Tag: The Gallow Gate

(BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY? // an exhibition and programme reflecting on racial tension, representation and the Black experience

London-based, multidisciplinary art collective sorryyoufeeluncomfortable in collaboration with The Gallow Gate present the exhibition and programme (BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY? as part of the Glasgow International 2018 Supported Programme. For the exhibition collective members Christopher Kirubi, Halima Haruna, Rabz Lansiquot, Mayfly Mutyambizi, Imani Robinson and Jacob V Joyce respond to the programme title. The exhibition will be surrounded by talks, workshops, performances and a film screening, with the intention of inviting audiences to engage with questions related to racial tensions, representation, translation and the experiences of people of colour. I interviewed Imani and Rabz to find out more about sorryyoufeeluncomfortable and the programme they have curated.

Please share more about the Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded project and how it led to the formation of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable.

The Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded project was started by Barby Asante [London-based artist, curator and educator] and Teresa Cisneros [cultural producer who has worked as arts manager, curator and arts educator] in 2014. They did a call out for young artists and thinkers to respond to Horace Ové’s 1968 film Baldwin’s Nigger; a documentary in which James Baldwin gives a speech and answers a series of questions from a London audience. Over 10 weeks we came together to respond to Horace Ove’s 1968 film Baldwin’s Nigger, focusing on the contemporary relevance of the themes that emerge in the film, and James Baldwin’s thought more generally. We produced artworks, performances and workshops which were showcased in a one-day event at Rivington Place [visual arts centre in London]. It was this project that brought the collective together and kick started our journey. Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded was developed into a performance created by Barby Asante which has been shown at Nottingham Contemporary, Art Rotterdam, Tate Liverpool & The James Baldwin Conference, Paris, and will also be shown as part of Glasgow International Festival in May.

Please share more about the name for the collective, and the thinking behind making this the collective name?

During our residency at Iniva [Institute of International Visual Arts in London] in 2014, we knew we wanted to take the collective beyond the BNReloaded project and our initial reasons for coming together as a group. sorryyoufeeluncomfortable was a brilliant fit for us. It articulated what we couldn’t always vocalise in art spaces, which are so often spaces of privilege, exploitation and palatable politics. As a majority non-white, non-heterosexual group of artists and thinkers we were often made to feel unwelcome in art spaces, with both our politics and our being-in-the-space always seeming to make other people flinch. sorryyoufeeluncomfortable is a flipping of the script. The name operates with multiplicity, it’s shady and sarcastic and on-the-nose and also an act of care and recognition for each other.

How has the collective evolved over the years?

The collective began with the BNReloaded project, with 16 members who were between 18 and 25 and artist Barby Asante & curator Teresa Cisneros as our mentors and primary producers. The collective actually works more like a network or community of artists now, who are working around similar themes and having concurrent conversations, so members appear and disappear on a project by project basis. At the moment the collective is being led by 4 people, with Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson producing, programming and curating the work and Jacob V Joyce and Zviki Mutyambizi in supportive roles. We also have a fluid group of contributors and mentors, including Barby and Teresa who have remained close collaborators. The work shifts according to people’s primary interests but the central thread is always radical & liberatory politics and what it means to be living and working in the current climate.

Where did the title for the programme come from?

If you’ve ever asked a white person (be they a friend or a stranger) what they are doing about white supremacy, you’ll probably have an anecdote about a slow descent into an array of exaggerated emotions ranging from anger, to tears, to shouting and storming out. If you’ve never asked this question, brace yourself. The title (BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY? acts both as a refusal (you come here expecting me to tell you what to do, but I only show you my art and make you see what you already know) and an acknowledgement that we are forced to share our lives with white supremacy. The question is all of ours… The question looms and it persists… the question is tiresome… the question is discomforting. The 6 Black artists in the show respond in loose or direct ways to the title question, for example, they may invert the question in order to ask: “What is white supremacy doing to you?”, or they may suggest that as Black artists, to make work of any subject matter, or of none at all, is to resist, to survive and to “do something”.

