So, last time we were talking about Nintendo started as a trading card game, LCD calculator. The man seemed bored, just playing around with it to pass the time, and Gunpei was like, hey, what if I use that same IC circuit, integrated circuit, to display characters instead of numbers. And the Game & Watch was created. It proved to be Nintendo's first foray into electronics. From there they had had the extendable arm, and you could tell now that the 80s were coming around the advent of the shift from a large single centralized PCs, big servers from which remote terminals accessed it remotely. That evolved into individual PCs, so essentially everybody had their own personal computers. Now this shift phased over from centralized arcades with big boxes to more home family entertainment centers, and Atari was getting on the bandwagon or creating, building it, maybe. So, Nintendo smart enough to tell Jin to make portable. Of course the technology wasn't extremely advanced, but it was such a novel concept that you could play a game portable, not plugged in, not hooked to a large TV. So that, that was revolutionary for the early 1980s. So, Nintendo, next phase, after the Game & Watch was their famous arcade title, radar scope. About to see the invention of Donkey Kong, remember Yamauchi, who was the president, the owner of Nintendo, so he's delegating and although he has smart smart very creative designers such as Miyamoto and Yokoi, under him he has to direct them and allocate funds for the right projects that he thinks are going to be a hit. So we're leading up to the invention of Donkey Kong Mario, Game Boy, well the NES and a couple of years later, the Game Boy. Miyamoto Shigiro, Miyamoto's working on a masterpiece, which in a way it kind of was, it's still very, very much an enduring video game, an enduring artifact in video game history. Of course, Shiro is based on the popular, very, very popular movie, ongoing movie theme. So, Miyamoto was the main guy and he was given Yokoi as an assistant and he taught, and Yokoi taught Miyamoto all he knew about game design to get him started. For the most part, Miyamoto was left alone to create this game, Donkey Kong. Stages, Miyamoto wanted to get the license to create a game based on Popeye actually, but he wasn't able to. So he had to choose, he had to create his own characters though. As Miyamoto was developing Donkey Kong, the playable character, the guy that the user would be playing, was known as Jump Man, probably not too hard to figure out, it's because he was able to jump. He'd be up against the villain known as Donkey Kong. It's the first platformer in which the character could jump over obstacles, which generally caused some to deem it the first platformer. When the game was finally finished, they sent it to America and the few employees of the company didn't like what they saw. Rather than have his new genre, they wanted Miyamoto to create a game with a maze or a shooting genre like Pac-Man or Asteroid. I don't know what I'm doing with my hands there, but they later approved it, but weren't sure about the name Donkey Kong in Jump Man. Yamauchi allowed them to change the name of Jump Man, though he refused to budge when it came to Donkey Kong, so he liked that. When trying to come up with the name for the main character, Nintendo of America's landlord went in the room demanding his rent check, guess what his name was? Mario Segale. Game was sent to two bars in Washington. By the end of the week, the arcades were chock full of quarters. Needless to say, the employees of Nintendo of America were shocked to hear this and immediately ordered replacement chips for the unused radarscope units. Nintendo had only five employees in the American branch, cutted the radarscope units and prepared them for, so that was kind of where we left off last time. It was the radarscope emulate games like Pong from Atari and Space Launcher, but it was a it was an arcade unit. Yeah, I guess it was just because it wasn't it just wasn't a good game. People didn't like it and they had created and actually manufactured a bunch of units to sell to America and they were industrious enough and creative enough and resourceful enough to essentially re-tool and modify the electronics that were in radarscope and recode it with new software to create Donkey Kong, so there now that Donkey Kong was a hit. They were running against the clock, you know, trying. Yeah, so that's fascinating that the American Division of Nintendo just relayed on their rent and their landlord was named Mario and I guess he had enough character to probably get a little deduction on either that or they were that impressed with this guy's personality that they wanted him to be the spearhead. This happened in a very short period. Donkey Kong became the next big worldwide hit. It was reported that the game was so successful that Nintendo in Japan couldn't keep up with the American demand for the game and this was 1982. All right, during this time period, Yamuuchi designated Masayuki Uemura as the leader of a group who would envision who would envision a home console that was technologically superior to all the other systems on the market, though was at the same time more affordable. Their dream would take a few years until it was realized. Capitalism had its finest right there, Universal Studios, though had taken notice of Donkey Kong and they had concluded having fringed on their King Kong license. He started with the small fry first and attacked Kaleiko who had acquired the license to distribute Donkey Kong from Nintendo in the US. Of course, they passed the bill and Nintendo was given a letter saying that they had to pay royalties for every unit they sold. They would have to cut a little small check, or maybe not so small, relatively, to Nintendo or Universal. Nintendo of America's Howard Lincoln and the rest of the NOA, Nintendo of America, agreed not to give in to the threats, so MCA and Universal sent them to court. The whole gist of this is that the ultimate decision boiled down to the fact that Universal, although they had created or been the studios in which a lot of King Kong movies were made, the idea, whatever you call it, the actual intellectual property called King Kong was actually at that time already part of the public domain, which means you can use it. Everyone charged you royalties and actually Universal then had to pay Nintendo 1.8 million dollars in damages.  It actually says that, that's why I emphasized it.  But so anyways, Nintendo earned their feathers, so to speak, their stripes. In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicom, and so in 1983 Nintendo built a new manufacturing plant in Uji City, that's UJI, which would replace the one built in 1950 for toys mainly. Same year Nintendo actually got on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Nintendo's about to blow now as they say. They were, they just bet, they had the foresight, the vision to see that technology in computer chips, which were the driving force behind the implementations of new technologies, were only getting cheaper, smaller, faster, more powerful I guess you'd say. Basically I gotta catch myself because this is a really long article and there's absolutely gonna have to be a part three. Make it interesting because there's lots of bits that definitely aren't interesting. So Yamuuchi, like any successful businessman, relied on negotiation tactics to get lower prices for his raw materials, which in this case is computer chips for his Famicom consoles. There was one company that was holding out on a man where they were charging a hell of a lot more than 2,000 yen per chip, computer chip at the time. What was it called? They really wanted to do it but they don't say what type of chip it was. Anyways, he bargained, he hackled them down by telling them that they would be purchasing 3 million chips in the next two years. So the guys are like, okay, when you bring your unit volume up to the millions, you can make a lot of money. So no doubt that was a big number for them. End of the development stage, Nintendo had to ramp up the price of the Famicom. So this is that, I'll show a picture, hopefully I already did, but it's that red and white precursor to Nintendo's entertainment system, the original NES, which most people think of as the original Nintendo console. So they had to ramp it up by $25 because unexpected costs. 1983 was $100, which is probably like, I'd say it's probably similar. Let me look it up, came $240 today. So relatively, compared to the $400 consoles you're getting today, I think that's what they are, right? It's not too bad. But let's get on the Mario. So 1983 wouldn't only be the year that marked the release of Famicom, the Famicom, the family computer, this was also the year when Mario Brothers was released. So this was an arcade video game. Miyamoto intended for the game to be a heavily multiplayer focused video game. It was important specifically for introducing Mario's brother Luigi, who acted as the game's second character. In the game, Mario and Luigi would have to clear the sewers, which they had invested with nasty critters and bugs, or which had been, they didn't do it. They didn't.  Following this, either of the brothers could knock the enemy away by simply touching them. Though if they're not knocked over and the two connect, the player will lose a life. So you can already see some of the mechanics of having to kick over a turtle for him to be safe to touch, or else they get you. The game is noted for being a cooperative and competitive game. Players can assist each other by defeating foes through the prominent goal, although the prominent goal is to receive a better score than the other player. In the game, Mario and Luigi were nearly identical at this point, with their simple palette swaps. So Mario being, I think, white and red, and Luigi being green and white. As the series progressed, so did the two characters' distinctions. There's a brief stint with Atari. They were going to partner up with Atari, but they decided not to. There's some little drama here, but it was essentially the fact that Atari would have probably ultimately squashed Nintendo's budding industry in America. So by a series of fortunate events, Nintendo didn't end up partnering with Atari, and they ended up becoming competition for each other, because they were going to partner up with Atari to release the Famicom, which would have Mario on it, Donkey Kong. So there was an infamous video game crash of the 1980s which had affected the entire industry in America, and they were actually ready to sign papers with Atari. But during the event, Atari witnessed an illegal Donkey Kong prototype playing on a Coleco console, and it was an illegal prototype, but Atari assumed that meant Nintendo was working some backdoor deals, and that they had given them a version of Donkey Kong to play on their consoles. So they got pissed, and called the deal off. Almost tried to sue them, actually, but Atari would have owned the rights to Famicom, and they would have just shelved it, and tried to actually push their own Atari 7800. But Atari as a whole was ill-fated, and when the video game crash had taken the course with Atari, and brought with it the entire empire, nearly every other was trying to distribute consoles at the time. So now with no competitors in the market, Nintendo