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Living Archives

Living Archives

Written by: Stuart Hall Foundation & International Curators Forum
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What happens when two artists sit down together to talk? How might their conversations and artistic practices map a living archive of diasporic relations in Britain?

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

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

Copyright 2026 All rights reserved. Art Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Ebun Sodipo & Ain Bailey

    Ebun Sodipo & Ain Bailey
    Oct 4 2026

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

    Conversation transcript available here.

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

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

    Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

    Edited by Chris Browne

    Original designs by Yolande Mutale

    Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

    Music by LOX

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

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

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

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

    Niki Kohandel & Alia Syed
    Sep 28 2026

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

    Conversation transcript available here.

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

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

    Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

    Edited by Chris Browne

    Original designs by Yolande Mutale

    Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

    Music by LOX

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

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

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

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

    Alberta Whittle & Sekai Machache
    Aug 10 2026
    In the final episode of season one of Living Archives, Alberta Whittle and Sekai Machache think together about freedom, urgency and slowness, their many transnational and international collaborations, and their feelings about edges. Conversation transcript available here. Living Archives is an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, what Stuart Hall calls, a “living archive of the diaspora” which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain. Hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor, practitioners reflected on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other. Hosted by Jessica Taylor Edited by Chris Browne Designs by Yolande Mutale Music by LOX ------------------- Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator. She was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Alberta is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art and is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018 and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9. Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture, and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces. Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows, including at Jupiter Artland (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2021), The Lisson Gallery (2021), MIMA (2021), Viborg Kunstal (2021), Remai Modern (2021), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Art Night London (2021), The British Art Show – Aberdeen (2021), Glasgow International (2021), Glasgow International (2020), Grand Union (2020), Eastside Projects (2020), DCA (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), Pig Rock Bothy at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019), 13th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014), amongst others. Her work has been acquired for the UK National Collections, The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art amongst other private collections. Alberta is representing Scotland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. And over 2021, Alberta will be sharing new work as part of the British Art Show 9, RESET at Jupiter Artland, Right of Admission at the University of Johannesburg, Art from Britain and The Caribbean at Tate Modern, Sex Ecologies at Kunstal Trondheim, Norway, In The Castle Of My Skin (MIMA) and Gothenburg Biennale (2021). Alberta’s writing has been published in MAP magazine, Visual Culture in Britain, Visual Studies, Art South Africa and Critical Arts Academic Journal. Sekai Machache (she/they) is a Zimbabwean-Scottish visual artist and curator based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work is a deep interrogation of the notion of self, in which photography plays a crucial role in supporting an exploration of the historical and cultural imaginary. Aspects of her photographic practice are formulated through digital studio-based compositions utilising body paint and muted lighting to create images that appear to emerge from darkness. In recent works she expands to incorporate other media and approaches that can help to evoke that which is invisible and undocumented. She is interested in the relationship between spirituality, dreaming and the role of the artist in disseminating symbolic imagery to provide a space for healing against contexts of colonialism and loss. Sekai is the recipient of the 2020 RSA Morton Award and is an artist in residence with the Talbot Rice Residency Programme 2021-2023. Sekai works internationally and often collaboratively, for and with her community and is a founding and organising member of theYon Afro Collective (YAC). ------------------- Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.
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    1 hr and 2 mins
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