Sound, Space and Identity

Sound artists Ain Bailey, Chris Weaver and John Wynne talked about their practice and research at the 29 October 2015 Stuart Hall Library Research Network event. It was an informative and interesting evening, and, we believe, the first event in the library dealing with audio art practice and research. 

Ain Bradley

Each of the artists engages in different ways with identity, space, field recordings, representation and the problem of the ethnographic gaze.

Chris Weaver

The audience learned about the concept of identity expressed in the form of a sonic autobiography and how ambient sound can be seen as an indicator of prosperity. We listened to audio-collage compositions, field recordings in Pakistan and speakers of almost extinct languages from Northern Canada and South Africa. 

John Wynne

Many other original ideas and research centering on the acoustic world were revealed in the course of the presentations. You can read more about the presenters on our webpage, and listen to the audio recordings of the event (see below)

No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990

Keith Piper, Errol Lloyd, Makeda Coaston and Dr. Michael McMillan at Stuart Hall Library, October 2015

The Stuart Hall Library Research Network returned last week with an event about the Guildhall Art Gallery's exhibition ‘No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990’ (10 July 2015 - 24 January 2016)

If you missed the event, the audio recordings of the talks and discussion are available at the bottom of this post.


Curators Makeda Coaston and Dr. Michael McMillan and artist Errol Lloyd talked about their archival research for the exhibition, the curatorial challenges and recalled personal experiences from the blossoming of Black British Art during the period.

No Colour Bar features art work from twenty Black British artists from the 1960s to the 1990s. The speakers explained why the focus of the exhibition is Eric and Jessica Huntley; radical activists and founders of a London publishing house and bookshop. The Huntleys played a vital role in promoting black culture and visual arts in the 60s and 70s and the impressive recreation of their Walter Rodney Bookshop is the centrepiece of the exhibition.

Read more

LETTER FROM ABROAD: Encountering Jozi Style

Dr Christine Checinska

Associate Researcher, VIAD, University of Johannesburg

Founder and Convener of the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group, Iniva, London

Exhibition Installation View, Hypersampling Identities, Jozi Style, FADA Gallery (Ground Floor), University of Johannesburg. Photograph by Thys Dullaart, Image Courtesy of VIAD Research Centre

Groundbreaking, energetic, innovative, vibrant, robust, boisterous, vital…

All words that could be used to describe the University of Johannesburg, Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre’s, (VIAD), recent series of ‘Encounters’ designed to examine the refashioning of masculinities within contemporary black cultural movements in Johannesburg.

Under the title (Re)-Fashioning Masculinities: Identity, Difference, Resistance, the ‘Encounters’ took as their departure point the concurrent exhibition ‘Hypersampling Identities: Jozi Style.’[1] The exhibition showcased the work of young homegrown male designers and design collectives as well as that of photographers, sartorial groups and ‘trend setters’. The Isikothane were amongst the featured groups, whilst the Sartists and the Khumbula were amongst the prominent design collectives on show. The cultural practitioners included Jamal Nxedlana. Many of the contributors referenced the Pantsulas and the Swenkas; more established black cultural movements. I was invited to deliver key lectures and a performative response. Since the work that I have been engaged in over the past fifteen years, including the setting up of the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group here in the Stuart Hall Library, has been concerned with the relationship between fashion, textiles, culture and race, I was only to happy to do this.

Exhibition Installation View, Hypersampling Identities, Jozi Style, FADA Gallery (Ground Floor), University of Johannesburg. Photograph by Thys Dullaart, Image Courtesy of VIAD Research Centre

Our three-day debate wrestled with the concept of ‘hypersampling’ itself, the performance of masculine identities through the intermeshing of music, dance, gesture and dress, the ever-present hierarchies of power and value based primarily on race and culture, self-representation by referencing the past and by referencing an imagined future, the consumption of (global) African styles, critical ‘whiteness’/critical ‘blackness’, i.e. positionality and mindful analysis, and the notion of the Black Dandy. As expected, and indeed as I had hoped, we raised far more questions than we were able to answer.

The astute facilitation of the VIAD team – Leora Farber, Claire Jorgensen, Maria Fidel Rigueros – ensured that the tensions between voices, that at times clearly sat on the opposite sides of a given argument, were held and used to creative effect, generating un-familiarly rich intellectual discussions. Particularly refreshing was the insistence on the foregrounding of the work produced by the practitioners. This calls to mind the artist Sonia Boyce’s recent critique of the confounding brushing aside of certain artists’ work in order to solely focus on issues connected to race. The two must be addressed; the work itself and the political debates emanating from the work.