Share with our readers the visual choices for the title (including the word ‘but’ in brackets and writing the title in capital letters)

We knew that the audience for GI, and many art festivals, is mainly white and largely made up of arts professionals. As Black artists we wanted to speak to the consumption of the work of artists of colour, which is often at our own expense. The title is as much an address to our audience as it is a provocation for the artists – who cannot help but be faced with the question. Audiences are engaging with our work, which is variably about Black pain and Black death, but what are they doing to address their complicity in that, or to amplify the voices of those already fighting for liberation? What are the art-world audiences doing about sustainable living and working conditions for Black artists? And how are they engaged in material transformation within the institution?

The capital letters signify the affect and the urgency embedded in the articulation of this question, the heaviness of the question and the way it feels somewhat impenetrable to exist or escape as a Black person in this world. Sometimes a shout reaches further than a whisper…. or sometimes a shout is the only way you will be heard. And the brackets are there as a preconceived comeback to a series of tired, self-preserving responses that do not answer the question.

Why do you think it is important to combine making and writing for the interrogation of the title?

The artists in this show Halima Haruna, Jacob V Joyce, Christopher Kirubi, Rabz Lansiquot, Mayfly Mutyambizi and Imani Robinson all have varying practices. sorryyoufeeluncomfortable is a multi-discplinary collective; a community who make things and who write poetry, songs and prose to activate their practice. (BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY? is a personal and a political question and we wanted to be able to respond however we liked, or however we could. Sometimes our responses can be vocalised, or put into words, and other times different modes of expression are better able to articulate an answer.

Why do you think it is important for the exhibition to be surrounded by conversations, workshops and performances?

A core part of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable’s work is public programming – creating intentional spaces for radical study and dialogue; it’s very much ingrained in what we do. We wanted the chance to engage with the range of topics and ideas that are present in the work, and to be in dialogue with our audiences who we believe offer as much to us as we can to them.

It’s important to have multiple entry points to the work; to make the work and the ideas surrounding it as accessible as possible for those who it concerns directly, which is all of us in our distinct ways. We also exist within a wide community of artists, filmmakers and writers who have a lot to say; our programming provides a non-hierarchical space within which to engage with multiple perspectives and draw connections.

Please share more about your thinking when putting the structure of the programme together?

We wanted to give our GI audience a taster of each of the kinds of activations we programme. We facilitate workshops & seminars, radical study reading groups, and we also curate film screenings and exhibitions. When we are programming we always aim to create a space for popular education, that is, a democratic space for knowledge sharing in all directions, rather than a one-way street to educate our audiences. In that sense, the structure of the programming also invites audiences to engage in conversation and to participate in the work, rather than solely to consume it.

Please share more about Black British Shorts and why you felt you wanted to have the screening be a part of the programme?

Whilst we were ICA Young Associates in 2017, we curated a programme of shorts films by and concerning the lives and experiences of Black British people. It was a really wonderful event for us personally, as the submissions we received reflected what we already knew from experience, but also showed us new and varying perspectives. The films were of such a fantastic standard; we were really proud to be able to share them. The audience at GI is pretty international so we just wanted to share some of the films again and showcase our extended community of talented Black brits.

Who do you imagine as your audience? And how do you think they will react to or process the exhibition and the programme you have put together?

We definitely hope that our work appeals to Black & POC folk, particularly queer folk, who are also interested in art and radical politics. Those are the people that we make the work for and put events on for and that tends to be the majority of our audience for our work based in London because there’s a pretty strong Queer POC creative community there. We hope that the kind of work we do resonates with the POC community in Glasgow too.

However, we are totally aware of the demographics of UK arts & culture audiences. They are overwhelmingly white and middle-class for a number of reasons and this means that a significant amount of events and exhibitions which deal directly with race politics have a markedly white audience-base. It’s always difficult to balance the desire to create work and share that work with audiences, and the oftentimes disheartening feeling you get when that audience doesn’t reflect your community. This also mixes with uncertainty around what exactly those audiences are taking away, is it simply that they attended this ‘cool’ thing about Black art, or do they actually leave with a changed perspective and a plan for active allyship? – Many people will come to the exhibition expecting it to give them answers to the title question. That’s not the purpose of this show, and that’s part of the gag.

