Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello, this is Pearl Lam Podcast. Today I’m in London and I’m very happy sitting beside side this great curator, writer, journalist, whatever. Ekow Eshun can you just briefly talk about yourself?
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, I like the whatever bit. I’m Ekow Eshun. I’m a writer and a curator. I write about art, chiefly. I curate exhibitions internationally. I write books. I like to think a lot about. Well, actually, I’ll tell you what. Look, a lot of the work I do, not exclusively but often centres on black life, on black being, on black presence and black thinking. I’m interested in articulating the complexity of black presence in the world.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But I think you are the right person to talk about it because you were the first black, black, black editor of the Arena magazine. And then and then you are the first black director of ICA here.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, I was the first black editor of a mainstream newsstand magazine in the UK, was the first black director of a major public institution in the UK. I mean, all of you know some of these firsts in a way. They say something about the nature of what what we call it social or structural change in a country like the UK. But in my role, in my past, in my history, this is some of the things I’ve done right now. I’m also chairman of the 4th Plinth Commissioning Group, which decides the work that goes from the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square the most, I would say the most consequential public art programme in the UK. Absolutely so.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): The by the way, for the audience to know the Fourth Plinth is in the Trafalgar Square. So every year there is a choice of an artist to create an artwork for the Fourth Plinth. Yeah, and you are the chairman.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah. And so that’s includes people like Yinka Shonibare and lots of different, lots of historically significant contemporary artists. We run a programme, but so all of these things I’m interested in because fundamentally I’m interested in the role of art, culture, identity, being and how we can describe how, what significance those have both in a wider public sense and also for us individually.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hold on first, OK. When you first started, how do you know that you want to be, you know, I you, you’re like an activist as well. Yeah. So how do you know when you’re growing up? You you, you grew up in and in UK.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, yes. I was born in Britain. My family’s from Ghana. I was born and brought up in Britain. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So. So what makes you start being a writer? An art person? Interested in culture?
Ekow Eshun: So I mean, look, this is a good question in a way. I want to play that back to you for a moment, Pearl, because look, I figured this is the thing. I think I’m interested in origin stories. So actually, look, let me just do, I’m just going to do this delivery. I will answer the question. But actually I want to hear your answer to that question just for a moment. Where do you start from?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, oh, I, you know, my interest in art is actually, I mean, I, when I grew up, I was very good in painting. I do drawings, I do paintings, I do all that. It’s also because when I was young, I’ve, you know, when, during my era, no one understand ADHD, right? So I was jumping up and down and doing all these things. So from three years old, I was punished. I have to do Chinese calligraphy, so just for you to sit down and focus and learn patience. And then after that, being that doing that, I hate calligraphy, but then I went to school, so I start drawing painting and from calligraphy they sent me from Chinese painting and all that. So when I was in doing my A level, so I want to study one less subject. So I did art and my art was pretty good. So when I have the money and then I went to graduate show. So I start buying, collecting a little bit of art, looking at it. And then I went into the art business is by by default or or by coincidence, because when I went back to Hong Kong, I did not want to be joining my parents, I mean my father’s business, nor do I want to be an accountant or a lawyer. So I said I would, I will open a gallery. I would do something that they can’t touch and they cannot influence me. They cannot do anything.
Ekow Eshun: See, look, so, so thank you for that because in a way, it’s an interesting illustration of the way that the personal falls into whatever we might call it, the professional. And I would say my story isn’t necessarily that different to that different, but similar in that I grew up in Britain, but I also spent a couple of years when I was a small child, I think maybe from about, let’s say about two or so till 5. My family went back to Ghana, where, you know, my parents came from, where I lived in Ghana for a few years. And I remember coming back to Britain after that. I mean, very struck in a way by how strange Britain felt in the way it dealt with race culture. I looked at it from an outsider’s point of view and I think.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Even at such a young age.
