Shaheen Merali
Unilever Strike 1987/88
Batik on untreated cotton
In 1989, Shaheen Merali curated and organised a contingent of five Black and Asian artists, including himself, Sonia Boyce, Keith Piper, Al-An deSouza and Pitika Ntuli to exhibit at the Havana Biennial.1 In this conversation Ntuli and Merali outline the significance of the biennial as a moment of visibility for Black and Asian artists in Britain, and as an example of the transnational alliances they were creating. The Havana Biennial not only countered the lack of representation of Black and Asian artists in the UK but also emerged as a stage for the progressive notions of internationalism, solidarity and criticality that were constitutive of their work, connecting them to an international art world.
Merali and Ntuli trace networks of friendship, solidarity and creative organising among artists of colour in Britain and the evolution of grassroots organisations including Africa Centre and African Dawn. Ntuli reflects on the experience of being an artist in exile and the evolution of his sculptural, poetic and pedagogical practices. He describes how his creative practice survived during his imprisonment in South Africa and the resourcefulness with which he had to operate. Ntuli also shares his poetry and reflects on writing as a medium that he used to critique the apartheid regime. He discusses his work as a teacher and facilitator in higher education settings, as well as grassroots community engagement projects.
About the Speakers
Dr Jasmine Chohan is an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, having also completed her PhD there. Although her PhD focused on the Havana Biennial with an emphasis on Cuban contemporary art, her specialisations span across global biennials, contemporary Asian art and contemporary British diaspora art. While completing her PhD, Jasmine spent time studying at the Universidad de la Habana, Cuba, and simultaneously worked on the 12th Havana Biennial. More recently, Jasmine has been working for Tate in London in their schools and teachers department. She has also been focusing on arts education more widely, concentrating on diversity and inclusion. She has been collaborating with groups such as the 1989 Collective and the Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme to reach out to secondary schools in outer London boroughs to ensure the dissemination of British diaspora art to the next generation.
Pitika Ntuli was born in 1940 in Springs, South Africa and grew up in Witbank, Mpumalanga. While a teacher, artist and a critical thinker, he was living under the threat of apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s which forced him into exile in Swaziland where he was arrested and made a political prisoner until 1978, when international pressure forced his release to the UK. He embarked on a prodigious career in exile, completing an MFA in 1985 at the Pratt Institute, New York and an MBA at Brunel University, London. He has lectured at various international and South African universities, including Central Saint Martins, Middlesex University and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is primarily a sculptor, creating structures in any physical medium he can find – metal, wood, stone and bone – and ranging from small to monumental works in granite that weigh more than nineteen tonnes. He was awarded the Global Fine Art Awards people’s choice ‘You-2’ in 2021. In 2013 he was awarded the Arts and Culture Trust Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2012 the city of Johannesburg named him a ‘living legend’.
Shaheen Merali was born in Tanzania and lives in Britain. He is a curator, critic and artist of Asian heritage. Merali began his artistic practice in the 1980s, committing to social, political and personal narratives. As his practice evolved, he focused on his work as a curator, and has now moved to research and writing. Merali is Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and a PhD candidate at Coventry University, based at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), Research Institute for Creative Cultures. His research is concerned with contemporary political Black arts practices that emerged in Asian and African diasporic cultures in the early 1980s and their relationship to curatorial and self-organisational formations in British arts. Merali is a member of the steering group The Role of Visual Arts Organisations in the British Black Arts Movement in the Midlands that received the AHRC Networking Grant (2021–23)
Merali curated the inaugural Uganda Pavilion, Radiance – They Dream in Time, for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. The pavilion was presented the special mention award at the Golden Lion Ceremony. Merali co-curated Berlin Heist – or the enduring fascination of walled cities for the 2014 Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland. He also co-curated the 2006 Gwangju Biennale in Korea. Merali was the Head of the Department of Exhibition, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin from 2003 to 2008, where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by publications, including The Black Atlantic: Travelling Cultures, Counter-Histories, Networked Identities (2004), Dreams and Trauma: Moving Images and the Promised Lands (2005) and Re-Imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation (2008). Merali was a key lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London from 1995 to 2003 and a visiting lecturer and researcher at the University of Westminster from 1997 to 2003.
In 1988, Merali co-founded the Panchayat Arts Education Resource Unit in Old Spitalfields Market. The Unit engaged in an archiving practice, collecting ephemera, documents and publications pertaining to British political Black artists or artists of Asian and African descent. Their collection provided research material that illustrated the link between modern and contemporary art and activism in the UK and internationally. Since 2015 the Panchayat Collection has been donated to Tate Library and designated a special collection. It is housed at Tate Britain, London. Merali was the curatorial consultant on the Provisional Semantics project that took the Panchayat Collection at Tate as a case study to address ‘the challenges of representing multiple perspectives within an evolving digitised national collection’. His curatorial contribution was titled Panchayat-Horizon.
