PAST EVENT: This was part of the EAF22 programme.

For EAF22, we presented an Endnote Lecture, with Hew Locke, in conversation with Dr Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani.

Hew Locke is a Guyanese-British sculptor and contemporary artist. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, he spent his formative years (1966-80) in Guyana before returning to study in Britain. 

Locke explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, how different cultures fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. These explorations have led Locke to a wide range of subject matters, imagery and media, assembling sources across time and space in his deeply layered artworks.

Locke’s Duveen Hall Commission for Tate Britain, The Procession, opened in March this year, and in September 2022 his work Gilt will be unveiled as the Façade Commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  Locke has had several solo exhibitions in the UK and USA, and is regularly included in international exhibitions and biennales. His works have been acquired by collections such as The Tate Gallery, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Dr Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is Lecturer in History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include transnationality and diaspora, and the politics of postwar abstraction and visual culture in Britain and beyond. She has held positions at the Yale Center for British Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; the Ulrich Museum of Art; and Tate Liverpool. Her most recent publication considers the representation of postcolonial politics and labour in Frank Bowling’s Mother’s House series, in Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties (Bloomsbury, 2022).

The Endnote Lecture is presented in partnership with British Council Scotland.