Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: EMPIRE LINES
Episode: The Time is Always Now, Ekow Eshun (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x National Portrait Gallery, The Box)
Description: Curator Ekow Eshun reframes the Black figure in historic and contemporary art, surveying its presences, absences, and representations in Western/European art history, the African diaspora, and beyond, via The Time is Always Now (2024).
In 1956, the American author James Baldwin wrote: ‘There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.’ Heeding Baldwin’s urgent call, Ekow Eshun’s new exhibition brings together 22 leading contemporary African diasporic artists from the UK and the US, whose practices emphasise the Black figure through mediums...