Ekow Eshun: Yes, because this Britain’s a kind of interesting place. People don’t necessarily say what they mean a lot of time. So you have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, well, really what’s going on. And so, yeah, so I was, I was, I felt quite attuned to that from an early age, but it also was then quite an uncomfortable feeling, an uncomfortable feeling about, well, how do I stand here? What is it I’m hearing? What is it I’m seeing? All of this made me think about, well, how can I find a way to live and to be without being oppressed or othered in this environment? Early on, I wanted to be a writer because that seemed.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): From early on.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, because it seemed to me a way to be able to say what I felt rather than necessarily have to listen to what someone else said about me. If you’re a black person, basically people are always talking about you in some form or other. You walk into a room, someone’s already decided who you are. They’ve already decided you’re some sort of threat or some sort of outsider, some sort of alien presence. I was very aware of that and I wanted to have my own say in a debate about who I was or who other or who other black people were. I remember when I was about 17 or something like that, I went into my local library, that’s in the reference section in my local library, and I came across this publication. It was just the kind of pamphlet. It was about British cinema and it was describing a kind of early wave of black film. This is in the 1980s, late 80s or early 90s, and I picked up this pamphlet and it changed my life because in that I found the writings of a number of different scholars. Stuart Hall, who was an important theorist in cultural theory, Paul Gilroy. I discovered this world. It turned out that there were scholars and academics and artists and writers who were thinking about some of these.
Ekow Eshun: Issues that had been on my mind since I was a child and I had no idea that you could extend thinking beyond the personal to think culturally or politically about.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Do you talk to your parents about that?
Ekow Eshun: You know what, not not so much in that, like I said, I thought I was on my own lonely path in a way, because also when you’re a teenage you’re trying to figure stuff out. So the SO Discovery and Stuart Hall at that age was a revelation to me because it meant because I realised that you could write and you could write with sensitivity, you could write with acuity, but you could also write about the culture, about the world we lived in. You could write not just fiction as it were. You could write theory and that theory wasn’t abstract. That theory had a direct relationship in my case to how I live, to how I look, to how I saw the world. And that was a revelation to me. And from that moment on, origin story, from that moment on, well, two things happened. 1, I actually stole that pamphlet from the light because I wanted to keep it with me because it made such an impression of me. And then after that, I realised, well, actually, look, OK, you’re allowed to write about the things you’re interested in, the things you’re passionate about, and that that writing has its own significance. So from there, I’d, you know, I did a bunch of sentences, went to university, but I also, I started writing from an early age about popular culture, about fashion, about music, about hip hop, about style. I started writing for a magazine called The Face, which was. I know, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Who won’t know The Face!
Ekow Eshun: A very significant Style magazine of its time. I’d grown up reading The Face. I started writing for The Face. And the thing that I, I took with that I took to that was the idea that you could write about fashion and it could mean something. It could mean something not just in terms of, well, both in terms of, well, the significance of the thing in itself, but it could be also a way of, about talking about culture, about talking about society, about talking about who we are and how we live. And that’s really how I started.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Wow. And then did your parents say anything that. Oh my God, what are you doing? Can you make a living writing? Yeah, like old parents, Right?
Ekow Eshun: Of course they did!
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Whether Africans, Chinese, they’re all the same.
Ekow Eshun: Of course, of course. So I went to, I went to the London School of Economics. There’s a degree in politics and history. I came out of there. I said I want to be a freelance journalist this oh.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): My God, Can you imagine your, you want your LSE and you want to go to being GenZ. You don’t want to be a banker. You know what I don’t?
Ekow Eshun: Want to do that? So, yeah. So I mean, they were, you know, they were sceptical, but also, I mean, do you know, this is where I wanted to be. I wasn’t interested in anything else by then. I’d start writing for The Face while I was a student.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, you’re start writing for the face by the time you were a student? Very impressive.
Ekow Eshun: Student. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From when I was about 18 – 19, something like that. Because again, if you look around, what I felt was that there are stories all around. There were stories about culture, fashion, youth culture. It seemed to me that exactly this thing, that something very simple, the choices people made about how they dressed, about where they went, about the music they listened to, these things are not inconsequential. These things deserved attention and enthusiasm. So I wrote about the place I went. I wrote about the clubs I went to, I wrote about the clothes I saw people wearing. And so, yeah. So by the time I got culture. Exactly. So by the time I graduated, I was already doing this. And I carried on doing that. And then I became an editor at The Face magazine. And then I became the editor of Arena, which is a men’s style magazine, which is the system magazine to the Face published by the same company. So by the time I was in my 20s, I was editing these magazines from doing from doing all of that to thinking about art. It’s not very different. It’s not, you know, the material is different, but the what you might be able to discover from within that work remains the same. So the issue is it’s not the theme, it’s what you see within the theme. It’s the world’s that you discover. It’s the world’s that artists.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because we’re talking about contemporary culture. Contemporary artists is reflecting contemporary culture. Exactly. So as a black person, when you’re growing up, have you ever feel that you’re being discriminated? Mean, and that is why you have this, this whole whole mission that you want to correct this, you want to clarify this.