Ó Christine Checinska, October 4^th 2015

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[1] ‘Hypersampling Identities: Jozi Style’ was produced by VIAD in association with VIAD post-doctoral fellow Daniela Goeller and Lifestyle and Pop Culture Trend Analyst, Nicola Cooper. 

New displays: Fanon and Black Phoenix

To mark the 20th anniversary of Iniva’s exhibition ‘Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire’ held at The Institute of Contemporary Art in May 1995 and the current Autograph ABP exhibition ‘Frantz Fanon’ by Bruno Boudjelal at Rivington Place (2 October – 5 December 2015) we've created a new display of selected works by or about Frantz Fanon available in the library.

An upcoming symposium at the ICA on the 31st of October will reflect on the relevance of these ideas today and asks 'Where are we now in relation to structural violence, de-colonising culture and relations, and the power of aesthetics and its explorations of complex formations of racial identities?'

You can also currently see a display in the library of the three existent issues of Black Phoenix, Rasheed Araeen's pioneering journal dedicated to post-colonial visual arts. The first issue contained his 'Preliminary notes for a Black Manifesto'. The journal later became Third Text, which is still going strong today.

At Home with Vanley Burke at IKON Gallery, Birmingham

22 July – 27 September 2015  

A reflection by Dr Christine Checinska, VIAD, University of Johannesburg

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Referred to as the ‘Godfather of Black British photography’, Burke (born Jamaica, 1951) is also a dedicated archivist and collector of objects relating to black culture in Britain. Ikon presents At Home with Vanley Burke, an exhibition of the entire contents of Burke’s flat in Nechells, north-east Birmingham.[1]

Indeed the entire first floor of the gallery is given over to almost the entire contents of Mr Burke’s flat; everything save his bed, his computer (a MAC) and his desk I believe.

What follows is a reflection on what is a totally enthralling show - one that gives the viewer not only a unique insight into the artist’s world but also a glimpse into the everyday worlds of Britain’s African and Caribbean communities.

Entering the space, via a white-walled corridor in which paintings, photographs, posters and ‘African’ busts have been hung, the viewer immediately becomes part of what is essentially a living archive. This living archive shifts and changes in emphasis and energy, depending on who inhabits it. A large mirror at the entrance ensures that we are all included in the show as accidental exhibits,[2] just as Burke himself becomes the subject of his own enquiry. As one moves through the space, the overriding feeling is one of being 'wrapped in domesticity'; a particular kind of domesticity that is African Caribbean at it’s root but is connected to the basic human need for a sense of home, for a sense of belonging. But it is not only the distinctive décor that places this space within our community; the near constant soul, ska and reggae soundtrack emanating from the stereo in Burke’s living room provides an unmistakably Caribbean diaspora pulse.

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Walking from Burke’s reconstructed office, to the front room, to the kitchen and back, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the packing and unpacking of his library. In his essay Benjamin considers the relationship that a book collector has to his books. He suggests that the act of collecting is of equal importance to the collector as the collection itself; the act of acquiring possessions linked as it is, according to Benjamin, to memory. The ‘poles of order and disorder’ that the collector attempts to straddle by creating order out of the chaos of books, in Benjamin’s case, parallel our attempts as Caribbean migrants to hold the tension between attempting to settle in a new homeland and the longing to return to the old one, whilst all the while navigating a ‘Mother Country’ that did not always welcome us as a good mother should. The fastidious tidiness of the piles of VHS videos, the towers of newspapers, the books, souvenirs, trinkets, golliwogs, shackles and other ironmongery relating to enslavement, not to mention the many photographs, carvings, collages and paintings, seem to create a precarious order out of such disorderly emotions.