was like, let's get on this. 1884 happened. This is their time to shine, so they're in full swing. They're trying to really, really pump out really good quality games with the Famicom, and they shift their entire business model from arcades to family, home, entertainment centers, because why not? How many? There's a lot more homes, individual kids than there are arcades. So in 1984, many arcade games, however, were released that would actually later be ported to the Famicom. They hit games such as Balloon Fight, Clue Clue Land, Duck Hunt, Excite Bite, Hogan's Alley, and Wild Gunman. They're games such as F1 Race. This is a sequel to Four Nandoo G, and the final entry to the Donkey Kong arcade trilogy, Donkey Kong 3, second one being Donkey Kong Jr. Finally, there was a big debut, a boxing game called Punch Out, with two exclamation points. All right, in 1985 now, Nintendo let loose the Famicom, which was revealed to be released in America a year prior as the Advanced Video System, or AVS, was renamed and revealed as the Nintendo Entertainment System in Las Vegas. So, okay, so that's why it wasn't technically it. It's just a revamped Famicom, as all NES was then. I didn't realize that. So Nintendo started a 1985 boom in which they delivered. So, yeah, Nintendo, they're trying all sorts of stuff now. They're like, all right, we had a hit with Donkey Kong. Early escaped a fatal deal with Atari, who eventually got bankrupt, or I don't know, they went bankrupt, but they failed as a company. Yeah, they had some good streaks of luck, really. So they want to capitalize on it. And they have an NES now. They're putting out great games. And now they want to really set themselves up for success. So Yamauchi, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the CEO, the owner of Nintendo, split his research, his R&D research and development team, into four segments, including Nintendo R&D 1, 2, 3, and 4. They're all headed by different people, and given different assignments. It would be the biggest group of the bunch, and would go on to create many other games released for the NES. The group known as Team Ishikiru emerged from R&D 1. There was a little robot called Rob at one point. Didn't go very well with product testers. Proved that kids would like it, though. Yeah, creator showed that device, showed it to a bunch of children, and according to him, the reactions weren't as positive as he had hoped.  That's so funny. Clearly it did, because he released it with an NES and it flopped. Now a group of programmers in Japan were hard at work on starring the star from Donkey Kong, titled Super Mario Brothers. The game would send the series in a new direction and setting. Instead of being placed in Brooklyn, New York, Miyamoto would create his own universe, entitled The Mushroom Kingdom, where he was getting his creativity from. Single player experience had the player choose between Mario or his brother Luigi, though their abilities were virtually identical. In the game, the antagonistic bowser would kidnap Princess Peach due to her ability to revert his magical attacks. So there used to actually be a reason he would kidnap her instead of just because Mario and Luigi heard of the news and immediately departed to save her. They traveled through over 30 stages and eventually defeated the beast, thus saving the princess. The game had expansive scrollable levels, various enemies, different environments, and an amazing physics engine. The game far surpassed anything ever released by that and helped propel sales of the Famicom in Japan when it was released, but it was bound to make a even bigger impact in America. Yeah, that just goes to show you NES. I mean, it wasn't really a miracle that Nintendo succeeded in the industry. It would have been crazy to think that they could have such a quality product on the hardware and the actual software of great games like that and still fail. But they didn't. They did really good. And yeah, people just caught on because it was a really fun game. It was an expansive universe, like it said, and you can get lost in it. And it was fun to play. Another video game. It would be hard to replicate the success of Super Mario Brothers. And while financially it didn't happen, it did technologically with the video game The Legend of Zelda. The Legend of Zelda was made to coincide with the release of the Famicom disc system. And the disc system was a bit pricey at $100, but it was well worth it to play Legend of Zelda. The game was important. So why is the Legend of Zelda so important? For one, it's generally thought to be the major precursor to the console role-playing genre and the action role-playing genre. The game isn't a typical role-playing game, though various aspects were emulated in future titles, such as the setting, epic music, which was really epic, character design, story and character progression, and overall scale. It was just huge, monumental, so it was hard to beat, you know, because you really got immersed in the world.  So it was a big hit for a year, a little over a year in Japan before we even saw it in America. And so Shigeru Miyamoto was heavily inspired on his childhood when creating the game. He said he would explore the many mountains of Kyoto when he was younger, and would venture inside the caves with a lantern in his hand. Miyamoto would implement his idea of finishing a game to see the ending in Legend of Zelda, as he had done with Super Mario Bros. Whereas most games were at that time simply played by gamers just to receive a high score. So that's fascinating that you could make it more of a narrative with an actual arc, story arc, and an ending at least, other than just levels, trying to get high scores. Other genres, other games released during this time were Donkey Kong 3, Urban Championship, Gumshoe, and a console version of Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda in these games weren't the only titles released, but Nintendo still needed to release the console in the rest of America, Europe, and Australia. So like I said, they're just rolling them off one after the other. They had Mario Bros. Legend of Zelda. Those were riding on the back of the wild success of Donkey Kong. So now they're going to take it from an historic one to a more, so they're going to shift, they're going to evolve from the past to the future now with Metroid. They wanted new weapons, they wanted it to be futuristic, lonely setting, and the players would gradually obtain new weapons as they increased health through progress in the title. They took control of a character named Samus Aran, who would find secret areas blast through hordes of enemies and engage in challenging platforming segments. The game was meant to take the popular platforming of Super Mario Bros. and merge it with the exploration of the Legend of Zelda. At the end of the game it was revealed that the player was in actuality a woman, but the player actually had to finish the game in a certain time to be able to. The title actually did terrible upon its release. Alright, so Nintendo still put in a lot of games. Fun fact, in June of 1986, Miyamoto and his team worked to create a direct sequel to Super Mario Bros. that was actually titled Super Mario Bros. 2. The game looked nearly identical to the first title, though was deemed too challenging so it actually was never released in America or Europe. So yeah, Nintendo is just smashing the market right now. They received 1986, it was in America, 87 it went to Europe, and yes, with the console essentially released worldwide, Nintendo and their third parties would release a continuous stream of titles. Third parties actually however were forced to be limited to five games per year as a part of the Nintendo seal of quality, which is actually really, it's a really smart idea. So I think that the legend of Zelda, I think what made Nintendo the legend that they are today is really their quality. It's like Apple, and it's like music. Shitty music might be popular for a week or a month or a year, but it's the quality music that endures. I wonder how many contemporaries of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach there were that were famous that we just don't know about. So Nintendo was just smart and they maintained their seal of quality. 1987 rolls around, we start to have the legend of Zelda's release in America has become a huge, huge hit. And I have to remember my, my nanny, where this kid's grandma whose house I used to go over, she would make the sandwiches and tell us to go play outside.  So actually, maybe that was why I never played Legend of Zelda much until Nintendo 64 actually. Okay, so 1987, the smart year that Kanpei Yokoi start to develop his handheld system, his handheld version of the NES, which was, of course, titled the Game Boy. Yeah, Nintendo just started blowing up from there. So I'll, I'll try to make the next episode if I do, I might not because we kind of all know the history of Nintendo from here, but it might be more of a relevant nostalgic trip for all of us. If I do one just purely dedicated to the consoles from the NES to the Switch. But yeah, so the NES, that was, that was a lot of information. I really thought I would actually get through the entire history of Nintendo right there, but didn't even make it to the Super NES, didn't even make it to the Game Boy actually. So sorry about that. Element if you thought I dragged it out, wait to give me some constructive criticism. Anyways, that's, I don't know, I've done a lot of interesting stuff there. I had no idea that was emerging in a dying video game console market. So I think again, like Apple, like that they were able to survive a harsh market like that. And it's really no wonder that Nintendo is the superpower they are today. They just had good programmers, efficient hardware designers, good negotiators apparently, and creative, most importantly creative people. Hope you guys enjoyed it. And just want to thank all you guys again, like always, for your likes, subscriptions, especially your comments. I love reading your comments, even if it takes me a couple days so until next time guys, I hope you all sleep very sound and well.