Ekow Eshun: Yes, Yeah, yeah. Look, in a way it’s about survival, because the question is, if you live in a society that seems often hostile to your presence, how do you live? How do you walk? How do you survive and not be defeated and not be diminished and not be confined and not be othered? My response would be to suggest that you speak, that you write, that you find the words that allow you to clear space and define and determine yourself on your own terms. That’s the goal.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But, you know, the world has changed. Yeah, Right now we’re talking about diversity in and, and, and inclusivity of all. And although Mr Trump has just.
Ekow Eshun: Deleted.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Deleted the whole thing, right? So obviously, you know, with all these big changes you will find yourself right in the centre of these sentiments. Don’t you think the whole world is now not just that? No, not about discrimination, it’s about celebrating.
Ekow Eshun: Look, I mean the thing I’m most interested in how can we, how can we speak with sensitivity and empathy, of course.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Empathy is really important.
Ekow Eshun: Of each other. My thing is a lot of the focus of my work, not exclusively, but a lot of the focus of my work is around, as we’ve been saying, Black culture and identity. And I don’t do this just, I mean, not only to say that this is work that deserves attention and is in many cases extraordinary, but also because I’m interested in living in a world where we get to acknowledge each other’s presence, each other’s particularity, each other’s the richness and complexity of our interior lives. That seems to me a valid pursuit.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I saw. So I mean most of the exhibitions you’ve done, you are focusing in African Diaspora, but you haven’t you, you haven’t really focus on artists of Africa. Why?
Ekow Eshun: Well, I mean, it’s not entirely true, but I mean, so yes and no, I’ve done, I’ve done exhibitions of African photography and so on. But to, to go with the tenor of your position, I guess because you know, in a way, on a, on a personal level, at one point I spent time thinking, I did think at one point, look, am I allowed to talk about Africa in I don’t, you know, I haven’t, I’ve lived in Africa for a couple of years as a small child, but I lived in Britain the majority of my life. So what is it I can say about Africa that someone who’s based on the continent can’t say better? What I do know about is the African diaspora. What I do know about is the sensibility of belonging to.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because you are part of them.
Ekow Eshun: More than one place at the same time. And to and I’ve actually come round actually in the end to thinking also about African, to understanding at least from my point of view that in a way, even if you’re born or based on the continent, we all come from more than one place simultaneously. So yeah, look, there’s room still to do more. There’s still to do this. I mean, I actually now I’ve done a series of exhibitions in Ghana. I did a show I’ve done yeah. I’ve done a couple of large group shows in Ghana and Accra. Yeah. And Accra, yeah, in Ghana for the last couple of years, which which bring together Ghanaian artists and African artists with international artists from across the diaspora. And again, this is like you raise an interesting point. And as much as one of the things that I am interested in, I’m interested in, let’s say being cautious about is notions of authenticity. So when I do a show in Ghana, it’s not just about Ghana, it’s just about Africa. It’s still really about how I think anyone of African origin based on the continent, based internationally, the way you’re in a conversation, you’re in a conversation about.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): It is a cultural exchange. It’s cultural dialogue.
Ekow Eshun: Exactly. Exactly. So if I do a show in Ghana, that’s not just about Ghana, it’s not just about Africa. And I hold to that. That seems to me.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I think it’s much more interesting actually and actually because now first time when I went to Nigeria, I was being told the word called Africa, he said. There’s nothing called Africa. Even in Nigeria. We have so many tribes and we are all so different. We don’t even have one coming. OK, you know what you learn because I think you are, you know each of the tribes of each of the of the country, you all have a different, completely different rituals.