How will the exhibition be constructed and how have you planned to have the various artworks speak to each other?

The process of constructing the exhibition had several parts to it. It began with commissioning the artists: we put together a concept that was broad enough for multiple interpretations but that had a single thread that would tie everything together. As curators we wanted to work with artists whose work and practice we knew well, as this gives us the kind of trust you need to build an artist led curatorial model where all involved are committed to the process of working collectively. Knowing our artists well, and being in conversation with them already, meant we could leave them to their devices and allow the show to come together organically. The magic really happened during the install. When we entered the space we didn’t know what it was going to look like when we finished, and that allowed us the freedom to make it look however we wanted. It was a collective process of trial and error, and of trusting the process and each other implicitly.

As a collective what are some of the texts you use as a foundation for how you think about Blackness, the Black existence, white supremacy, representation and translation? Why do these texts appeal to you?

Because of our origins as a collective James Baldwin is one of our central inspirations because of his employment of loving rage in all of his writings. – There are a lot of readers in our collective and we often read texts together as a collective and as part of public programming. We’ve held events around the work of Sylvia Wynter, Frank B Wilderson III, Fred Moten, Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKittrick, Black Quantum Futurism, Octavia Butler and CLR James. Our collective conversations around Blackness are always evolving, the more we read and speak to each other, depending on who we are collaborating with, and with each project we work on, wherever we are in the world.

Is there anything else about the collective, the exhibition or the programme that you would like to mention?

We don’t get paid enough to do the work we do and nor does any individual or arts collective of colour we know. It’s a real problem in the art world, never mind the rest of the ‘worlds’. Ultimately, we work because we have to and because we love what we do – but this shit is unsustainable.

(BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY will be on from 19 April – 20 May.

20 April 2018
Many Half Hours: New Music Through Collaboration

A multifaceted collaboration between musicians, dancers and writers, Many Half Hours crosses borders and transcends musical genres. Born out of a partnership between South Africa’s experimental music imprint Mushroom Hour Half Hour and Scotland’s The Gallow Gate gallery, the aim of Many Half Hours is to bring together a wide range of artists from different backgrounds to create a new, singular piece of work that combines their respective experiences and skills.

Starting out as a vinyl based music show on internet radio, Mushroom Hour Half Hour evolved into a unique independent record label focusing on recording live, contemporary African music. Based in Johannesburg the label travels around Southern Africa recording a variety of artists in different spaces as well as curating once-off collaborations between artists from different genres and generations.

It is this concept that The Mushroom Hour Half Hour have brought to Glasgow in partnership with The Gallow Gate. Based at Many Studios, a creative space in Glasgow, The Gallow Gate is a platform for contemporary visual art and culture working with creatives with African and Caribbean heritage to address west-and-white-centric-thinking within the arts sector in the UK. The space also experiments with methodology by introducing play and participation to the programme to build accessibility to creative practice with their local context. Curator Natalia Palombo explains: “We designed the gallery this way to challenge what people expect from creative practice, and to try to break down barriers of access and elitism within the sector. We’ve done this largely by producing cross-arts projects, like Many Half Hours, which brings musicians into the gallery context and invites audiences into the process of making rather than focusing on ‘final/completed work’.”

Many Half Hours sees The Gallow Gate hosting three South African musicians alongside three UK based musicians and artists to collaborate, record in and around Many Studios, and for a series of live performances. The musicians and artists involved come from a variety of backgrounds and generations, and included Omar Afif, a Gnawa vocalist and musician playing the gimbri and krakebs, cellist and dancer Katie Armstrong, as well as dancer and choreographer Mele Broomes. Joining the collaboration from South Africa are the incredible Sibusile Xaba, Thabang Tabane and percussionist Dennis Magagula.