Hello everyone. Thank you very much, firstly, for your patience, and thank you also for joining us this afternoon for this panel discussion either in person or through the livestream. I'm Naomi Pellonski, I'm the assistant curator here at New Hall Art Collection and co curator of Mawsoul to the centre of the frame along with Harriet Loughler. For those of you who don't know it, the New Hall Art Collection is a collection of modern contemporary art by women at Murray Edwards College. It was founded in the early 1990s in order to challenge the underrepresentation of women artists in museums and galleries, and is now the largest collection of its kind in Europe. Mord Soltir was one of the first artists to donate works to the collection and was a key figure in its early history, and it's long been our ambition to bring together the works in her incredible Zabat series, and to highlight her beautiful and important art. Soltir hasn't been as recognised as she deserves to be, But there's a lot of interest and energy surrounding her work now, and it's very exciting to be a part of that. I want to thank all of the lenders who generously loaned their work for this exhibition, and it's tour to Touchstone-Rochdale, which is the gallery that initially commissioned this series. And I also want to thank Deborah Cherry, who manages Mordsdalties estate for all her help and guidance during the process of curating it. One of the things that we wanted to emphasise in curating this exhibition and organising this panel discussion was to show the multifaceted nature of multi-alters practice. She was a visual artist, but also a poet, a curator, an editor, a dramatist, a sound artist, an activist. The list goes on. She was a real renaissance woman. And we're really pleased that tonight's panel brings together people who knew her in various different contexts and have different perspectives on her work. Those who knew her personally and collaborated with her, those who have researched her work from an academic and curatorial point of view, and those who have been influenced by her artistically. So thank you so much to Jelaine, Dion, Marcia, Laura and Evan for taking part. And finally, I want to thank our brilliant partners on this event, the Paul Mellon Centre. It absolutely wouldn't have been able to happen without you and it was such a joy to work on this together. Thanks Naomi. Hi everyone. I'm Sarah Turner. I'm the Deputy Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. And I just wanted to say a few words of welcome and thanks on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre. For those of you who don't know about the centre, we're an educational charity and a research centre. We're based in central London and a part of Yale University. And our role is to support research on the histories of British art and architecture and our mission is to open up those histories and to reexamine them and to provide access and to support for the study, research and learning about art and art history. And one of the ways we do that is by collaborating on events such as this one, which bring people together to share ideas. And Maude Salter was an artist and a thinker who was deeply invested in what she described in one of her texts as the call and response of making, exhibiting, displaying, writing and debating about art's role in the world and about making histories visible. And this display, organised by the curators of the New York Hall art collection, offers us a moment of gathering and reflection. And I really want to thank Naomi Polonski and the team, all the team and especially the tech team at Murray Edwards for making today's event happen. And the Paul Mellon Centre's events manager, Shauna Blanchfield, for all her work on planning the logistics of holding a live hybrid event. And just for that way to the beginning shows that this is some new territory for us as we test out the technology. And we really want to welcome those of you who are here in person with us. It's absolutely brilliant to have so many people in a room together and to those of you who are watching virtually. Again, welcome to you. Thank you for your support. Thank you for joining us. And we hope that you'll join by posing questions in the Q&A session as well. We can take questions from in the room and from outside of the room. So do join in with the conversation today. Now I want to introduce our chair to you, Jelaine Twardros, who will be chairing the panel discussion for the rest of the afternoon. As many of you will know, she's the chief executive of DAX, a knock for profit visual arts rights management organisation, and is the co-director of the Arts360 Foundation, which she established in 2016 with Mark War. She's got many other accolades, but like all our speakers today, their biographies are also on our events page so you can read about their amazing careers and what they do by having a look at that. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Jelaine and say thank you to you and all our panel and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Hi, welcome everybody and thank you Naomi and Sarah for convening this very special conversation today on Mord Sulta. I'd also like to thank Sean and a brilliant tech team here at Mareddodd's College who've done such a fabulous job. It's wonderful to see Mord Sulta's sabbat out. We were just talking earlier, some of us haven't seen that work for three decades. And I've been very excited to see the resurgence of interest and engagement with Mord's work in recent years. I'd like to pay tribute to the estate of Mord Sulta, but also to all the artists, curators and art historians who've kept the fire lit, championing Mord's work and her significance as an artist, writer, curator, poet and so many other things, as Naomi said. The history of art, as we know, is full of absences and it requires persistence and effort to ensure that artists of colour and women artists in particular are part of our shared cultural history and memory. And if you haven't already done so, I urge you all to go and see the wonderful exhibition, Lumen, by another important artist, Shatipa Biswaz, who's with us here today, which is at Kethil's Yard, it's a really fabulous show. One of the reasons that Mord Sulta speaks so powerfully and eloquently to new generations of artists, curators and audiences is, I think, because she was so far ahead of her time in addressing the absences and illusions in our shared culture, and in particular the glaring absence of black women from regimes of representation in the historical record. Mord spoke about how she was fascinated, even haunted by the idea of disappearance and the disappeared, and I just want to read you something that she wrote. The whole notion of the disappeared, I think, is something that runs through my work. I'm very interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly black women's experience and black women's contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalised, so that it's important for me as an individual and obviously as a black woman artist to put black women back in the centre of the frame, both literally within the photographic image, but also within the cultural institutions where our work operates. Although she wouldn't have expressed herself in these terms, by the late 1980s Mord was decolonising the discipline of art history, the archive and the museum, making works that are complex, multi-layered and compellingly beautiful. Works which also bring back into the central frame black women's creativity and histories, she would have called them her stories and experiences of black women. One of my earliest pieces of writing was on Mord's sort of series called Hysteria, which she made in 1991, not long after the Zabat series that are on exhibition here. I was commissioned by Mark Seely, director of Autographs, the Association of Black Photographers, to write a review of Hysteria. Mord had been a Mo Mart fellow at Tate Liverpool between 1990 and 1991 and a touring exhibition at Hysteria started at Tate Liverpool in August 1991. It was an installation made up of photographic prints, marble plaques, scripted narrative and audio recording and it tells the story of a 19th century black woman artist who sales from the Americas to Europe to seek fame and fortune as a sculptor in Rome, but having achieved a successful career, she disappears. It's a fictional tale based on fragments of the true life story of Edmonia Lewis, a successful artist who lived and worked around this period and the review I wrote was called The Case of a Disappearing Black Woman Artist. This exhibition and this afternoon's conversation continues a vital process of redressing the absences and illusions of in-art history, bringing Mord's sort of back into the centre of the frame and I'm really delighted that we've got four amazing women on the panel this afternoon and I'm very excited to hear their presentations. First of all, Laura Castagnini is a curator and writer interested in the histories of feminism and their current articulations, especially as they intersect with the politics of sexuality and race and their expression in modern contemporary art. And Laura's just been appointed as curator of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, which is wonderful, congratulations Laura. Laura's admired Sulta's work since she was introduced to it many years ago by artists of her own generation, including Evan. As a curator, she worked on Tate's first acquisition of Mord's work, the major series Le Bijoux, which entered the collection last year. Next, we'll hear from Evan Effacoia, who is a London UK-based artist, educator and energy worker who, through sound, text, video and performance, places demands on existing systems and institutions of power to re-centre and prioritise the experience and voice of those previously marginalised. Evan finds great refuge in the breadth of practice that Mord has left behind. In particular, the Safi, a token of remembrance the viewer leaves with after viewing an artwork, has been an inspiration for their own investigations into a collectively orientated art practice. Next, we'll hear from Marcia Michael, whose multidisciplinary practice centres on the reconstruction of the Black Family archive. Marcia injects current discourses of the personal that speak about and to the Black Presence in Britain. Marcia does so within a Black feminist intergenerational and decolonial visuality that pertains to her own diasporic experience and that of her ancestors. Marcia identifies with Mord as an artist who returned to search for their heritage in places of remembrance. She too has searched the same landscapes for words and memories of four mothers that keep on returning. Dion Sparks is a London-based artist whose painting practice explores abstraction and the transformation of materials to create objects of contemplation. Dion met Mord while studying on the BA Fine Art and John Mord's University in the late 1980s and Mord later invited Dion to show work in exhibitions such as Passion, contemporary Black women's creativity of the African diaspora. They also worked together for a short time as part of the feminist arts news collective, following her graduation Mord invited Dion to model for Zabbat, in which she represented Erato, the muse of lyric poetry. So without further ado, Laura. Dion, sorry, it's first up. Forgive me. Good afternoon, my name is Dion Sparks, as we just said. I'm an artist, I'm a teacher and also, as you heard, a sitter for Zabbat. I'd just like to share some brief thoughts. They're quite personal, I guess, this afternoon.  