Ekow Eshun: Exactly. Exactly. So yes. Yeah, exactly. So it seems to me interesting to be guided somewhat by that complexity, by that multiplicity, by the sophistication that inevitably comes from that cosmopolitan position. If we begin from there, then the story of what is Africa or African is an open proposition rather than a singular idea or something authentic or fixed.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): OK, I want to ask you about Afrofuturism. I mean I got really interested to read this one. Afrofuturism, which has only started what? Well.
Ekow Eshun: It’s a concept from the 1990s, let’s say. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So how did this come about? About I mean talking about, I mean rituals, myth and.
Ekow Eshun: Well, so so Afrofuturism is an idea. It’s coined at the yes end of the kind of 1990s. It’s an idea that.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Why in 1990s it come up with Afrofuturism?
Ekow Eshun: It’s kind of, it was a theorist kind of came up with the idea and it kind of became popular because it was a way of talking about black people that didn’t reduce people of African origin, black people to a historic past. So the context for this is that historically speaking, in the Western imagination, black people have often been constructed as if they belong somehow to the pre modern, to the uncivilised, to the outside of history rather than progress into the future. So Afrofuturism as a concept overturns that and suggests that as an imaginative pursuit we can construct an idea of blackness as a as a future facing endeavour and experience. The works that come out of that often relate to science fiction, but also can go broader than that, into favourable, into myth, into speculation, so I think.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So you agree with this?
Ekow Eshun: Well, I mean, interestingly so, yeah, I did a show, I did an exhibition a couple of years ago at the Haywood Gallery.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Called In the Black Fantastic? .
Ekow Eshun: Called In the Black Fantastic.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Ekow Eshun: Fantastic. And this was a group show that brought together again artists from across the diaspora, people like Nick Cave, Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher, significant artists, artists whose work in some forms embraced myth or speculative fiction as a way of challenging the I think just kind of racialized ways that black people are confined in popular imagination. Interesting. For me that wasn’t an Afrofuturism show, because one of the things that actually I get a little bit exercised about is the idea that to counter, to offer a kind of counterpoint to popular ideas of black underdevelopment, you have to think about African futurity. You can only, you have to think about black people in the future. You have to think about black people in relation to technology. I’m more interested in the fantastic rather than the futurist. And by the fantastic I mean works and ideas that embrace myth, speculation, belief systems, knowledge systems, historic notions of cosmology and place. Interested in the ways that artists, it seems to me, have been actually drawn in a much broader cosmology of images and references than just the Futurist. So this is what I try to bring together with In the Black Fantastic, a show that seemed to me rich in its imagery, rich in its ideas, that reached back as reached back in time as much as it reached forward in time. If we think about someone like Wangechi Mutu, some fantastic, extraordinary artist, Kenyan origin, based in the US, her work, her imagery, it deals with, Yeah, African deities and fiction figures as much as it does conjure these extraordinary speculative dreamings. So I wanted to say, look, there’s more going on here than just Afrofuturism. There’s something the there’s a richer terrain as a stranger. There’s a more fantastic set of worlds being explored through some of this work.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Absolutely right. So now talk about the current show in the Philadelphia Museum. Artists reframe black figures.
Ekow Eshun: Oh yes.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): How does I mean 60 artists there? Tell us more about that.
Ekow Eshun: Show so this is so now so the current show that I have at the moment is called The Time Is Always Now.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, The Time Is Always Now.
Ekow Eshun: Artists Reframe The Black Figure. So this is a group show that opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2024, is currently touring in the US as we speak. It’s the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s about to go to the North Carolina Museum of Contemporary Art. There’s actually, I mean, there’s sixty or more works in the show. I think there’s 20 to 24 something like that. Artists in the show. Now, the, the, the, the goal with the show is to look up artists that are working with figuration, artists that are working with the black figure, chiefly in painting, also drawing, sometimes sculpture, and to think about what they’re doing. Because it’s my contention that they’re doing more than simply trying to reflect, as it were, the figure as we might know it. Like, let’s stand back for a moment. If you think now across the course of art history, we can go back to the 17th or 18th to the 19th century. All these different times in the past, they’ve been representations of the black figure up in many works. But historically, those representations of the black figure have been created by Western artists, by white artists. Just the history of art in the 20th century, we start to see a shift. We start to see a change. Black artists that come to the fore now, where in the 21st century what do we see? We see a whole range of artists. Carrie James Marshall, Amy Cheryl, Noah Davis, Henry Taylor, All of these artists creating works of extraordinary acuity, depth, sensitivity and beauty. And doing so from a position that does not involve simply looking at the black figure, which is what historically has taken place place in Western art, but looking with or from the perspective of the black subject. This is the shift that we want to illustrate in this show. So we see from the position of the artist or their subject. And in that respect, what we open up to then is a realm of interiority, of complexity, extraordinary depth and sensitivity. That’s the shift that’s taking place right now, and that’s what the Time Is Always Now tries to capture as an exhibition.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): How wonderful. And then this, this exhibition and is now going to after this Philadelphia is Carolina?
