Arike Oke and Pelumi Odubanjo

Arike Oke is currently the Managing Director of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, which is known as the leading institutional voice on the Windrush Generation and the home of Black British history.

Independent curator, writer and researcher Pelumi Odubanjo joins Arike Oke for a discussion about how their work with archival materials creates spaces to heal, discover new stories and find other ways of living and possibilities for making art.

The pair talk to Lucy Cowling from the Roberts Institute of Art about the importance of knowledge transmission between generations and community building within Black British cultures.

NOTES

At 7 min 51 sec Arike Oke refers to the Jamaican/Scottish nurse Mary Seacole as looking after troops in the Boer War, this should be the Crimean War. 

MORE INFO

This episode is part of our ‘On Togetherness’ podcast mini-series, where we invite conversations between artists and practitioners in the cultural field, exploring collaboration and how to be together in all its forms. Find previous conversations between acclaimed photographer Hrair Sarkissian and curator Michaela Crimmin, plus academics Matthew Spellberg and Richard Sommer. 

Arike Oke is Managing Director for the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. Arike has worked in cultural heritage for over 15 years, from the seminal Connecting Histories project in Birmingham, to building Wellcome Collection's archive, and co-convening Hull's first Black History Month. She is also a writer of short stories, which you can find on arikewrites.com.

Pelumi Odubanjo works as an independent curator, writer and researcher interested in diasporic black vernacular culture and image making, informed by decolonialism and black feminism. Pelumi works with artists, archives, and cultural artefacts to explore historical and contemporary links between the intersectionality of women, migration, and identity. as means to disentangle our understandings of archival practice. She was Curator in Residence at the Black Cultural Archives in 2020.

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