drawing. As part of Evening of Performances 2018, Grace presented The Boxer. The Boxer proposed the intimate moment of sharing physical and mental wounds as a possibility to create open social relations. Belgian curator and academic Katleen Van Langendonck joins Grace Schwindt in conversation about Grace's practice and the crossovers between Katleen's current research into performance and the translation o...
Phyllida Barlow on Bethan Huws
November 19, 2021 00:00 - 25 minutes - 23.4 MBWe invited Phyllida Barlow, whose work is featured in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, to choose a piece from the collection as the starting point for a conversation about influences and objects of interest. She chose Bethan Huws’ Untitled, 2002. Untitled is from Huws' Word Vitrine series and is a text-based work of sculptural form, using standard office word vitrines made from aluminium, glass, rubber and plastic letters. First created in 1999, her Word Vitrines reference Marcel Du...
Arike Oke and Pelumi Odubanjo
October 11, 2021 23:00 - 40 minutes - 37.2 MBArike Oke is currently the Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, which is known as the leading institutional voice on the Windrush Generation and the home of Black British history. Independent curator, writer and researcher Pelumi Odubanjo joins Arike Oke for a discussion about how their work with archival materials creates spaces to heal, discover new stories and find other ways of living and possibilities for making art. The pair talk to Lucy Cowling from the Rober...
Michaela Crimmin and Hrair Sarkissian
September 27, 2021 08:00 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBMichaela Crimmin is an independent curator and co-director of the not-for profit agency, Culture+Conflict. For over 15 years she taught on the Royal College of Art’s curating contemporary art MA. Hrair Sarkissian is a photographer who was brought up in Damascus and who now lives and works in London. His practice explores his own personal memories and histories and the relationship between visibility and invisibility. In this podcast, our guests discuss Sarkissian's formative years workin...
Matthew Spellberg and Richard Sommer
September 16, 2021 15:49 - 46 minutes - 43 MBMatthew Spellberg is a scholar whose topic of study is the comparative history of dreaming—how dreams are experienced, shared, and made use of in different cultures. Originally trained as an architect, Professor Richard Sommer is interested in where politics and design meet. He writes on monument making, urbanism and time-based architecture. The pair sit down to discuss dream sharing and the important role psychic spaces play in how we live and work together, mutual interests that have bro...
Ryan Gander on Boyle Family
April 28, 2021 21:23 - 27 minutes - 24.7 MBGander chose Study of a Coloured Tile Path With Red, Black and White Tiles, 1988 due to seeing a shared interest in time and collecting places in moments. It is a meticulous recreation of a randomly chosen area of the earth's surface in resin, fibreglass and mixed media, perhaps representing a front garden path in London. Ryan Gander's work takes many different forms, from sculpture, film, writing, graphic design and performance. He joins Ned McConnell from his Suffolk studio for a conversa...
Emma Talbot on Huma Bhabha
March 18, 2021 12:29 - 23 minutes - 21.5 MBEmma Talbot selected What is Love (2013) by Huma Bhabha when asked to pick a work from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection to discuss in relation to her own practice. Bhabha’s painted sculpture, which could just as easily be an alien from the future or symbol of an ancient past, forms the basis of a discussion about time travel and the way both artists imbued their works with with feeling and tie the personal up with events in the wider world. What is Love (2013) is a totemic representa...
Caroline Achaintre on Berlinde De Bruyckere
December 17, 2020 11:25 - 16 minutes - 15.5 MBBoth having keen interests in the animal world, art history and mythology, Caroline Achaintre quickly gravitated to Berlinde De Brucykere when asked to choose a work from the David Roberts Collection other than her own to discuss. De Bruyckere's Lost II (2007) is a large sculpture made from epoxy, horse skin metal and wood, where what looks like a spineless horse carcass is draped over a domestic table. Achaintre describes being drawn in by the combination of repulsion and attraction to wh...
Jonathan Baldock on Niki de Saint Phalle
November 05, 2020 09:44 - 20 minutes - 18.3 MBAn artist he has long loved and admired, artist Jonathan Baldock quickly gravitated towards Niki de Saint Phalle when asked to choose a work to discuss from the David Roberts Collection. Topic of deliberation is her small sculpture Nana Danseuse made around 1972. He is interested in both the joyous celebration of female figures and the (at times overlooked) politicized, feminist activism and trauma that is also present in de Saint Phalle's practice. There are formal crossovers in Baldock ...