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Just as Benjamin’s relationship to his numerous volumes is not based on an emphasis on function and ‘utilitarian value’, the unused objects in Burke’s front room, for example, metamorphose into symbols, able to unlock memories – the artist’s and our own. Benjamin observes that the personal memories of the archivist stem from the intimate relationship between collector and object. It is as though the objects bare a trace of the owner: ‘not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.’ The things inside Burke’s home, through their initial acquisition and handling, bare traces of their life journeys, at once personal history and, in my opinion, an underrepresented aspect of British social history. The reconstructed bedroom is home to a 1950s prom-dress belonging to Burke’s mother, for example, and the dressing table is the resting place for a tablecloth hand-stitched by her mapping different points in her life by capturing the signatures, and therefore memories of certain people that she has met. There are also the now familiar gaudy porcelain figurines nestling inside brightly colored, starched crochet doilies - once highly fashionable, but now highly kitsch. In a sense, over time these unused objects increase in perceived value and become ‘sacrelized’, to cite Igor Kopytoff. This is especially the case for the objects destined to be re-housed in the Library of Birmingham archives. This is precisely the sort of transformation that intrigues Burke. He states: ‘I collect these things but they are not mine.’ And ‘there is a sense in which the collection has gone beyond me.’

At Home with Vanley Burke, Ikon Gallery 2015
Photo: Stuart Whipps 

Perhaps the most surprising discovery about Burke is the way in which he has brought his creativity to bare across so many genres beyond photography. There are barbed wire sculptures, costumes including a man’s suit jacket fashioned out of the pages from the book of Genesis, collages such as the painstakingly constructed Council of Voices (a nine year project), large-scale naïve paintings and carvings. He freely admits that his home is not about preciousness. It is about the expression of a remarkable creative energy – the artworks are nailed to the walls. One is left with the impression that Burke’s creative practices and collecting are unbounded and unceasing.

As curator Watkins concludes; Vanley Burke’s home truly is a ‘cabinet of wonderful curiosities’!

Christine Checinska, 26th August 2015 All rights reserved. Images courtesy IKON Gallery
 More details on the Ikon Gallery website 

[1] Text from IKON exhibition guide

[2] Furthermore, on the day of my visit I was served tea in the ‘kitchen’ and challenged to a game of dominoes by the artist.

Stuart Hall Library Research Network: Call for proposals

Would you like to present your research at one of our upcoming events?

Image © Christa Holka

We are now programming for our summer and autumn library talks season and are looking for relevant proposals. The Stuart Hall Library Research Network is a forum for researchers, artists, academics, curators, students and activists to introduce an aspect of their work. It is a meeting place for the discussion of practice-based or more conventional forms of research that may include: visual arts; film and media; curatorial practice; cultural studies; cultural activism; postcolonial studies; literary studies, including criticism and theory.

We are looking for exciting and engaging ways of uncovering your research. This might include individual presentations, presentations in pairs, in conversation/dialogue, or presenting a group project.

If you are interested in presenting at a future Research Network session, send a 200 word proposal outlining your topic to the Library Manager. The meetings will take place in the Stuart Hall Library from 6.30 -8.30pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes long (2 presenters per session). Previous themes have included

• The cultural construction of identity
• Diasporic art and culture
• Issues of race, diversity and colonialism in art education and practice
• Migration, post-colonialism and globalisation
• The politics and philosophy of race, gender and identity in society and culture
• The intellectual legacy of Stuart Hall and cultural studies

This is not intended as an exhaustive list and all presentations on practice or research that in some way resonates with the activities of Iniva are welcomed. We also welcome proposals which are suitable for our Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group which looks at textiles and dress as part of wider visual culture from a decidedly cross-cultural perspective.

There is no fixed deadline but proposals are sought as soon as possible. 

More information

Nicholas Brown Library and Information Manager library@iniva.org

Blackamoors, Noble Savages and Mungo Macaronis: the Black Male Body in Fashion Media

The Stuart Hall Library Animateur, Dr Christine Checinska  will be speaking at the Black Portraitures Conference in Florence. Christine will use Stuart Hall’s work as a departure point from which to discuss the image of the black man in fashion media. Christine has kindly provided the summary of her conference paper for readers of our blog (see below).

"Stuart Hall, commenting on the recurring (mis)-representations of the black male body, noted that for each depiction of the savage and the slave there exists a less threatening image of the black as a docile servant and ever-merry minstrel or clown. This paper argues that the Blackamoors, noble savages and Mungo Macaronis present in contemporary fashion media are little more than manifestations of the savage, the slave, the servant and the clown, revealing traces of the ambivalent colonial fantasies embedded in the field. How do these images shape our ideals and identities? How do they relate to self-representation and the everyday performance of black masculinities?