Son of the legendary Dr Philip Tabane, who founded Malombo the group and created Malombo the sound, Thabang Tabane is a percussionist and vocalist who learned to play the drums when he was younger by watching his uncle and co-founder of Malombo, Mabi Gabriel Thobejane. From Mamelodi in Pretoria he continues the longstanding tradition of Malombo that sees the traditional sounds of South Africa, particularly that of the Pedi and Venda, fused with that of improvisational jazz.

Originating from the Kwazulu Natal midlands, Sibusile Xaba is a guitarist and vocalist that is carrying on the Maskandi/Mbaqanga tradition of his region while also forming part of South Africa’s burgeoning, dynamic jazz scene. In his music he is influenced by the likes of his first mentor, the Zulu guitar giant Madala Kunene, as well as vocal master Shaluza Max while still pushing the envelope and evolving his sounds. Under the mentorship of Thabang Tabane’s father and alongside Thabang he continues to explore the sound of Malombo widening its spectrum by including influences such as rock and other contemporary genres.

This unique cross-border collaboration has answered questions and challenged understandings surrounding non-traditional collaboration. “How will a classically trained cellist work with Southern and Northern African musicians who have grown up around music and learned through rich historical and familial traditions? And how then, does a dancer like Mele Broomes, whose style has been influenced both from her gymnast training and her Caribbean heritage intercept and interpret those sounds?” asks Natalia Palombo. “The answer to all is ‘beautifully’! It’s been incredible to see these artists come together over the last few days and find a seamless flow within the group, borrowing rhythms and language to build new work,” she says.

Apart from the three public sharings which formed part of the residency, the artists also performed at The Art School as part of Creative Mornings, the Transmission Gallery as part of The Other’d Artist/s show and Subcity Radio.

While the collaboration and live performances were only transient, the recordings will be hosted on the Mushroom Hour Half Hour site.

Final sharing courtesy of Many Studios and shot by Iman Tajik.

‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

17 July 2017
Natalia Palombo – challenging the expectations of creative practice

I interviewed Natalia Palombo about her work as an arts producer and how her research focusing on African contemporary visual art and film has manifest itself throughout her career.

On your website you describe yourself as an “arts producer with focus on African contemporary visual art and film”. Could you please expand on this?

I’ve worked within the fields of film and visual arts (predominantly) for around 10 years. In my last year at art school I became very interested in seminal West African films mostly from 70s – early 90s, from filmmakers like Gaston Kaboré, Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambéty and Souleymane Cissé. I went on to do a Masters on the African film industry, looking quite specifically at the role African film festivals play in the distribution of African cinema. From that research, I went onto work with a Scotland-based African film festival called Africa in Motion Film Festival, and also programmed for organisations in Nigeria and South Africa.

I then began to really miss working with artists, and for the last 3 years I’ve been working more broadly across the contemporary arts to produce projects with musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, and so on. I was working mostly outside of the UK until last year, when I opened a new project space which focuses on my research, based in Glasgow, Scotland.

My work has always been interested in how you can use creative practice to change perspectives and challenge prejudice in the UK. Our arts sector here still serves as a vehicle to ‘preserve’ western perspectives and white supremacy, providing space for mostly white, middle class artists, as per usual. My new project space is trying to build mostly non-arts audiences to engage with authentic African and Caribbean perspectives that counter the narratives pushed through western media.

Tell our readers about some of your research which extends from this.

I hope all my work extends from this point.

Tell our readers about The Telfer Gallery. Are you still involved in The Telfer Gallery in any capacity?

I co-founded The Telfer Gallery in 2010 alongside a bunch of friends. I spent a couple of years on the programming committee before moving on to focus on my own research. I co-founded this organisation straight out of art school, so it played a big role in how I would go onto develop my career as a producer and a curator. I studied graphic design at art school, and at that point, all I knew was that I wasn’t going to be a graphic designer. This platform really allowed me to understand where my skills lay, and how I wanted to work with creative people to produce a socially and politically engaged practice. To be honest, it was here that I realised that I had no intention of creating work, and that my role was in creating spaces and places for more important voices to be heard.