I'll start with some of my memories. And as I was invited to this panel, I started to think about what kind of words come up when I think of her and the sorts of things that come to mind are formidable, clever, caring, legacy, history, style, prolific, multifaceted, bold, stature, inspiring, daring commitment, sharp, wit, self-aware, ambition, strategic. And I think what I'm trying to just bring to mind there is just what a formidable, self-aware, powerful artist Mord Sulta was. And really, I've shared this with some of the panel that when you were with her, you really had a sense that you had to raise your game. She was incredibly strategic. I think we've heard that a little bit just in the introduction. She had an incredible sense of history and her place in it. She had a lot of foresight on how to work with organisations and individuals to bring her work into the world and the work of other black women. And in particular, Zabata is a fantastic example of that. As you know, she worked with Rothschild Gallery to create this work and it was the 150th birth of photography. So a very timely piece of work. And as you heard, I met Mord in the late 80s and there was a period in that time where we spent a little bit of time together. I'm just going to focus a little bit on Zabata in particular. There were a number of projects we worked on, but in Zabata, she invited me to sit as a sitter, but also to work as an assistant on that project. And what I noticed when I assisted her, I just finished my degree, so it was a fantastic opportunity for me. We worked in the studio. She was a great collaborator. She worked with somebody who was supporting her technically with the camera. I remember the vein of him being there at certain points, but she had an incredible clarity and vision around what she was doing. It had huge scope and ambition. I don't recall lots of conversation about what to do, how to prepare, but I do recall she asked us to bring some clothes and objects that meant something to us. And actually, you're not sharing the slides, am I? I'm not sure where the clicker is. Oh, here it is. Sorry. So I think we should put the slides up. So obviously you can see what we've seen in the exhibition this afternoon, the portrait here of Mord and this one here of myself. Some people, you know, I did have the mask on earlier, so it wasn't quite clear, but it is me. I promise that is me. And you'll notice that the clothes are, those are my own, so she asked us to bring in things. And they're actually just ordinary clothes. There's nothing particularly, they're just everyday clothes that my jewellery, the fabric that somebody gave me a friend, and Mord gave me the drum and asked me to pose with that. And what I noticed when she was working that, you know, there was a very careful attention to detail, you know, the way that she set up my lighting, the backdrops and so on. Perhaps when we come to the panel discussion, we could talk a little bit more about the self-portrait because I remember that I was, I think we were alone in the studio on that day. And obviously she needed a lot of guidance or help, physical help around making that, so perhaps we can talk about that. But my reflections when I look at this work and think about this work is, you know, the challenge that she made to the role of the muse and the model. And interesting that when she selected the sit-ins, you know, some of them were obviously very well known, Alice Walker an incredible public figure, but others like myself and Delta Street, we were just sort of newly graduated, not well known, but she presented us all in the same level. So there was a certain sort of collective equality there. And I do find it quite incredible to think about and reflect on that she has somehow immortalised us. And I don't think I quite understood that at the time, but now that I recognise it's in public collections, you know, you realise that you've been put in the history books. So, you know, speaking to the emissions that we were talking about before, this is quite a special privilege.  And she was also very aware of how to get her work into public collections. So it was interesting to me that she donated this to this collection here, which obviously allows it to be taken care of for the future. And when I came to reread the artist's book that accompanies the exhibition, so it's about the poetics of a family tree, I found it to be an incredibly rich poetic document. You know, it reads almost like a mix of time travel, a sort of memory, a reimagining. It's a sort of historic and almost like a poetic longing. There's a lot of longing in that piece I found. And I'll just quote from her here, she ends with this kind of cryptic message. She says, and so he returns the end of this tale. You might be desirous of a few answers. Well, I myself have one question. What happened to the missing others? And if you don't know, why should I tell you? So I found that a really powerful sort of cryptic moored message. I'll just finish on a little bit on her sort of legacy and impact on my own work and myself and some of the some of the messages I think I recall. One of the things she would say a lot is you just have to keep going. You know, as a black woman artist, you have to keep going. And actually she said it gets harder, not easier. That's something I heard her reflect on several times that, you know, that journey gets more challenging. But she also emphasised that you're not alone in that, you know, hers was not an individualistic endeavour. It was very much part of a kind of collective.  There's a long history. It's that you're part of a continuum. You're part of a collective in the present, but also the future. That was a very important message that I took. But also that your particular work is very important and that you had to value it and that that you were making a valuable contribution. And these are some works from my work at the time. It feels very old this work now it's 30 years ago, but it's the same sort of period. It was actually made a bit for fours of that. But what was interesting, I think some of the parallels is a, you know, some of the parallels were about looking back or looking into the future. And also the sort of physically putting yourself centre stage. So those those sort of photographic sort screens in textiles are obviously self portraits. And currently I'm actually doing an MA painting at the Royal College of Art. And I'm returning to Zabat actually. I'm doing a piece that's about a kind of homage to that work. So it's still leaving its legacy. Mord also understood the importance of organising and networking. This was very important and documenting. I think this, you know, she had incredible force to understand. These are some of the things when I looked back through my files, the sort of things I found in my archive. This exhibition that I was very honoured to take part in that she invited to me to passion. And these are some of the documents around that. So very often, you know, there might have been exhibitions, but there was nothing, nothing physical and tangible. This is a pre-digital age. And so it's wonderful that the art historians, for example, Deborah Cherry, as people have mentioned, are able to go back to these archives and that she left us that kind of trail. And as Lubaina Hymid said, I'm just quoting a little bit from passion, which is this book that Mord edited, a very important book I also contributed an essay here. And Mord, sorry, Lubaina Hymid writes here in her essay, Mapping a Decade of Black Women Artists 1890. Sorry, 1980 to 1990. She writes, it's been depressing not to have been immortalised in the coffee table book. It has forced some of us into becoming, in being publishers. And clearly Mord took up that mantle and understood the importance of documentation. We're clearly in a new moment now. I'll just leave it on that for a moment. We're clearly in a new moment. There's still a lot to do, a lot of work, but we can now enjoy major exhibitions such as the one coming up by Lubaina Hymid at the Tate. Or we are now being represented by Sonya Boyce at the Venice Biennale. It's credit to those artists and we all celebrate that and enjoy this progress. But I do feel some of the gold does rub back on to Mord and this is part of her legacy. And actually just a little note that she wrote to me when I graduated and I gained a first class degree. She had contributed to my degree as I interviewed her and Lubaina Hymid for my dissertation. And in the note she wrote, you know, congratulations, but I do recognise that some of the gold rubs back on us all. So she kind of recognised her own contribution there. And she did something extraordinary with her life, I think, and she really just kept going. That was the amazing thing. I just want to finish, I think, with a little quote from Zabat, and this is one of her greatest gifts, I think. This is a quote from Mord Salter. If you need to see yourself and your beauty, you can look in a mirror. Thank you, Alen, there. Thank you. So it's really nice to be here. Can you all hear me fine? Very nice to be here. I'm going to get straight to second. That was just amazing and I'm feeling the connections through what I'm about to say. So through her use of words and pictures of others as a woman who returned to search and claim a heritage, to me, Mord was a time traveller. I do believe that if she was alive today, today would never have been the today that black artists are seeing, living and being in. Today would have happened a long time ago. As an artist, I turn to Mord for her purpose and her maternal passion to use the personal to reclaim the history, making everything that is done by black people, especially mothering, political. Over and over, she used her body and her voice to preach about the others for others. For whom she searched for and lived because of.  And yet, it is not to her images that I turn as a photographer, it's to her writing. It's her ability to return, to remember and to reclaim that which she knows she must, not just a body but a voice. In order to speak their truth into existence, I'm going to read Mord's poem from the standpoint as I am in a black woman. As I do so, I will acknowledge the lengths that her spirit has travelled to be able to write those words that I can speak. I will then read my own poem. Ain't I a black woman, written is a part, but made through a similar reclamation of place, body and maternal yearning for our ancestral bodies. And as I read these poems, I ask you to ponder on the many ways in which her words become mine. And then I hope that my words become embedded in yours. For in speaking a language whose words were constructed in the same timeline as the oppressor's language, we, as in all of us, make ourselves time travellers. And even though I say shapeshifters, alternating between their worlds and worlds, it is through our powerful imagination that enables the historic black and brown bodies to give them a voice. A voice they have always had. Therefore, when we speak within our works, when I speak here now, I speak in uniform with them present with me always. I continue to speak their vocabulary, which is always in conversation with each other, because over time and time again, they tell me, they show me that they spoke to each other with love. Black love. It has shown me the importance of claiming their words in those places when she moved, sorry, when she went to Africa and photographed the slave ports in Gambia in her series, Sphinx. In my own search for my maternal ancestors, I did the same. I returned. I learnt. I embodied. I speak from their memory always. As I journeyed to Jamaica to retrieve through an embodied imagination the absences of my foremothers, moulds wailing, I have not to hear, but it's a cry. It's a cry to intercede. They beg, they yearn for an intercession for our bodies and our minds, our stories that have to be retold. I have come to understand as I gaze at black and brown faces who sit among the audience here, who sit in my heart, in my memory, in my mind, whose presence have always been here. Did you get me? They've always been here on this earth in the mythological narratives. I sense the elements of strength, beauty and tradition in Maud Muses. In Naamanham Muses, there is an ancestral kinship that is formed where channels of communication are created by blood, but also in blood. Why? Why? Why? To be able to speak where it's said in their timeline through bodies that resemble my own, perhaps within Alice Walker's womanist expressions, that is to reveal and share the intergenerational strengths and relations with the ways in which women's love, culture, agency and commitment connect and inspire to the well-being of all the people, means that I too am a time traveller. Words heard today were remembered yesterday, and words told tomorrow that hit your heart today are words that have travelled through because of love. As I read as a black woman by Maud Salter, I asked you to take note of her words, and none of my own.  I have been mounted in rape, bred from like cattle, mined for my fecundity. I have been denied abortion, denied contraception, denied my freedom to choose. I have been subjected to abortion, injected with contraception, sterilised without my consent. I have borne witness to the murderers of my children by the clan, the front, the state. I have borne sons hung for rape for looking at a white girl. I have borne daughters shot for being liberationist.  As a black woman, every act is a political act. Every act is a political act. As a black woman, the personal is political, holds no empty rhetoric. Ain't I a black woman? No right to be angry, no right to cry. No right to hold your hand or talk to you. No right to see you or call you my own. I never had the right to call you by your name that I chose.  He treated me just like I was a slave. I was a slave and then he got his friends to do the same. The colour of my skin was betrayed by the fullness of my belly twice more if I had stayed. I ran. Truth be told, if I stayed, I would have died.  Does that sound familiar? But am I not dead now without you? An entire woman to have feelings and a soul.  I wish you know, I wish you could know what it means to be me. Does my life matter? Does my black life matter? An entire woman, how I wish I could be free. How I wish you could be free. He tried like the previous master to make me feel as though I could only live my life because of him. The moment he was right, my mind had been twisted. He takes away my children, my child, so that I no longer feel like a woman, human, like living.  Yeah, you're right.  My kinky hair, your afro hair that I pass on to you. Means I've passed on other things too. Memories. Breathe. Don't forget the sky. Remember the eyes. Remembering is everything. Tell everyone who has ears to hear, to hear. Tell them in ways they will understand. Sing, write, show your body. Let them touch the history that is yours. It is yours. They want me to wait until slavery is over. But I have been to the future. I have seen what not remembering does. I have witnessed what forgetting is. I cannot wait any longer. I cannot wait until this slavery is over. It is never over. The names just change. Women, children, mothers, daughters, brothers, fathers. Have we not suffered? Have we not suffered? Have we not suffered? Our bodies, our minds traumatised. It once in your DNA they now tell us. Let's not forget who I am. Who am I? I am your mother. I'm a woman. And my skin is black. Like yours, my children. Thank you. How to follow on from that. Thank you, Marcia and Dion, honestly. Yeah, I am feeling a lot of things right now. Okay, let me get myself together. Right, wow. Yeah, I mean, thank you for this invitation to be here, to talk a little bit about the, yeah, the huge impact that, you know, Maude Solter has had on my practice today and, you know, really does continue to have. And, yeah, what I'm offering and sharing today is, yeah, a few reflections, a few encounters on, yeah, the way that her impact, the way that her practice has impacted the way that I work, the way that I organise, and, yeah, has really played a huge part in where I am and, you know, all the, all that I am able to offer to the world. And I wanted to kind of touch on a couple of the words, a couple of terms that have really stayed with me that I came to know about through this work and one of those is car, which is a spirit of resistance and then the safi, which is a token of remembrance that the viewer leaves with after viewing an artwork. And, you know, both of these terms are terms, I would say, really weave into my own practice and, yeah, I will, you know, elaborate about that as I go on. And so, you know, what you see here is a letter that I wrote as part of a project that I was involved in with a group I used to, oh, and still doing some way organised with, you know, collective creativity. And we were, you know, we came together around 2013, you know, having felt really failed by our arts educations in various ways and we came together as queer, black and people of colour to kind of, you know, kind of look at, you know, and try and address in our own way these absences, you know, and we would informally me that because we were trying to piece together, you know, the histories that we knew were there, but for some reason weren't visible. And I'm just going to read a little quote from a publication that we put together called Surviving Art School, an artist of colour toolkit, which was in collaboration with Nothing in Contemporary around 2015 or 16. So upon discovering artists like Maud Salter, Claudette Johnson, Shretape Biswas, Sonya Boyce, Labena Hamid, Zerina Bimgy, Chyla Camari Berman, Ingrid Pollard, Polomi Desai, we realise that these are still the only ones that made it into books and if you look, you will find them, but there really are many more. Knowing their work cements a sense of history, of knowing that there were artists in the 80s at the height of race politics making subversive critical work about identity. You have a legacy that is yours that you can refer to. It's more than representation. It's seeing people who reflect your own story in those big glossy art books. People who have names like yours. It gives a sense of connection rather than a sense of constant loss and mourning, which is what living in a neocolonial, hetro-patriarchal world feels like. One of the things that we did as part of this project was we held a workshop and one of the activities was to write a letter to a future younger self and what you can see here is the letter that I wrote as part of that activity. I'm going to read it now. A letter to a future younger self. Dear Evan, I'm writing this to let you know about a book I wish I'd known about when I was studying at Winchester. It's called Passion, Discourses on Black Women's Creativity. I think if you'd known about it then, you wouldn't have felt so lonely. You would, in a sense, because you would have still been surrounded by middle-class whiteness, but at least you would have known that artists with passion, energy and drive who were coming from a similar place as you existed. You would have learned about the amazing work of artists such as Labena Hamed and Ingrid Pollard. You were already aware of Maud Salter because of the circus series, but you didn't know about the movement they had created. The pivotal bringing together and organising a black female artist's work, it would have helped you to hear about their struggles and persistence, and it will help you to keep going when you feel like you can't anymore. With love, Evan, a future you. Shortly after this, I also went on to really write about Maud and some of her work is part of my MA thesis paper. This was around 2015. Again, I'm kind of reflecting on an encounter with passion. Because at that time, I was finding it very hard to find a copy. Thankfully, I do have one now, but at that time, it was proving tricky. This thesis was actually in a similar way to the thin black lines book, the exhibition catalogue that went with the exhibition. I wrote it as a series of letters, so I'm writing to this figure at Biola. I've been trying to find a copy of passion.  It's proving challenging. The book first published in 1990 is out of print and not widely seen. To me, it's just as crucial a text as ways of seeing or mythologies. What do we do when the books we need to read are not in our libraries? How do we find them? How do they find us? You know, in its passion that I first read poems from Zabat, poetics of a family tree, which was Maud's second volume of poetry published in 1989. It was through that text that I came to know about this term car. I'm going to read just a short extract from the poem Full Circle where you start to kind of where this car, the essence of it starts to reveal itself.  Heritage, responsibility, worth. More precious than gold weights, the spirit of car. And then another extract from my thesis paper. Car, the spirit of resistance permeates the following text. Car is a term I came to learn of through the work of Labena Hamid and Maud Salter. Maud Salter writes that the artwork would often come back devoid of small pieces of card or wool or drawing pins. Never vandalised, just depleted. It's nice to think that black people take small tokens as safis, tokens of remembrance. So Salter takes the gesture enacted by the viewer as an act of solidarity, friendship even. A sign that the work is made to be shared as a collective endeavour. And across a prolific output of collaborative exhibitions, magazine articles and catalogue essays, the relationship between the pair of artists is made visible. The traces of friendship that I find encouraging in my own pursuit of a de-individualising art practice. Is there something specific in an artwork made between and for friends? Distinct from the increasingly market driven archetypal subject-object orientation that is very common to art making these days. There had not previously existed spaces for black women to show there are on their own terms. So writing in a different time 2015, now 2021, I wonder what we should take from these practices. What we should carry with us moving forward and what we need to do differently. So since working with collective creativity, which was very much about redressing the imbalance within our own relationship to art history, I've got on to be part of a number of other different collectives and more recently in 2018 I went on to establish Black Obsidian sound system with a number of peers working in art, film and sound. Similarly in the way that Maude worked and collaborated with her peers, it was a marginal status that brought us together and in our individual togetherness we have everything we need, we become abundant. With BOSS the sound system is our sacred object, our totem, a symbol of our collective struggles and desire for more. And the itinerant nature of the system means that we can transform any space into one where we can feel a sense of belonging. And I'm going to return to the essence of car this time with an extract from historical objects again and it's about poetics of a family tree. Slavery days and here I find you still on the plantation, now differently guised yet still a bondage and freedom freedom has an empty call when I see you still chain to their supremacist belief in themselves. They cannot be allowed any longer to rewrite our experience, call it Marxist or feminist history or herstory no longer no more. Car is rising car is rising listen listen you can hear her call for car is rising car is rising here come here her call and you know I really wanted to understand you know where this where this