Last week I saw the opening of a new international exhibition aimed at interrogating the legacy of our colonial past through conversations between contemporary artists, museums, archives and the wider community. Curated by D6 Culture in Transit, a dynamic Newcastle-based arts organisation, ‘Contested Desires: Constructive Dialogues’ is the result of a multi-year, large-scale creative collaboration spanning three continents, involving 22 artists and 20 arts and heritage partners.
It is a hugely ambitious project which was only able to be realised through a patchwork of funders, including the EU’s Creative Europe programme, Arts Council England, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and the Newcastle Cultural Investment Fund. Credit to these organisations for continuing to believe that the UK still has a salient role to play in the international arts scene.
Creative Newcastle within ‘Creative Europe’
Prior to Brexit the UK was one of the main beneficiaries of the ‘Creative Europe’ programme and so the rupture with our nearest neighbours caused immense damage to our creative and cultural industries as well as to our wider reputation on the world stage. Like a few other outward-looking arts organisations, D6 has sought alternative means to continue working in the European sphere, eventually opening a sister organisation in Cyprus, a country which is ironically both an EU Member State and a member of the Commonwealth, with a long and complex history of colonisation.
Cyprus is therefore naturally one of the countries involved in Contested Desires, along with Chile, Ghana, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Tunisia, and the UK. However, the exhibition now showing at the Great North Museum: Hancock until 29 July is a snapshot of this intensive collaboration, featuring the work of just seven artists.
Participants in ‘Constructive dialogues’
Patrick Ziza
Gateshead-based dancer, choreographer, and performance artist Patrick Ziza’s ‘Tracepace’ is an evolving artwork inspired by his residency at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. This holds the testimonies of those impacted by the human rights violations committed under the dictatorship of General Pinochet (1973 – 1990). Through its collections the museum remembers those who were tortured and disappeared during the military coup along with archiving the repression that subsequently took place, the resistance movement, exile, and international solidarity. The museum aims to stimulate reflection and debate and to promote respect and tolerance in order that these events never happen again.
Newcastle has always welcomed people seeking sanctuary and Chileans who fled violence and persecution, continue to make an impact on the city, sharing their music, food, and other cultural traditions. Ziza’s gallery installation of human footprints on strips of cloth with accompanying photographs documenting the artist’s ritualised process, therefore feels highly appropriate, marking a cycle of connection across the globe.
Ziza was, in fact, absent from the exhibition preview, performing in Turin, at an event with one of the other project partners, the Museo Egizio, which houses a collection of archaeological artefacts, taken from sites in Egypt.
Maria Luigia Gioffre
Meanwhile, the Italian artist, Maria Luigia Gioffre was in attendance at the Great North Museum along with a film of her work, ‘Waiting Wars,’ inspired by her residency in the Netherlands where she explored the conundrum of Fort bij Vijfhuizen, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was originally designed to defend Amsterdam from a potential enemy who never came. As Europe ramps up its military spend, Gioffre’s creative reflection in the form of chants and dance movements offers a form of personal resistance to current political trends for ever more securitisation.
Elisabeth Efua Sutherland and Isaac Nana Opoku
Two Ghanaian artists are presented in the exhibition – Elisabeth Efua Sutherland and Isaac Nana Opoku. The former, who has a background in dance and theatre, immersed herself in Newcastle’s history during her D6 residency – mapping stories of black and African people who visited the city or made it their home, including Frederick Douglass, the 19th century American abolitionist and former slave who famously stayed in Summerhill Square. Meanwhile Opoku, who is a visual artist, used the coded symbolism of indigenous weaving techniques as the inspiration for a large-scale textile comprised of folded hand-drawn notes and sketches following a residency at Rome’s Museo Della Civilta, an emporium of stolen African artefacts built during the Fascist Dictatorship of 1922-1945.