When we were designing the refurbishment for the new Many Studios building, we also designed a gallery space for The Telfer Gallery, so Many Studios continues to support this platform by giving the organisation space in kind. It complements The Gallow Gate really well as The Telfer Gallery works predominantly with Scotland-based artists, and producing more of a traditional exhibition programme which focuses on high-quality arts production. You can find out more about their programme on their website.

Work by Graham Fagen, ‘Our Shared, Common, Private Space’ – Rum Retort (2016). Photography by Iman Tajik

Tell our readers about some of the projects you were involved in as a freelance art producer – there are quite a few. Perhaps mention the ones you enjoyed the most or you felt related to your research directly.

In 2016, I co-curated a group exhibition with Mother Tongue called Rum Retort. The exhibition sought to re-trace and activate the connections between Greenock, Scotland and the Caribbean, sited in the town’s former Tobacco Warehouse. At the height of trade to the port, Greenock received up to 400 ships from the Caribbean annually, arriving with sugar and tobacco, and now like the Caribbean, is a stopping point for cruise ships. Scotland’s role in the slave trade has long been a contentious issue. We have often pushed the blame towards England and focused instead on the role Scot’s played in the anti-slavery movement from 1780. Rum Retort was conceived in part to draw attention to Scotland as collaborators in the enslavement of nations.

Ref: Scottish historian Stephen Mullen’s book “It Wisnae Us: The Truth About Glasgow and Slavery” is an interesting account of Scotland’s tangible links with slavery, focusing on physical legacy through the buildings and streets of the Merchant City.

The Power of ZA (2014) is also a really important project to me. I co-produced The Power of ZA with a Scottish based design studio, Pidgin Perfect, for World Design Capital Cape Town 2014. The Power of ZA was a research project which served both as a big learning curve for me professionally, and also inspired a lot of my current projects through the connections made while in South Africa.

This was one of the first freelance projects that I produced in collaboration with another organisation. This experience was important in terms of understanding how to manage two sets of objectives and expectations for one project. I struggled at points to make sure the research was portrayed in a way that was authentic, and also relevant to how my research is positioned. There were compromises that I had to make in terms of the ‘voice’ of this project – as an outsider I think it’s important to make sure the voice comes from the content and the artists, rather than the producers. However, the project also gave me the opportunity to meet incredible artists who I’ve gone onto work with in other projects. My follow-up project CC Joburg | Glasgow came from this research and allowed me to work with incredible artists Lindiwe Matshikiza, Dean Hutton and Anthea Moys, and has also been the seeds for my next project, Many Half Hours, with Mushroom Hour Half Hour.

How do you feel this time working as a freelance art producer has shaped your understanding of what it means to be an art producer, as well as how it has informed how you approach your position as Managing Director at Many Studios?

My time working as a freelance producer allowed me to travel to incredible places and these trips have undoubtedly shaped my research and changed both how I work and who I am as an individual. My research manifests in a number of ways, however, travel remains to be the most effective way for me to build ideas and learn about new artists’ work. When I’m reading, or even meeting artists from all over the world whilst at home, it’s definitely hard for me to fully detach from the hecticness of home! Visiting other cities gives me the chance to fully immerse myself in creative practice, and I’ve found my most important relationships come about in those periods.

Unfortunately, I don’t get much time or resources to travel in my new role, but this realisation has definitely shaped how I work with artists that I invite to Glasgow. I think it’s important to create the space for visiting artists (in the broadest term) to engage with the city they’re in, to critique the city, and to make sure that the project is designed to be responsive to the moments that occur when you’re in a new place and meeting new people.

Tell our readers about Many Studios. What direction do you see Many Studios going with you as Managing Director?

Many Studios is a big beast! We’ve had such an incredibly journey building this business. We started in 2010, and ran as a voluntary directorship for the first five years. An opportunity came up in 2014 to refurbish a massive building in the East End of the city. We finally moved into the building in March 2015, and introduced 40 creative studios, two galleries, residency spaces and creative shop units. I’m the Managing Director of the organisation, but also the only staff member at the moment. This means my role is diverse, working across studio management, accounts, curation, community outreach, business strategy, etc! Thankfully, I get a lot of help from two advisory directors, Becca Thomas and Marc Cairns.