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, in North Carolina. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): North Carolina.
Ekow Eshun: As as we’ve been saying, the point by this show is is that the open up space for reflection, contemplation, conversation. This is the goal of the show. The goal of the show is to bring together these artists, but no exhibition makes sense, functions is anything without its audience of.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Of course, absolutely right.
Ekow Eshun: We’re trying to create a space where we can see blackness as a sight of possibility, as a sight of dreaming, as a sight of extraordinary reaching and beauty. That’s what these artists do and that’s what we’re trying to share.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): OK, so then your next show in May is in the Baltimore Museum and it’s called what? Blacks, Blacks and Rising, Earth Rising. [Black Earth Rising]. And but, but then you’re not just doing an African artist, that’s Latin American and there’s native, Native Indian artists just.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, keep going.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Tell us more.
Ekow Eshun: So look so so the next show that I have, I’ve been working on for the last whatever it is a couple of years. It’s a show called Black Earth Rising. It’s the Baltimore Museum of Art opens in May. It’s a group show that looks at the complex links between colonialism and climate change as seeing through the work of artists of African, diasporic, Latin American and Native American origin. Which is to say, artists whose origins lie with groups and communities, who’ve experienced different aspects of settler colonialism, of extractivism, of exploitation, but who respond through their work to these histories with actually works of works that embrace nature as a site of fraughtness and fragility, but also extraordinary beauty. Of course. So Teresita Fernandez, Firelei Baez, Frank Bolin is in the show. Yeah. If we think about their works, they have an extraordinary facility with colour, sometimes with abstraction, sometimes with figuration. They deal in history, presence, the beauty and fragility of landscape, memory, colonial violence. All of these things are in play, but we’re also thinking about how we got get to have got to the fraught place of the planet in the 21st century, a heating planet, a warming planet. And one of the points I suppose I wanted to explore in the show is often when we talk about climate change, we do so from the perspective of Northern Hemisphere. So much of the image around climate change is polar bears and, and, and, and icebergs. But actually the majority of the impact of climate change is on the developing world, is on the global South. And so by bringing together artists whose origins lie within different parts of the global S, what we actually see is a different visual aesthetic come into play, which is not about the North, but actually has at its heart just kind of visual cues that lead us towards the tropical, the Equatorial again, the southern hemisphere. So the.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I think the show is a little bit different from your past show yeah shows. So it makes it really exciting because you bring 3 separate very different culture, yeah together and all all has gone through a postcolonial yeah moments.
Ekow Eshun: Exactly. So I’m not saying that everyone has shared exactly the same sets of experience and history, but they do share an experience of these clonial pasts. And so when you bring those works together, I mean, the, the, the, the challenge with any group show is, yeah, can you create an environment that seems to have a fluency to it where the artworks of one artist can speak to the art of another artist? So that’s, that’s really the challenge. And that’s what I’m still working on. And I hope it will make sense aesthetically as an overall show so that the proposition of the show is fully realised in the experience of the show. That’s the goal. I’m excited so far in the ways that it’s developing. I’ve got a book that I’ve done to accompany the show as well. Which book? Yeah, yeah. Which allows us to go. I mean, it’s visually LED, so it’s got about 200 images in it. But it allows us to go beyond the confines, the physical confines in an exhibition, to draw in much more work.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Do you ever have any free time? Yeah, because you’re doing that. And then, and then, and then you just publish a book as well.
Ekow Eshun: So.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. I mean do you have time or not?
Ekow Eshun: I’m asking I’m you’re asking that question, but I’m not asking that question of you also.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I mean, I mean, is this, by the way, this morning I just bought an book. Book. Why don’t you talk about the strangers? But you’re talking about these five men that we all know.
