The Botanical Mind

Resonant Networks: Art, Place & Practice is a new two-part podcast series by interdisciplinary artist Evan Ifekoya, exploring the infrastructures that sustain creative practice in Lagos and beyond. Episode Two features Amanda Iheme, Igbo-Nigerian architectural photographer, writer and educator, in conversation with Ifekoya on the intersections of art, psychology, and the architectural landscape of Lagos.

Resonant Networks: Art, Place & Practice is a new two-part podcast series by interdisciplinary artist Evan Ifekoya, exploring the infrastructures that sustain creative practice in Lagos and beyond. In Episode One, Ifekoya is joined by Moni Aisida, Executive Director (GAS), and Magda Kaggwa, Comms & Projects Manager (Yinka Shonibare Foundation), for a conversation on building cultural ecosystems and nurturing artistic exchange.

Three of the New Curators, Nailah Reine Barnes, Jasmine Lee and Ugbad Yussuf sat down for a discussion around 'akâmi-' by Duane Linklater with Ethel (Trapper) Linklater, Tobias Linklater and Grey Plumes.

To accompany her artist commission for RALLY 2025, Anna Howard and our Public Programme Curator Matt Williams were in discussion about how her piece 'Record' will be realised at the festival.

Artist Richard Wright and our Director Martin Clark discuss how Wright's artistic practices have been informed and influenced over time. Wright also gives an insight into his site-specific approach to painting and how his wall painting in Camden Art Centre's Gallery Three was manifested, produced and executed. 

Artist Gregg Bordowitz and Josephine Pryde discuss what it means to make art in the present moment and explore how established infrastructures shape and influence artistic practice.

To mark the first UK publication of 'American Genius: A Comedy', author Lynne Tillman is joined by Emily LaBarge and Michael Bracewell for a discussion at Camden Art Centre.

Curator and writer Isabel Seligman discusses Matthew Krishanu’s works on paper and their relationship to his wider painting practice. 

This episode marks the launch of Hedva's latest book, Your Love is Not Good. It features a reading and discussion with esteemed art critic Philippa Snow. The episode provides an insightful exchange, bridging literature, art, and contemporary issues at the time of recording in Autumn 2023.   Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, and Rewire Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, Frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, and is anthologised in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages.   Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater.

The discussion recorded in Autumn 2023 is complemented by readings from Innominate by Pearce and Ill Feelings by Hattrick. These works reflect on the character of "queer evidence" and their shared interest in blending autobiography with historical narrative.   Naomi Pearce is a writer and curator. Recent projects include Good Bad Books? At the Barbican (co-programmed with Anna Bunting-Branch) and Almost Conceptual, Matt’s Gallery, both in London. Her writing has been published by Art Monthly, Happy Hypocrite, Kunstverein Munich, e-flux Criticism and The White Review, among others. From 2018-2022 she was a member of the Rita Keegan Archive Project, a social history and curatorial collective, whose recent activity includes an exhibition at South London Gallery and the publication Mirror Reflecting Darkly with MIT Press. Innominate is her first novel.   Alice Hattrick’s criticism and interviews have appeared in publications such as frieze magazine, Art Review and The White Review. Alice’s work has most recently been included in Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art: HEALTH (ed. Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). They are the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose. In 2016, they were shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Ill Feelings, their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021.

With Martin Clark, Darian Leader, Ralph Rugoff and Mohammed Sami Building upon themes and visual quotations from Sami’s exhibition , The Point 0, this panel discussion examines contemporary painting and its capacity to exist as repositories of information, invoking subjective interpretations of private and public experiences through various material and technical processes.

How can discourses between seemingly disparate disciplines inspire art? Tenant of Culture and historian Arwen P. Mohun reflect on the importance of research in their respective practices and discuss the influence of Mohun’s book Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 on the exhibit Soft Acid.  

This podcast is led by DeForrest Brown Jr, author of Assembling a Black Counter Culture, in conversation with Steve Goodman (aka Kode9 and founder of Hyperdub) and Nkisi (co-founder of NON Worldwide). Collectively they discuss the migration of techno music from North America to Europe with an initial focus on the situated contexts of the dance music scene in London and across the U.K. during the early 1990s. With reference to techno’s spiritual and technological origins, evolution, and relationship with the Hardcore Continuum movement. Techno at the End of the Future – Episode 1: London was produced by Zakia Sewell.

Episode 2 focuses on past, present and future of the Detroit-Berlin axis. By means of an interview collage, writer and Make Techno Black Again activist DeForrest Brown, Jr., Lerato Khathi aka Lakuti (founder of Uzuri Recordings and the Bring Down the Walls initiative), Boris Dolinski (resident DJ at Berghain) and Mark Ernestus (musician and founder of the Hard Wax record store) explore how the rapid growth of techno and club culture in Germany after 1989 relates to the music’s origins in the Black neighbourhoods of the post-industrialised city of Detroit.

