Episode Details

A brush with... Alberta Whittle

Season 5 Episode 3 Published 5 years, 2 months ago

Description

Alberta Whittle talks to Ben Luke about her influences in art, books, music and other media and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Over the last few years, Whittle has emerged as one of the most striking new voices in contemporary British art, especially with her collaborative film installations focusing on battling anti-blackness. Born in 1980 in Bridgetown on the Caribbean island of Barbados, Whittle moved to Birmingham in the UK as a teenager before studying at the Glasgow School of Art—she still lives in Glasgow today but spends some of her time in Barbados. This relationship between her native Caribbean and her Scottish hometown have informed her work from the start, in terms of exploring her own identity and its connection with the histories of colonialism, slavery and systemic racism. Whittle's acclaimed films are a collage of disparate moving images, including found archival material, footage shot on an iPhone and extraordinary performances filmed in beautiful high definition, among other things. In this conversation, she explains her instinct to collaborate with performers, artists and writers, reflects on her love of the art of Frida Kahlo and Hilma af Klint, among many others, and discusses the music she adores, by artists as diverse as Dancehall queen Patra and the late opera singer Jessye Norman. Plus, she answers our usual questions, including the ultimate one: what is art for? This episode is sponsored by ARTIKA.

Links for this episode

Alberta Whittle

Shows:

Alberta Whittle: Reset at Jupiter Artland

business as usual: hostile environment at Glasgow Sculpture Studios

Life Support at Glasgow Women’s Library

Sonia Boyce’s exhibition In the Castle of My Skin at MIMA, Middlesborough

British Art Show 9

Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now at Tate Britain

Sex Ecologies at Kunsthal Trondheim

Scotland + Venice

Discussed in the interview: