The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum Podcast

The City is Full of Noises: Episode 1 - What is The City is Full of Noises?

The City is Full of Noises is an annual festival of electronic music that takes place at Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. In the first episode of this series, Jack speaks to Dom, one of the founders of the festival, about what inspired it and what makes it so special.

Herbert Art Talks Episode 4: Bridging the Gap - Gordon Cheung’s Megalopolis

How do landscape paintings reinforce or challenge traditional power structures? 
Drawing on both Eastern and Western art traditions, British-Chinese artist Gordon Cheung encourages us to question the assumptions of familiar landscape paintings, which often reflect the politics of a world where history is written by the victors. 
Now on display in Divided Selves, his painting Megalopolis is inspired by a major Chinese development project, combining three neighbouring cities into a single urban powerhouse. The work is a futuristic, mixed media cityscape, mixing features of traditional landscape painting with surreal, dreamlike elements, in a style he describes as the “technological sublime”. 
Inspired by his own “in-between” identity, Cheung raises the question of whether diaspora communities can act as a “conduit of understanding” between cultures, helping to rebuild bridges that have previously been burned. 
Divided Selves: Memories, Legacies, Belonging is free to visit at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until 24 September 2023. Find out more at theherbert.org.

Herbert Art Talks Episode 3: Drawing Memories - Sophie Ernst’s HOME

What does home mean to you? From childhood memories to national identities, Sophie Ernst’s HOME explores what the idea represents to people who have been forced to leave their homes behind. 
 
Over several years, Sophie has built up an archive of interviews with artists, architects and historians, all with direct experience of migration. During each interview, she asks her subjects to draw out a floor plan of the house they grew up in - a process which is filmed and later projected onto a 3D model. 
 
These physical models invite us inside the homes her subjects describe, encouraging us to relive memories with them and empathise with their experiences of loss.
 
Divided Selves: Memories, Legacies, Belonging is free to visit at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until 24 September 2023. Find out more at theherbert.org.

Herbert Art Talks Episode 2: Serving Justice – Sofia Karim’s Turbine Bagh

From family recipes and rituals to snacks on the street, food plays a huge part in shaping our identities and structuring our day-to-day lives. It’s part of the power of Sofia Karim’s Turbine Bagh series, which transforms something as ordinary and everyday as street food wrapping into an eye-catching tool for political protest.
Developed in response to the female-led Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Turbine Bagh is a series of paper samosa packets printed with calls to free political prisoners. Conceived as an installation for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the series has evolved into an international movement, uniting artists and activists from different national, cultural and creative backgrounds around a shared cause.
In the second episode of our Divided Selves podcast, Sofia discusses the inspiration for the eries and the role of food in times of crisis. 
Divided Selves: Memories, Legacies, Belonging is free to visit at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until 24 September 2023. Find out more at theherbert.org.

Herbert Art Talks Episode 1: Power Structures – Sofia Karim’s Architecture of Disappearance

How do we build the kind of world we want to live in? In the first episode of our Divided Selves podcast, artist, architect and activist Sofia Karim explores the structures that uphold power in societies – both literally and metaphorically. 
An Architecture of Disappearance is a series of small-scale architectural models inspired by Sofia’s correspondence with political prisoners. After years of working in architectural firms, the imprisonment of her own uncle prompted her to begin campaigning for the release of political prisoners – activism that eventually changed her career for good. 
Divided Selves: Memories, Legacies, Belonging is free to visit at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until 24 September 2023. Find out more at theherbert.org.

Divided Selves - Episode 1 Teaser

How do we build the kind of world we want to live in? In the first episode of our Divided Selves podcast, artist, architect and activist Sofia Karim explores the structures that uphold power in societies – both literally and metaphorically. 
 
An Architecture of Disappearance is a series of small-scale architectural models inspired by Sofia’s correspondence with political prisoners. After years of working in architectural firms, the imprisonment of her own uncle prompted her to begin campaigning for the release of political prisoners – activism that eventually changed her career for good. 
 
Divided Selves: Memories, Legacies, Belonging is free to visit at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum until 24 September 2023. Find out more at theherbert.org.