Ekow Eshun: OK, All right, so.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Why choose this five men? Why is it called the Strangers?
Ekow Eshun: So so this is so this is a yes. So I have a book.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): This is from art to writing.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, so I have a book. It’s a non fiction book that was published. It’s just come out. It’s published in the UK towards the end of last year, comes out in the US in May this year called The Strangers, subtitled 5 Extraordinary Black Men in the World’s That Made Them. This is a similar territory to what we’ve been talking about to some extent. I’m interested in black being and black presents, and in this book I take the lives of five different black men from different points in history. Some of them well known, like Malcolm X or France Fanon, others less well known, like Ira Aldridge, who was a Shakespearean actor on the London stage in the early 19th century, or Matthew Henson, who was the first person to reach the North Pole. He was an explorer. I take each of their lives and I look at some aspect, the particular time period in their lives, sometimes weeks, sometimes months or years. I’m interested not so much in what they did, but how they experienced and saw and walked through a world that was hostile to them. And so to do that, I’ve tried to imagine my way into their lives. So the book is non fiction, but I speculate some more on how they might have imagined the territories around them. So I imagine my way into their lives because to some extent the historical record about them. For someone like Malcolm X, it’s rich. For others is is thinner. But in each case, I was guided by something that Toni Morrison said. Toni Morrison said that black people are often the objects of history rather than the subjects of history.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Object of history.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, rather than the subjects of history. So I wanted to think subjectively about these people. So I imagine my way into their lives, into the world, in order hopefully to come to a closer sense of their sensibility and where you’re seeing and where you’ve been. And then I’m in there as well. Some more. Like in between. In between these chapters about them, there’s some shorter essays where I just kind of think about my own relationship to his subjects.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): When you write a book like this, yeah, you could not do different, different project because it’s very, you know, it’s very involved. You’re talking about all these figures, I mean all these historical figures. You actually have to do research. You, you, you have to emerge into it. So when do you create your show? Did you write or do you?
Ekow Eshun: Well, I mean it’s it’s actually let.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Me just.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, it’s a good question. So so.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You cannot put yourself out and do another project.
Ekow Eshun: So I don’t know about you. I mean, look, I don’t know about you, but I’m basically look, The Strangers took five years to write simultaneous to do to writing The Strangers. I was working on these exhibitions that we’ve been talking about.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Exactly, you know.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, do them all at the same time, because in a way I’m trying to explore different facets of a similar thing. We began this conversation. I was talking about being young and finding myself. I don’t know if somewhat odds with the world around me. Trying to understand how I could live, trying to understand how I could live without feeling that I was being denied a place. Trying to find a way to be. This is what I still do. It turns out that in terms of writing a book, creating exhibitions, you say different things with those but similar things, such that some of the time I’m thinking in terms of prose and right, some of the time I’m thinking visually. But all of the time I’m trying to understand the fraughtness and fragility of living and being and walking through the world.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Even your exhibition is about that.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. So we’ve been talking about this next time doing Black Earth Rising about colonialism and climate change. This also is about remains interested in displacement, remains interested in the experience of other in. It’s not that I can’t do other things, but these seem to be interesting subjects, interesting subjects that also I’m interested in the ways that I’m interested in how I think about that and explore that, hence writing. But I’m also interested then in what I can see and share in the kind of conversations I have. We’re different artists and the worlds that they’re describing. I’m based. I’m quite curious about stuff, so. And it seems to me there’s a lot of stuff to be curious about. And so a lot of this originates from me and my personal interests, fascinations, preoccupations. But it’s also about the capacity and the joy of creating environments and having conversations. Conversations like this one also, as much as everything else. So all of this the the, yeah, the joy of this is that it gets me. Out of my head, it gets me into conversation and communion with other people who see extraordinary things.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So do you mean that right when you do all these projects it’s like a self discovery as well?
Ekow Eshun: I mean, it can’t not be The thing is.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Therapeutical well.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, I mean, I, I try to think about that in egotistic terms, in that one of the I have is looking and thinking and being inspired by the work that other people do. And that stuff helps it very selfishly. That helps me. It helps me Orient my way through a world. But it’s also deeply exciting, of course, to be able to spend time looking.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And also and also you create questions on people’s vote on all the viewers makes them think.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, exactly. And this and.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): That’s what really art is about. It makes you think, yeah, of course you look at something. It has to help you to think about.