Since the slave trade, images of the black male body have not only adorned advertisements for ‘exotic’ colonial produce like tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco but also the surfaces of objects employed in the ritual of dressing such as boxes of bleaching agent, tins of shoe polish, hair pins, snuff boxes and trinkets. As early as the sixteenth century fashionable members of the English aristocracy donned black masks at courtly functions and, in some instances, painted themselves black as Mores. By the eighteenth century, the image of the black male body, partly through its association with expensive products, had become a marker of status, wealth and style. But could the (mis)-represented black male body, now an ‘object’ of desire, ever be deemed beautiful? How does today’s vernacular black male dress trouble certain Western notions of beauty? How does it challenge Western notions of black masculinities?

Through close readings of historical and contemporary imagery, this paper traces the origins and continued presence of Blackamoors, noble savages and Mungo Macaronis – each one a form of ‘black face’ that renders the individual invisible. It considers the tension between (mis)-representation and self-representation. Vernacular black male dress is seen as a form of counter-gaze able to temporarily overturn invisibility, as masculine identities that break free of the stereotypes noted by Hall are refashioned via the strategic tilt of a hat, or the glint of a bracelet, or the flash of a neon coloured lining on an otherwise sombre outfit."

Dr Christine Checinska Biography

Dr Christine Checinska is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of East London, a Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg and the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur at Iniva, Rivington Place, London. Christine’s work as a writer and curator is situated at the meeting point between fashion, textiles and contemporary art. A primary concern is the relationship between cloth, culture and race from the perspective of the African Diasporas. Her recent publications include Reconfiguring Diasporic Identities in Beyond Borders, John Hutnyk (ed.), Pavement Books, (2012) and Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles, Jessica Hemmings (ed.), Bloomsbury Publications, (2014). She combines all this with her work as a design consultant in the fashion industry.

Audio recordings of on 30 April. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss

John Weiss and Althea McNish, Stuart Hall Library

We are very grateful to Althea and John for an insightful and interesting evening at the April Clothes Cloth and Culture Group. Althea is an internationally successful textile designer who came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s. She studied as an architect, at the London College of Printing and at the Royal College of Art. Althea's vibrant textile designs were sold by Liberty's, Hull Traders and other textile companies throughout Europe.

Fabric by Althea McNish

Althea's husband, John Weiss, is an architect and jewellery designer. John and Althea talked entertainingly about their lives together and the inspiration sources for Althea's textile designs. They touched topics as diverse as the origins of their surnames, the royal family, Althea's experience as a migrant to Britain and how she worked with technicians in the textile industry. Read more 

some of the audience and a sample of Althea's fabric

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group. Dr. Althea McNish in conversation with John Weiss.

Join us for this free talk Thursday 30 April 2015 6:30 - 8:30 pm at Stuart Hall Library

Dr. Althea McNish is a painter and textile designer, she came to Britain from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1950s to study at the London College of Printing and the Royal College of Art.

Best known for her innovative and successful textile and surface pattern designs, Althea worked with Liberty & Co., Hull Traders and international companies. Examples of the range of fabrics designed by Althea can be seen on her website

Althea and was associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement. Her art work draws on diverse cultural influences.

In 2011 Althea was featured in the exhibition RCA Black organised by The Royal College of Art in collaboration with the African and African Caribbean Design Diaspora (AACDD). The exhibition celebrated art and design by African and African-Caribbean graduates and students; a group who are often marginalised within the creative industries.

Althea describes her experiences as an artist and designer in her interview with John Weiss in Building Britannia: Life Experience With Britain, 2009. She talks about how she worked with the major international textile companies, her use of colour and 'tropicalisation' of English flowers.

"In the context of the unacknowledged contribution and influence of the Black artist, Althea McNish had a visible effect on British textiles and thus on, and in, British culture" John Weiss 1998

Dr. McNish works in partnership with her husband, designer John Weiss, who will interview her for this Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group event

Talk: researching a parasol from Goldsmiths Textile Collection

Christine Checinska and Ruby Hoette's recent talk at Goldsmiths is now available online.

It is part of Goldsmiths Objects (In)Sight project which "aims to develop object-based research skills and foster cross-disciplinary thinking".

Christine and Rubys' session focused on a parasol from the Goldsmiths Textile Collection. Their talk is part of a series delivered by academics or practitioners from different disciplines. In each session the speakers chose an object from Goldsmiths Special Collections & Archives, or Textile Collection and shared their ideas on research methods into the artefact.

Christine Checinska is the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur and founder of our Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group.