Inter Worlds archive
The Inter Worlds project aims to increase knowledge of transcultural practice generally; in doing so, to contribute to decolonising the curriculum. Specifically, the project highlights how the transcultural enriches art practice as a vital means for connecting ideas and people and for developments in contemporary art. It promotes considerations of how cultural hybridity arises through interrelations between varied sources and means.
The Inter Worlds online archive presents artwork and texts by Slade staff, students, alumni and visitors who have contributed responses to the importance of the transcultural in art and in their personal practice. The archive has a long-term aim of staging an exhibition by selected archive contributors. The Inter Worlds archive is part of the Inter Worlds project at the Slade that includes a series of talks funded by Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL as well as the British Art Network. The Inter Worlds project is led by PhD candidate Jasmir Creed and supported by Professor Sharon Morris and Professor Kristen Kreider.
* image includes material of a sensitive nature involving animal cruelty and death
Remi Rana Allen
External Contributor
I investigate the construction of British Indian female identity and ‘the maternal’, informed by my personal experiences. Specified by being a British born Indian woman whose body maps her identity, its perception and reception by appearance. Of Indian heritage, culturally British not English. Through paintings, digital prints, film, and object-based installations, I use processes that represent intimacy, transformation, time and touch.
Remi Rana Allen, Killer Queen, 2019, stone, Indian hair extensions, tape, bindi, wire, steel, thread, 80 x 70 x 60 cm
Eva Bachman
Slade School of Fine Art Student 2023
Beyond the Horizon 2022 tunnel book not only resembles the three-dimensional tunnel book to a theatre diorama, it also reveals a multi-layered interpretation of a landscape. The individual segments in the photomontage are a combination of landmarks that represent countries linked to my identity. By merging different locations into one image, I aim to disorientate the viewer, questioning what constitutes the original part of the image and what is imposed on it.
Rather than offering a clear outcome, with my work, I try to illustrate the complexity of the transcultural identity, offering numerous readings. By adding layers taken from elsewhere, I am creating a dialectical image, imbued with multiple interpretations.
Eva Bachmann, Beyond the Horizon, 2022, 3 D tunnel book, 30 x 20 cm
Uday Banarjee
Slade School of Fine Art student 2023
The transcultural deeply informs my practice as I draw from a rich cultural heritage and combine it with modern socio-political strife, through my position as a young Indian. This work contrasts traditional symbols of fertility and a hellscape to explore global concepts of childbirth and changing attitudes around it based on identity and privilege.
Uday Banerjee, Celebration of Life, 2022, charcoal on khadi paper, 34 x 46 cm
Akshay Bhoan
Slade School of Fine Art student 2023
chaman meñ iḳhtilāt-e-rañg-o-bū se baat bantī hai
ham hī ham haiñ to kyā ham haiñ tum hī tum ho to kyā tum ho
In a flourishing garden, the intermingling of colours and fragrances give it substance,
If it is only I, then what am I, if it is only you then what are you
Akshay Bhoan, Raatri Yatra (Night Journey), 2021, markers and pastel on paper, 55 x 80 cm
Jai Chuhan
Slade School of Fine Art alumna
As an Indian-born British artist I am inspired by the multi-directional transcultural. My expressionist painting ‘Madonna’ 2022 explores the female gaze, reflecting classical South Asian sculpture and the long Western tradition of paintings of the nude whereas there is no comparable tradition of painting the nude in South Asian art.
Jai Chuhan, Madonna, 2022, oil on canvas, 150 x 205 cm
Jasmir Creed
Slade School of Fine Art student 2023
Jasmir Creed explores alienation and the transcultural by paintings of people in urban locations, informed by her identity as a British South Asian artist. Only Daughter 2021 shows a woman in South Asian clothes alienated from her surroundings that include an image of Southall Gurdwara and an elderly Sikh couple.
Jasmir Creed, Other Daughter, 2021, oil on canvas, 130 x 120 cm
Chaney Manshu Diao
Slade School of Fine Art student 2023
Performing Dictionary 1 is a live performance of speech and spoken word based on my individual identity. Originally I come from mainland China, I came to London eight years ago for study. My very personal transcultural experience is hugely influenced by thinking about who we belong to and the sense of otherness, in relation to migration, mobility, and my very own bodily experience. Considering my body as a site, my practice therefore addresses identity through the lens of transcultural context, which is informed by feminist theories, more specifically the locational feminism, intersectionality, and feminist geography. The use of the language is deliberately considered as way of demonstrating a linguistic vulnerability in relation to above thinking.