France-Lise McGurn on Tamara de Lempicka
October 22, 2020 08:55 - 19 minutes - 17.5 MBGlasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn has chosen to talk about Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka’s drawing Sur La Plage, made circa 1926. This drawing from the David Roberts Collection becomes the basis for a conversation that touches on the female nude, Madonna videos and cigarette packets. This is a new series of conversations as part of Broadcasts: Podcast, which will open up the David Roberts Collection through artists' encounters with works in the collection. Artists featured ...
Nicoletta Lambertucci
October 01, 2020 10:43 - 40 minutes - 36.8 MBNicoletta Lambertucci's career so far has been a story of beginnings. Firstly, working as a Curator at DRAF, she joined the team in 2012 just after the Foundation moved to its previous site, which was a huge former furniture factory in Camden. Since 2017 she has been Curator of Contemporary Art at The Box, co-shaping the strategy for this £46m museum, gallery and archive. Collections can be seen as fluid entities and resources. From this perspective, Ned and Nicoletta talk about curatoria...
SERAFINE1369 and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
August 14, 2020 07:46 - 49 minutes - 45 MBHow do bodies excavate movements, and do we archive movement? SERAFINE1369 and Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome discuss how their approaches to these questions, what role translation plays in dance, and how to navigate proximity and intimacy—particularly in terms of a 'post-COVID' landscape. Both have been invited to discuss their respective performance practices as part of their participation in DRAF Live Art Commissions, which will be realised in 2021. DRAF Live Art Commissions have been develope...
Anne Hardy and Aura Satz
July 14, 2020 16:11 - 1 hour - 66.1 MBSound is a portal. It can shape how we perceive our environment, call our attention or create cognitive dissonance. Artists Anne Hardy and Aura Satz are particularly attuned to the workings of sound or noise, working with it as a material. Aura Satz is interested in sonic notation and electronic soundscapes from feminist and historical perspectives. Anne Hardy is particularly interested in the relationship between space and sound, and how sound creates spaces in the same way that light cre...
Shezad Dawood and Professor Madeleine van Oppen
June 23, 2020 16:28 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MBDRAF Broadcasts: Live with Shezad Dawood and Professor Madeleine van Oppen Professor van Oppen's work finding ways to enable coral reefs to adapt better to rapid changes in ocean conditions and her approach to making her findings more accessible to the public have been a key touchstone for Dawood's thinking whilst developing his Leviathan. Dawood's Leviathan Cycle is an ambitious ten-part film cycle (currently five are completed), that also incorporates textiles, sculptures, and neons. In...
Laura Smith
June 23, 2020 16:27 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBDRAF Broadcasts: Podcast with Laura Smith Having worked as a Curator at Tate St Ives for many years before moving to Whitechapel Gallery, Laura Smith has a good understanding of the benefits of building relationships with local audiences. Her curatorial approach is one that foregrounds good social relations between everyone involved in making, hanging and experiencing an exhibition. Collaboration and shared experience are important to her, as it is through creating this sense of community a...
Joe Hill
June 23, 2020 13:53 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBDRAF Broadcasts: Podcast with Joe Hill What does it mean to have a "living collection", or use stories from an art collection to form societies that are forward-looking? These are the types of questions Joe Hill is asking since taking the helm of Towner Eastbourne (9:55). Towner Eastbourne has a rich history and eclectic collection. It has been shaped throughout the 20th century by artists and curators and as such has always been contemporary, tracking the contemporary as it has moved alon...
Lina Lapelytė
June 23, 2020 13:52 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBDRAF Broadcasts: Podcast with Lina Lapelytė Lina Lapelytė and Ned McConnell were supposed to meet for an Artist Talk at DRAF on 18 March 2020, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this, the podcast is a space to initially reflect on the immense changes to making, presenting, or thinking about art during lockdown. It has changed time management and pace, as well as underscoring the importance of touring and re-staging large performance works. The pair also discuss the ...