word car originates and you know I've since come to learn that it's it is you know an ancient commission term now known as Egypt and yeah it's this idea of a universal spirit you know that resides in each and every one of us and in the hieroglyphic symbol it's represented as a pair of open arms held upwards you know it's the inner consciousness that is at the root of our power you know and I've been really galvanised by this by this idea by this idea of a spirit of car within my own practice you know and it's something that I do draw great inspiration from and you know and I can see how that spirit that energy really permeate there's a bat series you know the photographic series that we are here and it's being exhibited you know currently at this moment and you know it was really a great honour and a privilege to be able to see you know the whole series in the flesh for you know the first time and it was a you know I was able to really kind of transform my my experience and my understanding of those works by really by actually seeing them in the flesh and you know I'm also really interested in you know the images of course but also the text you know that Maude wrote about these works you know because there's a bat is a sacred dance it's an occasion of power and it's a black woman's right of passage you know and these words and the images you know call to mind for me as you know has been has been talked about you know the importance of seeing oneself as part of something greater as part of a lineage as part of an ancestry and you know also you know for me also there's something in the works and you know in that decision I think to kind of draw from from the muse you know the kind of the mythology that we are so familiar with but it's a familiarity that you know at least for me I kind of always saw is like outside of me you know and somehow there's this kind of renegotiation of where where I can sit within a frame and you know the the the polyima the portrait of Doxyusae Barnwell was a work that today I spent a lot of time with because you know I actually I could really see herself really see her in me you know the the wide face the dark skin and in that moment I felt powerful you know I felt a sense of belonging and you know that really does yeah I mean I don't have words for it you know I really don't but there's just something really really special about that and that kind of encounter that one can have with an artwork you know that isn't the way of you know it isn't this intellectualising of it but just really accounts for the affect you know the embodied experience that one can have when one engages and interacts with a work and I actually just wanted to end with a with a quote that I found by Maud as she was reflecting you know on this series compared to the composition of the stars a photograph is no big deal any fixation of evidence or providence or the like is but nothing compared to the fact that we can take flight through the heavens and visit each other just when we like and for me that really kind of speaks to something actually Marcia said you know around time travel and you know Maud very much was and in some way very much still is time traveler and again that's something that really yeah I draw a lot of strength from in my own practice yeah that's it for me can you hear me okay no is that better I haven't done an in person thing for such a long time I don't know how to do anything yeah I just wanted to start by saying thank you for having me here or an amazing line up it feels like a real honour to be part of yeah I'm going to do a sort of overview or sort of art historical perspective to contextualise some of the work I'm going to speak specifically about this work Calliope which you would have seen in the exhibition which is a self portrait of Maud as Gen de Val Maud so I'm a bit nervous here we go Gen de Val haunted Maud's practice for over a decade as she says here her ongoing visual fascination with Gen de Val began in 1988 with the response to the Nadar photograph captioned unknown woman there she stared at me willing me to give her a name and identity a voice so for over a decade I've been image making with her in mind from Calliope in Zabat to Lebesu in 2002 so Gen de Val was the little known romantic companion and muse of Baudelaire the French poet and she was born in Haiti with a date that was unknown and she was an actress and dancer of mixed French and African ancestry she was reportedly the granddaughter of an enslaved woman from Guinea in West Africa sent by her owners to France to work in a brothel she met the young Baudelaire in 1942 when she was giving a she was part of a sort of amateur dance performance and she was with him for 25 years that relationship has been considered the most important in his life and she was a muse for a lot of his work in particular she was a muse in a very sort of exoticised way she was his black Venus and in particular we'll come to that a little bit later in this talk and I think what's interesting about the way that Maud rings Gen de Val in is it's through a sort of haunting of herself so she's embodying she's embodying Gen de Val in this in this work in particular as you can see she's even got the sort of the robe as well but has a very different expression looking away from the camera and also having the camera on the table in front of her so I wanted to show you some of the images that she makes after Kelly Opie who as you would have seen was the the muse of poetry and as you would have seen there was nine different muses in all the different I just I can hear myself okay yeah thanks so this is Gen de Val the original Nadal photograph actually I should maybe speak a little bit about that photograph as you would have seen it's been titled Unknown Woman and it's debated whether it was indeed actually Gen de Val there are images of Gen de Val which are doodles from Vaudelaire this is something that when Maude found this image she was really captivated by and in particular she was captivated by this sense of sort of what the image can do I might read this quote from her that I really like she says quote who is this Gen de Val a beautiful black woman who inspired Baudelaire to write some of the finest poetry in prose poems ever written miracles of language which explore her sensuality sexuality and ethnicity observed by the poet as the western world stood on the cusp of modernity itself and therein lies the crisis point for the vast contradictions in how she is perceived and portrayed and I think that idea of the crisis point in the history of photography is something that Maude's work looks at again and she said at one point that photography is not a tool, it's a weapon and I think that sort of comes back and again and again this is a work that she made in 94 which are these really small collages which are actually collaged directly onto the back of a book about Manet so it's sort of an act of graffiti as well as inserting Gen de Val into these images and then the last work that she made was this major work called Le Bijoux which is now on three of the works are now on display at Tate Britain in the 60 years exhibition and in a way I think that she takes what she does in Calliope and expands it out into this much bigger exploration of who Gen de Val is the title Le Bijoux relates to a poem by Baudelaire which he writes my beloved was naked and knowing my heart's desire had kept only her sonorous jewels on whose rich splendour gave her the triumphant air that Moorish slave women have on their happy days so rather than depicting Gen de Val naked with only her jewels on Maud is representing her with an array of different emotions with subjectivity and also she's very much closed and in control I think the other thing to mention about this work is actually I'll talk a little bit about the format so these are Polaroids they were made with the giant Polaroid the 20x24 which is the biggest Polaroid camera in the world there's only seven of these in existence they were over 100kg and this one was owned by the shek photographer Isno who travelled with it from Czech Republic to Salta studio in Edinburgh and it was sort of interesting working on the acquisition of this work for Tate because they are Polaroids they're really light sensitive and they're certainly going to be shown for one month every year which means that most displays are about six months so if you show the work at one of the Tate sites for one exhibition you'll have action for six years which it's a very I don't know, I think thinking about this idea of disappearance and the fragility of the photograph but also black women's history I think it's almost sort of ironic that this work is so difficult to display and to store and to keep but the other thing that's sort of interesting about this work is that way that she moves I quote here Deborah Cherry who's argued that there is a clear shift in focus from the trajectory of Salta's engagement with this subject of Gendaval she says by this point the exhilaration and animation of Zabat has vanished Zabat Zabat is silent, unspeaking mute and Salta herself has talked about this so in the catalogue she says I reconfigure myself as Gendaval not as previously ends Zabat as an active muse and artist but in a funk of post musdom and so the work then led to this major group exhibition that Maud put on at the National Gallery Scotland in Edinburgh in which she presented her own work of herself as Gendaval with possible appearances of Gendaval throughout history so she's got, she loaned works by Manay and Corbet this is in 2003 at the National Gallery and surprisingly I haven't been able to find that much information about this this exhibition considering I don't know, I find it a really exciting sort of huge undertaking and for it to, yeah but obviously it was this subject has been looked at in the Black Models exhibition that was in Paris a couple of years ago so I think anyway that's sort of future research I just want to also mention where I'm sort of going next with this I'm really interested in thinking about of Maud's practice Gendaval was apparently bisexual according to the who's who in gay and lesbian history and I've started reading Nellah Hopkinson's The Salt Roads which I'm not sure if anyone else on the panel has read but it's so beautiful and so it's talking about maybe I won't go into the novel but it's Gendaval is one of the characters in the book and she's having an affair and it's just really beautiful in the way that it's written but also I've started looking at some of Maud's own writing and I found an article she wrote about lesbian representation she uses black lesbian in one word black lesbian characters in film which she wrote in 1986 which is quite early and that's really one of the only times where she actively uses that expression you know that identity about herself which I think is really interesting especially considering that the Le Bijoux series was very much framed in theogue as a reenactment of or a sort of almost a queer of the idea of the muse she's having a lot of trouble with this she says sorry since childhood I have served as muse to painters, poets, photographers and musicians sometimes unwittingly usually with some element of collaboration most notably I feature in two works in public collections LeBaine and Hermes between the two my heart is balanced and