Chaney Manshu, Diao Performing Dictionary 1, 2021, live performance, text, speech
Yvonne Feng
Slade School of Fine Art alumna
Being a diaspora artist enables me to explore political and social events in my country of origin at a safe distance and from different perspectives. Within transcultural spaces, I search for artistic agency to act upon those events and negotiate the inextricable relationships between my sense of self and otherness.
Yvonne Feng, Notebook (Fragments) artist book published by Sulla Fuffa (Hong Kong), 2021
Errol Francis*
Slade School of Fine Art alumnus
The idea of the 'transcultural' informs my practice in the sense of making me aware of the need to disrupt the binaries, oppositions and dualities that confound human relationships.
Errol Francis, Harrison in Union with the Beasts, 2022, giclée print mounted on aluminium, 84 x 118 cm
Shiv Lalgi
Slade School of Fine Art student 2023
My art practice seeks to be a process of decolonisation for myself. Through film, photography and painting, I am able to access a space of healing that arises from the reconciliation and re-entering of diasporic existence, cultural hybridity, archive, storytelling and memories.
Shiv Lalgi, Phases, 2023, oil on canvas board, 10.5 x 14.85 cm
Bindu Mehra
Slade School of Fine Art PhD student 2023
Bindu Mehra, The Folding Landscape, 2018, inkjet on archival paper, 180 x 72 x 46 cm
Vaishali Prazmari
Year 2 Slade PhD researcher
Reconnecting with Siyah Qalam, this Big Little Devils piece was made in London then travelled to Istanbul, Turkey, where the mysterious original Siyah Qalam paintings are held (in the Topkapi Palace). Reconnecting with magic, my own inner demons and my children’s inner little devils too and painting them out in the hope that it encourages behaviour a little more like little angels. Transcultural exchanges via the Silk Road form the spinal cord of my practice which aims to suture different painting traditions and cultures together.
Vaishali Prazmari, Thousands of artworks generated by the 1001 Arabian Nights
Hermione Spriggs
PhD Student Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi): Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism, a curatorial and publication project led by Hermione Spriggs in 2017-18,part of the larger project Emergin g Subjects of the New Economy, funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr. Rebecca Empson in the Department of Anthropology, UCL.
Book: September 2018, English
13.5×20 cm, 136 pages, 44 b/w and 18 color ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-429-2
Andrew Stahl
Slade School of Fine Art Professor of Fine Art 2023
Kiss refers to a giant Buddha in Thailand. Astonished by its size and beauty it compelled me in 1990 to travel on a Wingate scholarship to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. I am committed to engage with work from all over the globe including China, Japan, India, and Africa.
Andrew Stahl's research in the last 30 years has been to examine and enhance the transcultural interaction between different cultures. In 2008, he established the Transcultural Artist Network, an Artist in Residence programme at the Slade.
Andrew Stahl, Kiss,1990, oil on canvas, 213 x 214 cm
Mary Yacoob
Slade School of Fine Art student 2023
The circular and gridded configuration of Mary Yacoob’s drawing is inspired by diagrams by Luke Howard, a meteorologist who named and classified clouds. Seeking to connect the earthly to the cosmic, the scientific to the artistic, and observation to imagination, the artist filled the space of her graph with a fictional map of interstellar clouds.
Mary Yacoob, Intergraphia 01, 2022, cyanotype print, edition of 40, 47 x 34 cm
Funa Ye
Year 2 PhD researcher, 2021-2022
My practice is mainly concerned with the relationship between the realities of everyday life and transcultural experiences. I am particularly concerned with the perceived connection between authority and the many areas of social life. Within my practice, I explore different power structures, ethnic groups, and fictional spaces within the realm of propaganda, and the concept of ‘perfection’ in an ideological system, and utopian landscape. Many of my works are rich in reference, parody, and irony related to the uniformity within the culture. This time in Nottingham Contemporary, my exhibition titled From hand to hand. It connects subjects considered light and kitsch - Nails and Ping Pong. These two things play a significant role in my different projects.
Funa Ye, Living with Smarts, 2021, photography, 90 x 110 cm
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Inter Worlds Transcultural Hybridity in Art
– ongoing
This project, led by PhD student Jasmir Creed and Professor Sharon Morris, is significant in its aim of decolonisation of the curriculum and the museum. It is funded by the Slade School of Fine Art and the Institute of Advanced...