For this episode of Conversations, Dave Beech and Esther Leslie navigate Olga Balema’s installation Computer to examine a range of formal, material and theoretical concerns. With a focus on the geographies of production, digital processes, architectural grids, artistic labour, and how domestic spaces have also functioned as workplaces since the onset of the pandemic. In doing so, they reflect on Walter Benjamin’s writing on the reception, engagement and interaction of the horizontal plane in art, design and media, whilst interweaving historical narratives regarding Goethe’s fascination with the Ginkgo plant. Dave Beech is an artist and writer. He is a Reader in Art and Marxism at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art (Brill 2020), Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production(Pluto 2019) and Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill 2015), which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Beech is an artist who worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His solo art practice revisits the critical traditions of photomontage, documentary photography, digital print, the photo archive and the photobook. Esther Leslie is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her books include Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde; Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry; Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage; Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form, and the milk projects, Deeper in the Pyramid and The Inextinguishable (both with Melanie Jackson). Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

On March 20th, 1980, Mount St. Helens (traditionally known as Lawetlat’la or Loowit) erupted. Rocks boiled, rivers evaporated into clouds, and Spirit Lake—a site connected with Indigenous whistling spirits known as Tsiatko—was smothered under a blanket of pyrolized trees. As part of a continuing series of works under the “Echomaking” umbrella, in this audio essay, Kristen Gallerneaux (Métis-Wendat) uncovers the sonic, material, and poetic resonances connected to this story. She will focus on the contagion effect of folklore born out of cataclysmic events, new mineral formats, and recovering knowledge within charged landscapes affected by geological and ecological transformation. This recording was made on land occupying the ancestral, traditional and contemporary homelands of the Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox), Peoria, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), and Myaamia people.  The people of these nations were forced from their land through the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. Kristen Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University). She is also the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. In 2018, she was a Future Thought speaker at Moogfest and premiered the experimental short film, The Hum. She has presented at Unsound editions Dislocation (2014), Presence (2018), and Intermission (2020). In 2017, she spoke about the history of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer and taught an electronic music production workshop at Pop Kultur Berlin. She has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, the Quietus, and Herman Miller’s WHY magazine. She has published on wide-ranging topics like mathematics in mid-century design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first mousepad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her book, High Static, Dead Lines, is available via Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press in the United States. Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.

Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and curator Sophie J Williamson, consider how time, history and circadian rhythms imprint themselves on our bodies. In Being Taken for Granite, Ursula K. Le Guin described a kinship with mud as a body that yields, reacts, imprints and responds. Taking this text as a guide they will unravel relationships between the body and the soil from which it is born, considering ways of archeologically excavating and reading bodies – human, non-human and geological – to understand their ever-present dialogue with the past. From the sedimentary strata of mountains to the narratives secreted in our own gestures, Okpokwasili and Williamson discuss the body as an accumulation and amalgamation of historic interactions. They will consider how lineage, past lives and trauma secret themselves in bodies, and how these silences resurface to reveal our entangled pasts, form us in the contemporary and redirect futures. Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer and writer. Her performance work has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, the 10th Annual Berlin Biennale, and Jacob’s Pillow, among other institutions. Her work includes two Bessie Award–winning productions: Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance and Bronx Gothic. She has held residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Rauschenberg Foundation Captiva Residency, and New York Live Arts, where she was a Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Okpokwasili is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. Sophie J Williamson is the initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a multidisciplinary research platform focused on the intimacies of being with the geological. Williamson was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre (2013 – 21), prior to which she was part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009–13) and worked at the Singapore Biennale (2006), Venice Biennale (2007) and Manchester Asian Triennale (2008). Her writing has appeared in frieze, Art Monthly, Elephant and Aesthetica, among others. Residencies and awards include: V-A-C Research Prize Recipient (2020), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Curatorial Fellow (2020); and Gasworks Curatorial Fellow (2016). Her anthology, Translation, part of the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press – Documents of Contemporary Art series, brings together writings by artists, poets, authors and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil. Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.

Professor Louise Steel examines the history of clay and how the cultural and technological knowledges of the earliest settled farming and urban communities were informed by people’s engagements with clay.       As one of the first mineral substance to be transformed from a malleable to a durable state. Many societies perceive it as an animate substance permeated with "a spiritual energy and life-force" that retains a "thing-power", allowing it to be shaped into various forms.[1] [2]     Building on her ongoing research Steel looks at the agency of matter to illustrate how the distinct capacities of clay (in relationship with water and fire) shaped and facilitated, but equally constrained, people’s behaviour, resulting in distinctive social and material worlds. Focusing on the vitality of matter, Steel considers how “the materials themselves are determining—even actively responsible—for the final shape and manner by which the finished article can manifest”. [3]   [1] Boivin, N. 2012. From veneration to exploitation: Human engagement with the mineral world. In Soils, Stones and Symbols: Cultural Perceptions of the Mineral World; Boivin, N., Owoc, M.A., (Eds). London: Routledge, pp. 1–29.  [2] Bennett, J. 2010.Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  [3] Attala, L. and Steel, L. 2019.Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Human Body> Cardiff: Wales University Press.  Louise Steel is Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Her research focuses on materiality and the interaction of objects in people's social worlds. She is series editor of Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Wales Press, and is currently editing a volume on Earthy Matters: Exploring Human Interactions with Earth, Soil and Clay. Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.

John Merrick and Alina Kolar discuss the history of The Radical Thinkers series from Verso. To reflect on how it enabled them to discover and engage with the ideas presented by favoured radical thinkers and the challenges of publishing at large. John Merrick is a writer based in London, where he is an editor at Verso Books. He has had work published in New Left Review, Boston Review, TLS, Jacobin, Tribune, New Statesman, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about class, culture and the North of England.

The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Maya Goodfellow and Alina Kolar speak about the understanding of the word Radical in relation to Immigration and Borders, Affect and Effect of Time, with regards to the ongoing impact of the pandemic, and what is within and beyond our control. Maya Goodfellow is a writer, researcher and academic. She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera and the Independent. She received her PhD from SOAS, University of London and is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, out now in paperback with Verso.