Ekow Eshun: Other things, of course, of course. And the look, the brilliant thing with all of this stuff is that I have answers. I have answers to anything. But yeah, you have the opportunity to ask questions, you have the opportunity to create environments where we might explore, and that seems to me something exciting and worthwhile.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I like it. I’m.
Ekow Eshun: Glad.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): OK, so and so tell me what? What is your future plan?
Ekow Eshun: Oh.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. What is your next few years? What is your plan?
Ekow Eshun: I mean, there’s, there’s lots of things I haven’t done yet. There’s lots of things.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I think the audience exhibitions is really exciting and your book is is great because it takes it in and into another angle. Yeah. So. So what is your next few years plan? Because the whole world, the world is changing. Yeah, I know. You know, whether we like it or not, it is evolving. So what you do and what your question is, it seems that now answers coming to you of you know there is obstacles and there’s but it’s much easier.
Ekow Eshun: Well, to go around.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): This whole.
Ekow Eshun: I mean, there’s, I feel there’s more to explore, there’s more shows to do. Of course there’s more writing to do. I want to make some films.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, have you ever made any films?
Ekow Eshun: No, but that’s not a reason not to do that.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, this is the exciting thing.
Ekow Eshun: Exactly like I feel that there’s more. So look, this is him. The the premise I start from with pretty much everything is a premise of not knowing. And by that I mean that I don’t, I try not to take for granted the world around me. I try not to take for granted the idea that, well, this is I don’t know, do you know this is Britain, We know it. We know who we know who people are, we know how we live. I try and start with a question mark about the texture of our times. I’m interested in how we can articulate, how I can articulate the complexity and what seems to me the inherent strangeness of being alive. I can always I’m very, very struck by fact that if we go back historically, at any moment in time, 10 years, 50 years, 500 years, it’s easier to recognise the oddness of a given period in the past.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You know, I was thinking that, you know, if if you’re doing all this, even 50 years ago, no one would give a would care about it, right? Black, black, who cares? You know, you know, black, yellow, like all of us. You are. You are the below, below. I mean, yeah. But now in this world, we start looking at culture, looking at colours. I mean, we want to give this equality. We want to learn about different culture. So it’s all different.
Ekow Eshun: It’s all different, yes. Doesn’t necessarily make it.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Balance. Yeah, exactly.
Ekow Eshun: Exactly.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Exactly, exactly. No equality. Come on, We have the myth that there’s no equality.
Ekow Eshun: So then what do we do? So we carry on looking, we carry on searching, we carry on trying to make sense of all of this and we recognise that in the end maybe it doesn’t make sense. But that does not invalidate the searching and the looking. And this is really what I try and do. I’m interested in the texture of the everyday.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And you always give a different point of view, which is the most important thing.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Different perspective because your shows is giving a perspective. You’re writing the book. You’re showing the different perspective of these men. Yeah, of their life.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, yeah, exactly that. And I just, I don’t know, I don’t even know what the words are sometimes. But what I’m most interested in is let’s just not take it for granted. Let’s not go along as if there’s only one inevitable way to see, to speak. This is how we end up with, I don’t know, the politics that we have. Let’s let’s stand up for the individuality of our experience and our perception of being. Let’s try and recognise and share our individual complexity. Let’s celebrate the richness and difference of each of us together, alone, separately and in company and in communion and in conversation.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Bravo, I love it. I love this. The world is turning. And what do you think about the next turning point? Do you think the people here everywhere they are, they’re going to understand, they’re going to embrace blackness, celebrating. And because you know, when I went to Africa, the most, the most interesting, the most intriguing thing thing thing for me is I mean, every when you talk to everybody that’s talked to me about tribes, they, they talk about their rituals. And I went to Ghana as well. And I thought the art scene in in Ghana was interesting, but it’s not as interesting as as Nigeria because I think with one big artist in and in and in Ghana, many younger artists, they just want to copy the same thing. And where while when I was in Nigeria, I went to different studios, they all did different thing, different, you know, just an aesthetic, different approach to art. So you, you go back to and to Ghana because it’s your, it’s like your old home, it’s like your family. What do you think about that?