The core of the organisation is the 70 creative tenants that work from the building on a day-to-day basis, but our public-facing programmes allow us to connect our tenants to international practice through The Gallow Gate, and locally, East End First Saturdays and Ross Street Market, our monthly culture festival and outdoor market, bring new audiences and entrepreneurial energy to the area we are in, whilst building unique partnerships that bolster footfall and grow the local economy.

The Routes We Thread by Arpita Shah and Paria Goodarzi, 2017

Tell our readers more about the new space curated by you at Many Studios, The Gallow Gate.

Through The Gallow Gate, I produce an accessible programme of creative projects but also responds to the intentional unconventionality of the space – a ‘gallery’ that doesn’t follow a white cube format, designed with modular openings allowing the room to collapse and expand, with broken walls and large, shop-front windows. We designed the gallery as such to challenge what people expect from creative practice, and to try to break down barriers of access and elitism within the sector.

The 2017 arts programme will focus on live, temporal creative practice, tracing the process and development of included projects to consider the relationship between audiences and artists and to counter expectations within arts practice that discourages the idea of ‘failure’ and ongoing criticism of work placed within a gallery format.

Since opening in March 2016, The Gallow Gate has experimented with methodology by introducing play and participation to build accessibility with our local and wider audiences, and to push the artists to challenge their own communication with audiences.

Our 2017 programme invites 8 artists/collectives to undertake an on-site residency. Some of our residencies sit within existing programmes including Connect ZA (South Africa), Making More Art Happen (Zimbabwe), Stories, Stones and Bones (Heritage Lottery Fund), and invites artists from Scotland, Wales, South Africa, Zimbabwe, The Gambia, Nigeria, Cape Verde, Senegal, Morocco, Barbados and Pakistan to The Barras.

Who or what are you excited about at the moment?

I’m so excited about our next residency, Many Half Hours. From 22 May, Many Studios will be hosting a 2-week residency in partnership with Mushroom Hour Half Hour (Johannesburg). We’ve invited two incredible musicians to Scotland, Sibusile Xaba and Thabang Tabane, to collaborate with 6 UK based musicians to create new work. The core artists from the UK are Sura Susso, Omar Afif, Moctar Sy Sawane, Cassie Ejezi, Melanie Forbes-Broomes, Rayanne Bushell and Katie Armstrong, with other artists to be announced soon. The invited artists all come from diverse musical and traditional backgrounds. Most of the artists have never played together before, intertwining contrasting musical traditions to create a unique fusion of sound and movement. A series of live performances will be staged throughout the residency, inviting the public to trace the process of the collaboration. We have kora, drums, gimbri, guitar, cello, dance, writing all on one stage, with musicians coming from all over Africa: South Africa, Morrocco, The Gambia, Senegal, Nigeria, to the UK.

Some of you will know Mushroom Hour Half Hour – an Experimental Music Imprint from Johannesburg doing incredible things. They curate location specific recordings featuring musicians that would not ordinarily play together – musicians from different generations, traditions and musical styles, to form unique, once-off collaborations. This residency is built around the theme of collaboration, both between Many Studios & Mushroom Hour Half Hour, and between artists in UK & South Africa. As well as inviting public to a series of live performances, “MANY Half Hours” will produce a series of recording sessions in and around Many Studios which will be hosted online.

Anything else you would like to share about yourself or your work?

I’m currently programming for next year at The Gallow Gate (from March 2017 onwards) and I’m always interested to chat to people about collaborations. Give me a shout if you’re interested in working with me to produce an exhibition/events/live performances in Glasgow.

To keep up with Natalia or to get in touch with her check out her website, Twitter and Instagram. To keep up with work at Many Studios check out their website, Facebook and Instagram.

The Routes We Thread by Arpita Shah and Paria Goodarzi, 2017

19 April 2017