Rafael Guendelman Hales
Chilean artist, Rafael Guendelman Hales, also spent time at the Museo Della Civilta where he was struck by the maps and diaries of colonial explorers, including Padre Coppi’s explorations in Amazonia and the former Italian colonies in East Africa. His artist book weaves together the narratives of these ‘explorers’ with his own diaries of problematic encounters at the museum. The artist is engaged in an ongoing project to create an animation about a fictional explorer and the contradictory nature of exploration in places already inhabited. As part of his residencies, he has been running workshops with children in Rome, Santiago and Newcastle, and their ideas and drawings feature in the current exhibition.
Paul Nataraj
The British sound artist and academic, Paul Nataraj, undertook residencies in Hungary, Portugal, and Cyprus as well as in Newcastle. Working with sound, text and recorded archive materials, Paul’s performances and installations examine the deep entanglements of a post-colonial mixed-race circumstance, which draw on his own lived experience. At the exhibition preview, people sat and listened through headphones immersed in this rich collage of sound.
Andreas Mallouris
Cypriot artist, Andreas Mallouris, spent time in Newcastle with the queer gardening club, TopSoil, reflecting on the dissonance between UK equality law and the British colonial legacy of anti-LGBT+ legislation in Cyprus where homosexuality remained illegal until the mid-1990s, nearly 40 years after independence. Meanwhile, despite considerable progress on LGBT+ rights, the UK’s harsh immigration system includes institutional practices that demand queer people who are seeking sanctuary provide ‘proof’ of their sexual identity, re-traumatising vulnerable asylum-seekers. Mallouris’ care-taking work encompasses film, sculpture, and photography.
Constructive dialogues: conference at The Word, South Shields
Six of these artists were also present at a day-long conference held at The Word in South Shields on 17 July, where the problematic legacy of European colonialism was further discussed.
The inspiring keynote address was given by visual artist Padma Rao, Director at Sangini, who has a long history as a women’s rights and arts activist in the region, fighting for the rights and well-being of Black and minority women.
Malavika Anderson, Museum Manager at the Great North Museum: Hancock, gave a refreshingly honest presentation about the challenges and contradictions she faces in her everyday work as a British heritage professional from the post-colonial Indian sub-continent.
In the afternoon Isaac Nana Opuku led a wonderful practical workshop taking us step by step through the process of making our own symbolic textile squares answering questions about our heritage and ancestral history. I drew a page of filigree lace patterns, acknowledging my forebears who were French Huguenot refugees who settled in Nottingham and helped to found the city’s lace-making industry.
Panel discussions with the artists addressed knotty issues such as multiple identities, cultural appropriation, the return of stolen artefacts and reparations for wrongs done by colonial powers. There was a good deal of cynicism regarding ‘tick box’ decolonisation practices which do little to address ongoing inequality and systemic racism in many of our institutions. Meanwhile, nationalistic political discourse in many countries risks undoing good work already begun. We surely need more projects of this ilk if we are to address historic injustices and avoid a repetition of last summer’s race riots?
Urgent action needed on UK’s engagement in EU cultural and creative exchange
In May’s UK-EU reset summit there was a brief nod towards the value of cultural co-operation. This comes after a Fabian Society policy paper ‘Arts for Us All’ published in September 2024 which recommended the UK rejoin the Creative Europe programme as an associate member. However, the ground is now shifting with Creative Europe likely to be merged with the EU’s CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) programme under a proposal known as AgoraEU. Whilst the details are still to be hammered out between the EU institutions, the proposal looks promising in terms of increased funding.
The UK cultural and creative sector should therefore be engaging with decision-makers now. We can’t afford to be left out in the cold whilst the rest of Europe gets on with the business of cultural exchange, creative collaboration and that all important constructive dialogue which helps us to learn from the past, deal with the present and build a better and more peaceful future.
‘CONTESTED DESIRES’ at the Great North Museum: Hancock
Great North Museum: Hancock, Barras Bridge, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; in Halls 2 and 3.
Dates: until Tuesday 29 July, seven days a week.
Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm | Saturday, 10am-4pm | Sunday, 11am-4pm.
Artists, creatives and cultural organisations interested in finding out more about Culture Action Europe and a UK campaign to rejoin Creative Europe should contact Julie Ward julie4nw@gmail.com