five I didn't ask to be in these pictures I didn't consciously sit for them but somehow I inhabit them it is somehow that I it is somehow that I'm interested in when exploring notions of the muse and what it means as a woman artist to take a female subject and retrospectively what it means to serve as catalyst for ideas and representations in the work of others I might just leave it there I feel like I'm sort of growing lots of information at you but maybe we can come back to some of this in the Q&A thank you so much for just extraordinary presentation and you know a tsunami of ideas and reflections or more sort of I really want us to have an opportunity to bring everyone into the conversation so I'm just going to indulge myself in one question before we open it up and there were lots of connections between what you were saying I felt and for one thing I think three words you used Marcia return remember a claim sums it up for me you know Dion you were talking about you know the importance of that relationship in a way between an older artist and a younger artist and those cycles of influence and inspiration and support and you were talking about Laura about the inspiration of Jean Duval the way that Maud is like a detective rooting through images and evidence to kind of find she knows these black women exist in the history gay black women exist in the history and she goes out to find them and reclaim them and Evan you spoke so beautifully about that the importance of understanding who has come before and being an artist knowing that there have been that sense of lineage and connection and I think those two elements of Ca and Safi of resistance and remembrance are things that also were themes in what all of you were returning and reclaiming in Maud's work I wondered if Evan you could reflect first about this idea of returning and reclaiming Yeah I mean I guess something I didn't go too deeply into for time but for me the archival investigation has been a big part of my work and my journey in coming to know and understand because yeah I did come out of my BA with a just yeah with a real sense of an absence you know like I said of practices that really spoke to where I came from and so you know in moving back to London in you know 2010 I was able to kind of really start to yeah go into the archives you know the Stuart Hall Library you know the African and Asian visual arts archive at Chelsea and you know a little bit later around 2013 the making histories visible archives and you know that really became part of my journey to kind of understanding and redressing and remembering because I had this sense that the work was there you know the practices were there but somehow they just weren't part of my arts education you know and so I went on that kind of you know that investigating the investigatory process of trying to yeah figure it all out and then that's yeah when collective creativity came together and we started to do that work together and there really was something in you know that process being again a collective one because even you know yeah being in the archive on your own and then finding these things it's like you want somebody to be able to share that with you know and so you know in doing that work and also as part of the process of doing that work I was also able to build connections with you know a lot of the artists as well who are very much still you know practising and up to really amazing things and so you know it became that process of looking back also being very much in the present you know and in that process I was able to you know rather than you know I often come back to something Lobena says you know there is no need to reinvent the wheel you know and actually it was only because of all the archival work that you know I've done and been able to build from that that I had this really great foundation and I've had a really great foundation to build from and you know I've done a lot of things that I can to also kind of involve others in that process and you know from then I can kind of imagine other other kinds of possibilities and ways of working and you know kind of working collaboratively and collectively and yeah I think for me yeah the kind of the archive has played a big part in that and yeah because we have the internet you can just search and find things and it's all there it's documented but the reality is that that history is fragile and precarious and you know it needs to be preserved republished brought back to the surface as a continuous struggle of remembering it does and even something like you know with passion you know I would love to see it republished you know I would love to see some kind of I made a note of that I've been talking about for a while because yeah you know it is you know it does speak to a moment in time that actually there is still a lot to glean and learn from you know and yeah I've done you know reading groups and stuff with it and it's really kind of impacted you know younger artists practices in really big ways you know and so I think yeah also this you know there was also this like you say it's like how do we also ensure that these you know these fragile kind of ephemeral documents can also kind of continue to proliferate and can also be made accessible in some way because you know archives aren't always accessible unless you have some kind of institutional affiliation so that's also something that yeah I've been you know kind of thinking through in my practice is also how does the material become activated in other contexts as well. Well the Art360 Foundation is working with Maud Sorter's Estate to organise the archive and I think the idea of republishing passion is something that we need to talk to the estate about and think about how we could bring that back in circulation. I'll just tell you that the artist Lauren Craig is looking at passion as well at the moment I don't know if you've spoken to her but yeah she's working on it at a very sort of early curatorial stage but yeah I should talk to her. Dion I wonder if you could talk as well about returning to Zaba you mentioned it right at the end it's quite tantalising I wonder if you could say a bit about what you're doing and how you're returning to Zaba and your practice. I mean it's in very early stages so it's sometimes difficult to talk about work when it's not fully formed but my work has changed I mean you saw a little bit of it there but I'm now working more with abstraction. Actually it's interesting in the current in the sort of British compact sure I know many other black women artists who are working. I mean there are lots in America you know if you look at Mark Bradford or Marey too there's a certain language that's developed there that isn't echoed here I don't know probably I need to do my research but actually in exploring abstraction I still feel the need to anchor it in some sort of discourse with the continuum that we've been talking about so it's always been a strange struggle actually for me because even back then I was making abstract work but actually it was almost not very cool to make abstract work then it was a bit of a no-no it was a bit like actually we need to there needs to be sort of an aspect of representation I am answering your questions it's just coming round in a circle and so that sort of idea of being visible physically the idea of figuration and being in the frame was very important then but actually I feel the way to speak about these things that we've been speaking about actually I found Marcia's what you spoke about really touching in terms of this circular history and this connection with our history which is as you say we've always always been here so there's no newness about it and actually to do that I felt I wanted to anchor it in something that was that had personal meaning for me that also is an important body of work in the way that artists do they often look at our history to make work you know they respond to you know and so my call and response I thought you know and also actually being called to this panel interesting it was all kind of had some synch with this I thought that made sense to look at that work you know a significant work that I was personally involved in that I represented in and how to now engage with that in a new language really which is what I'm doing so actually at the moment what I'm doing is more the kind of research aspect of putting things together like rereading that text actually has been really important I found it really interesting reading it when you know that last bit about history for clues and not facts like actually the way she writes is this kind of mesh of fiction memory and when you know bits of it like even just reading like delta streets one I'm thinking oh yeah that's about delta what's that about hell no you know it's like it really is a bit of a mystery but and I think that's it's really rich actually but as I was saying it's also quite spiritual I think I think there's something about what you've been saying that's deeply spiritual that I've realised that you know they're not reinventing the wheel I don't need to reinvent the wheel I can go to some work and carry it on in some way that's that's kind of what I'm doing and just you know and I only just start in September at the Royal College so it's like you know 30 years later doing the MA that I thought I would do when I you know but anyway it's yeah feels like a good time in the world Marcia you spoke about more being a time traveller and there's strong strand in your work and I think you you were invoking it very very powerfully in connecting with more's work and her legacy of a sense of time that is far more expansive and far far less delineated I suppose than the way in which perhaps traditional art history and traditional artistic practice sometimes thinks of time I wonder if you could speak a little bit about that and Evan also referenced and I think a couple of you did spoke about how more referenced ancient Egypt and mythical space and time and ideas I suppose for me personally it's about the absences and in trying to locate the absences time is completely circular it's not linear and I think at some point we're going to understand that and see as that but I think more had that ability to understand that it was circular and maybe in the way in which she embodied Jean-Gervais within herself that was another way of encirculating time within herself and I think for me that was quite a striking moment that she was able to put herself in somebody else's body but bring it to her time and then speak to us now and then it will speak to people continuously and I just think that's just incredibly awesome to have that foresight and to have the ability in using photography as well that thing that captured it captures the image it captures the soul does it capture the soul it's one of the things that people were quite scared of when it first invented does it capture the soul how does it try and inspire how does it affect me in the future a photograph and I think for me that's quite powerful Laura before we open up I wonder if you could say a little bit more about Mord's work in relation to institutions you spoke about the cybercrime which of course was a really extraordinary technology to be using at that time and actually was hugely logistically complicated for Mord to get a hold of a camera like that