Ekow Eshun: I mean, actually, I mean, I don’t know Nigeria that well in terms of its art scene. The Ghanaian art scene I’m having a really good time with at the moment because yeah, there is, there’s a lot of artists, younger artists inspired by Amoako Boafo, for instance, he’s do you know who’s I mean?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): How many how many artists are when they all paint more or.
Ekow Eshun: Less so. He’s he’s, he’s the, he’s the leading contemporary artist in Ghana right now, but he’s not the only one. In fact, I go there and I see people, you know, I see people like Gideon Appah. Or you can go to the north of Ghana and see what Ibrahim Mahama is doing is an extraordinary installation artist, an artist. He’s a really.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Great installation artist and.
Ekow Eshun: So if you look carefully, it’s not you actually see this Brett and diversity of work taking place. Elen Natsui, who for years was based in Nigeria, has gone back to Ghana and he’s 18.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, he went to his studio as well. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It’s a.
Ekow Eshun: 40 metre long stick.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s really.
Ekow Eshun: Amazing I’m actually quite so I’m actually pretty excited about what I see in Ghana and overall let’s say this in kind of more expansive terms. I think one of the things that that that that’s really interesting to me and one of the reasons why I’ve done some of the shows I’ve done like the time is always now. For instance, it’s interested in the ways that any successful artist really of any kind, one of the points about their success is that they have their own individual visual language. Yes, you know, it’s what artists that are copying aren’t interesting artists that are originally individual.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But that takes confidence.
Ekow Eshun: Yes, of course it does. Of course it does. But this is, I mean, this is the job. The job is to speak on your own terms. That’s really the role of the artist, to figure out a way you’re speaking and seeing if you’re articulating their own individual position in ways that others haven’t done before. It’s a very difficult job to do, but that’s what they do. So I find it very interesting. And overall, then what I see in Ghana or what I see here in Britain or travelling, you’re looking, let’s take sticking just to black artists, right? What I’m interested in are these different ways that all of these artists demonstrate the possibility of speaking with nuance, with depth, with complexity, with imaginative reach about blackness as a proposition. Blackness is is in the end, it’s a lived experience, but it’s also an idea. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Exactly.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, race. Scientifically speaking, race doesn’t exist. There’s no genetic difference between people of different skin colours other than the physical feature of that colour. But race exists as an imaginary that we all share. And the role I.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Think for race exists because it’s about control.
Ekow Eshun: Yeah, yes, completely.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Ekow Eshun: Completely that completely that race is invented as an idea to determine to define the difference between the superior.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And the inferiority, the sense of control.
Ekow Eshun: Exactly all of these things would live within that as an idea. And so the role of imaginative people and greater people, artists, writers, is then to say, well, what can we, if we cannot eradicate this, what can we make of it? And how then can we speak with the complexity that allows us to elucidate a position that is otherwise described as lesser? How can we get to the richness of that? How can we get to the nuance of that? How can we get to the beauty of that? This is what so much of the work does. This is what I take so much inspiration from writers. This is what they do. Toni Morrison song artists are so interesting because artists speak without words. They show us possibility, and then they leave the space for us to articulate what that might mean for us on our own terms. And this is the world, or this is one of the world’s I live in, where we look at these images, let’s say Carriage Ace Marshall. We look at the images of Carriage Ace Marshall and we discover ways of seeing and ways of being that can take us inside ourselves and then take us back out into the world with a sense of that complexity, of that possibility of blackness as an untrammelled, unknown, endlessly generative terrain, as a terrain of discovery that we can still keep walking in. That’s the world that I’m interested in exploring. That’s what I try and do with my exhibitions. That’s what I try and do as a writer. I try and talk about blackness as a site of possibility, of endless being, endless becoming. Stuart Hall, the great scholar and theorist, said something once. He said that identity is not a fixed proposition. Identity, he said, is a matter of becoming as well as being. Identity, he said, is an unfinished conversation that is always in process, always in progress, that shifts according to the times around us. The unfinished conversation is a conversation about who we are in the world. I’m dedicated. I’m dedicated to that conversation. I love that and I’ve enjoyed this conversation.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Too what the wonderful time we have together echo.
Ekow Eshun: Thank you SO.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Much thank you. Thank you for joining me.
Ekow Eshun: Thank you.
