Living Archives Podcast Episode 1: Ingrid Pollard & Rudy Loewe

In this, the first conversation in the Living Archives series, we sit down with Ingrid Pollard and Rudy Loewe to discuss the links between their practices, the relationship between activism and art-making and playful storytelling.

Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.

Living Archives is an oral histories project co-produced by Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, what Stuart Hall calls, a “living archive of the diaspora” which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain.

Hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor, practitioners reflected on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other.

Hosted by Jessica Taylor

Edited by Chris Browne

Designs by Yolande Mutale

Music by LOX

Bios

Ingrid Pollard is a photographer, media artist and researcher. She is a graduate of the London College of Printing, Derby University,  with a Doctorate from University of Westminster  Ingrid has developed a social practice concerned with representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens based media. Her work is included in numerous collections including the UK Arts Council, Tate Britain and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She lives and works in Northumbria, UK.

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Rudy Loewe (b. 1987) is an artist visualising black histories and social politics through painting, drawing and text. They began a Techne funded practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2021. This research critiques Britain’s role in suppressing Black Power in the English-speaking Caribbean, during the 60s and 70s. Loewe is creating paintings and drawings that unravel this history included in recently declassified Foreign & Commonwealth Office records. Their approach to painting speaks to their background in comics and illustration — combining  text, image and sequential narrative.

Recent exhibitions include A Significant Threat, VITRINE Fitzrovia, London (2023); uMoya: the sacred return of lost things, Liverpool Biennial (2023); Unattributable Briefs: Act Two, Orleans House Gallery, London (2023); Unattributable Briefs: Act One, Staffordshire St., London (2022); New Contemporaries, Humber Street Gallery and South London Gallery (2022); Back to Earth, Serpentine Gallery, London (2022); and NAE Open 22, New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2022).

Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.