to use it but I wonder if you could say a little bit about the interface between Mord's work and institutions because it's only really quite recently that institutions have been collecting Mord's work yeah I sort of don't know where to start with that because it's like we all know that institutions are big slow beasts that are only just getting round to acquiring Black Women's work including you know the institutions that have been collecting Mord's work including institutions that I used to work for I mean I guess thinking about like the work in the V&A was acquired very early on and I think that was interesting that she had one set that was specifically for the V&A whereas the other set was dispersed yeah I don't know I'm not sure how much I have to say about that to be honest I mean I did prepare an answer to your first question well I was just when you were talking about the question that you asked Evan about how when I mean it does relate to institutions I suppose but in a sort of a less direct way in terms of the institution of photography and her questioning of history with the capital H and the questioning of photography and time and I was just I suppose thinking about the exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland and how she kind of refused you know a usual sort of group exhibition like that you would be like this is definitely what it's about and this is definitely who is in all the all of the we know exactly who the model is and we know exactly when it was done but I think that the fact that she said possible appearances of Gendoval I think is really telling of the way that she thinks about history and this idea of like you know that image that I showed of Nadar first of all like I was reading today in a book that it's definitely not Gendoval but then I was also reading that it like more is so clear that it is from her perspective and she says you know I was trying to find the quote but she says something like go and check your archive is why don't you know that it's her it clearly is her and I think that's this idea of yes we have always been here but yet this really important woman to many artists actually I was looking also that sorry what's her name Lorenau Grady has also made work about Gendoval but yet we don't know when she was born we're not actually sure what her job was or really much about her at all we don't really even know what she looked like so yeah it's sort of like this history is there people you know black women have always been there but where are the records and so yeah I don't know I guess maybe her relationship to institutions is a sort of it's almost like she's playing with them it's sort of like a flotation or something well she also set up her own gallery so she was an institution builder as well we shouldn't forget that let's open up do we have any questions in the room please will you say who you are because you just hold on until the mic comes down so I think just down here Naomi please at the it's about row three please thank you so much thank you to Paul Mellon this is just a brilliant event and my name is Julia Ateal and I've been wanting to ask this question since Dion spoke about abstract working with in an abstract way and it made me think that as early as 1983 someone like Claudia Johnson was incorporating abstract elements into her work and even though the artist still speaks about her work as being represented in a sort of figurative there are abstract elements in the work and I wonder whether sometimes there are certain types of language that dominates our reading of black women's work that constantly eclips how the work is read so a point you make about language I think is really important the way even Ward uses language to provoke different types of realities to provoke different types of criticism around the way the record is kept and the language in which the record is kept as well because there is this constant invisible lyzing of black women and it's like we're not actually invisible credit is denied and also the language excludes what we're doing so it's all to the credit of research projects like black artists and modernism that we're returning to look at the work because by looking at the work old way to speaking might not actually reveal what's going on there so I'm really delighted, Dion, that you're working towards abstraction because I think it's an area that's sort of denied black female artists because we're so overly represented within a narrative of figurative work so thank you for that It's actually just interesting when you said sort of denied I mean it's almost like you aren't free to do anything although theoretically you are but it's almost impossible to not somehow have some sense of responsibility or awareness where you sit it's just not our privilege that we can enjoy it unfortunately but I think it's part of kind of you're kind of trying to open up a space in which everything is possible and also I think you have to be true to your own particular journey like you can't I mean it's not true to you to fit into whatever seems I think we want to get out of the box and I think that's part of the work that everyone's doing is trying to create a space in which there's a broad kind of practice, there's a broad spectrum everything is relevant everything has a place and it's just been part of it's just I don't know how to do figurative work at the moment actually it feels like there's so many traps in doing that but also because I'm also interested in lots of other things as we all are you know and I'm interested in different sort of philosophical ideas or ideas around a sort of Buddhist thought and it's like I'm trying to bring all of those things in but I still do have that sense of history actually I can't quite kind of just erase it not erase it but just not speak to it but it's important I think the point you're making which is that sometimes the way in which institutions framework which invitations are issued or contexts are drawn that become the constraint it's not about what artists themselves are doing because there's such a breath and complexity of language and modes of articulating do we have another question in the room yes one at the back and then do we have any questions online one okay so I think we've got time just for two the question at the back there and then we'll take the question online thank you so much hi my name is Sofia Gotti you don't need to say more no hi I'm really inspired by what I listened to this evening so thank you so much also for sharing your emotions because I feel like that has a real place and well one of the things I work on a lot is archives and trying to think about what happens to the archive to this documentation first of all when the archive doesn't have any documentation that you're looking for maybe or when the archive then becomes part of an institution does it not lose so many of its creative spaces attributes and when you're talking about re-claiming, re-purposing reconfiguring I was wondering what you're in that with that intent what is your relationship with archival material or that idea a very open question to anyone who would like to answer actually who would like to take that question Evan or Marcia? I've spoken to it a little bit but I think for me it's kind of what I said that actually I've having done a lot of different explored a lot of different archives and a lot of different context something I have realised that even when the material, the tiny amount of material is there it can be very hard to access because of the bureaucratic processes you have to go to in order to do so either you need an institutional affiliation or you have to submit some kind of documents or whatever for various reasons I've been able to do that but I understand that that's not always possible so I think something that I'm interested in is how does the material become activated in other ways I have tried to do it in different ways by organising some reading groups and collective creativity a lot of our work was about holding space for people to be able to interact with material without having to go through those various groups because the reality is that a lot of the material isn't part of people's arts education I also teach and I encounter that a lot where students are like oh but where is the material and you can find bits and pieces of it online but often it's decontextualised and miscredited or poorly credited and things like that you don't really get a sense of actually the dialogue and the relationships that people had the connections they had you really only get to understand that when you do the archival work and so I don't have an answer but it's something that I'm really interested in how does an archive become more active how does it become something that people can really be with outside of the bureaucratic processes that can enable you to really access that material I think I have one thing to say about that question Very quickly because we're running out of time I went out of it I was just going to talk a little bit how more you worked with archives because I was just thinking about how it's almost like this idea of going into an archive and looking at material looking for facts it's almost like she did the opposite of that the other way that she took on this persona and kind of made stuff up and lived this person and I I feel like I want to ask Dion to tell the story but you told me that more shaved ahead to make to make Calliope It was more about I was so impressed by her strength of character of the photographing of that piece of her as John Deval she had this amazing head of hair then she came in the next morning and she shaved her head I was like that's bold it was more just the boldness of her ability to go from that incredible let's get you all wrapped up in this a little and then to come in besides the fact that this whole thing about all the aunties in your head saying why have you cut your hair apart from that story it was just her decisiveness and the reason I brought that up is because I'm making potentially I'm doing what more does and making something up but I know that Jean Deval she apparently sold her jewels and her hair in order to keep her and Baudelaire alive a float financially because he was he spent he was sort of financially I don't know he just threw his money around basically and I just thought that was really I wonder if that was some sort of like homage or something okay we have one last question it's more of a comment actually from Nina Edge who is watching I just thought it would be really important to so thank you Nina for commenting virtually the copy of passion still speaks to audiences which is my essay in the book feels dated and just wondering whether images and words time travel differently so maybe that's just something for us to ponder about the different modes of text and image and their interaction and publications and their afterlife afterwards Nina Edge another important artist which we should credit and and whose work needs to be seen more often Evan thank you so much Marcia, Laura, Dion it's been an absolute pleasure and thank you to the Paul Mellon Centre and Murray Edwards College this has been a really important conversation and most importantly thank you to all of you who are in this room and virtually with us this evening it was an absolute pleasure to be with you