Living Archives Podcast S2 E2: Ebun Sodipo and Ain Bailey

The second conversation of Living Archives Season Two invites Ebun Sodipo and Ain Bailey to consider the creative potential of archives and imagination within the current social and political landscape, collage and fragmentation in building meaning and art-making, and how sound and performance shape an audience’s experience. Conversation transcript available here.

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, Living Archives is a podcast foregrounding intimate, intergenerational conversations between UK-based diasporic artists.

The pairings in each episode begin with an invitation from one artist to another. Together, they exchange insights into art-making, memory and the ideas and influences shaping their practices. Rooted in Stuart Hall’s vision of a ‘living archive’, the series is a record of creative dialogues that explore how histories, identities and artistic practice are considered in the present.

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Hosted by Yewande YoYo Odunubi

Edited by Chris Browne

Original designs by Yolande Mutale

Season Two designs by Joanna Risvik

Music by LOX

Bios

Ebun Sodipo makes work for black trans people of the future. Guided by black feminist study, with a methodology of collage and fabulation, her work locates and produces real and imaginable narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future. In doing this, Sodipo fills in historical gaps to create moments of archival pleasure for black trans people. This work takes place across multiple spaces: galleries, festivals, theater, digital, and print; in varied forms such as sound, performance, text, installation, video, and sculpture.

Sodipo’s work has been shown, read, watched, and performed at Frieze London, Cubitt, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, SHOWStudio, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s ‘How To Sleep Faster,’ Auto Italia, Institute for Contemporary Arts, Tate Britain, Text zur Kunst, Bergen Kunsthall, Wasafiri, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, and Camden Arts Centre.

Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops exploring identity, memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London. Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ programme for the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. Other recent commissions are the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: (Our Wedding)’ for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA; ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany and the installation ‘Four’ (2024) for FACT Liverpool’s ‘Resolution’ research project. She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Newer works for 2026 are ‘The Jamaica Project’ at Camden Arts Centre, London, UK and ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’ with Elaine Mitchener for Art On The Underground at Waterloo Station, London, UK.

Co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and International Curators Forum, supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund and Arts Council England.