Hew Locke in conversation
Wednesday 5 July 2023 6.30 - 7.30pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre | Burlington Gardens or digital livestream
Join artist Hew Locke RA and writer Melissa Chemam for a conversation exploring whether creativity can inspire connection.
This event can be enjoyed in person at the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, or via a digital livestream.
In this talk, artist Hew Locke RA discusses art and connection, inspired by the RA’s Summer Exhibition theme ‘Only Connect’.
Hew Locke produces works that invite us to engage with the past. Chaired by writer Melissa Chemam, this conversation explores the ways in which we re-enact, re-imagine and re-perform history.
Looking to the future, this discussion also focuses on new opportunities for creative connection, and the importance of art in bringing us closer together.
Hew Locke RA spent his formative years in Guyana before returning to the UK to study art, later completing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. His work explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, and how cultures fashion identities through visual symbols of authority. In 2022, Hew was awarded Tate Britain’s Duveen Hall commission (culminating in his work The Procession) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Facade Commission, as well as becoming a Royal Academician. His work is held in numerous collections, including the Government Art Collection, the V&A and the British Museum.
Melissa Chemam is a journalist, broadcaster and writer on art, music, social change, multiculturalism, African affairs, North/South relations, and activism. She is the author of the book Massive Attack - Out of the Comfort Zone (2019), and has been published by BBC Culture, Al Jazeera, RFI English, Art UK, CIRCA Art Magazine, the Public Art Review, the New Arab, The Independent, Reader’s Digest, UP Mag and Skin Deep. She also worked as a journalism lecturer and as the writer in residence at the Arnolfini art centre, in Bristol, from 2019 to 2022.
The event will be accompanied by speech to text transcription courtesy of Stagetext.
This event is supported by the Natalia Cola Foundation.
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Hew Locke will be back at the Academy next year, his work will be part of this great project:
Entangled Pasts, 1768-now
Art, Colonialism and Change
3 February - 28 April 2024
Main Galleries | Burlington House
JMW Turner and Ellen Gallagher. Joshua Reynolds and Yinka Shonibare. John Singleton Copley and Hew Locke. Past and present collide in one powerful exhibition.
Next spring, we bring together over 100 major contemporary and historic works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism – and how it may help set a course for the future.
Artworks by leading contemporary artists including Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien will be on display alongside works by artists from the past 250 years including Joshua Reynolds, JMW Turner and John Singleton Copley – creating connections across time which explore questions of power, representation and history.
In the setting of our Main Galleries, experience large-scale works including the life-size painted cut-out figures of Lubaina Himid’s installation Naming the Money, and Hew Locke’s Armada, a flotilla of ‘votive boats’ recalling different periods and places. Plus, powerful paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings and prints by El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Mohini Chandra and Betye Saar.
Informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past, this exhibition engages around 50 artists connected to the RA to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.
This exhibition will contain themes of slavery and racism, and historical racial language and imagery. Please contact us for more information.
Our Friends preview days take place 31 January, 10am–6pm, 1 February, 10am–6pm, and 2 February, 10am–9pm.
#EntangledPasts
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