Tate Etc.

The Swiss artist Miriam Cahn’s startling painting, The Beautiful Blue 2008–17, depicts a harrowing scene of two figures – one female, the other male – sinking into a dark sea beneath a bright, cloudless sky. The woman falls with her arms outstretched as if she has jumped feet first into the water while the man descends headfirst. The blue surrounding them appears at once tranquil and foreboding.

SAFI BUGEL Where did the idea for your film In Praise of Still Boys 2021 come from? JULIANKNXX It came from a series of poems I wrote in 2019, exploring my personal history as a Creole living in England, and the ways in which stories of people like me have overlapped across the globe. When shooting the film, I had the opportunity to go back to Sierra Leone, where I was born. There I encountered a group of boys who reminded me of my younger self.

OSEI BONSU Can we start by talking about your early life? Your mother passed away when you were young, and you were raised by your uncle. What are your memories of that time? EL ANATSUI My uncle was a Presbyterian pastor in Anyako, a town in southeast Ghana, so we lived with him in the mission house. Life in a mission house was quite different from life in the town itself. Our world was limited to the church and school.

In 2012, I discovered the Hulene rubbish dump, an open-pit waste site in Maputo, Mozambique, and began photographing the people who lived and worked there. More than a thousand families participate in the intensive labour of garbage collection, sustaining themselves and making a living out of whatever they find to be edible or useable amid the rubbish. Although the Hulene dump has been the source of livelihood for this informal sector, it is also the cause of major environmental degradation.

To think of the Rossettis is to think of Dante Gabriel – the sensuality of his paintings, their potent symbolism, the stories they tell. Yet I don’t think of him as much as I think of his sister Christina, his wife Elizabeth Siddal and the other women who modelled for him, such as Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth and Alexa Wilding. For it is their faces I see when I look at his paintings and drawings. They linger.

A visitor to Tate Modern in 2020 might have been surprised to find a work by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), the Dutch pioneer of abstraction, hanging not alongside his avant-garde peers but opposite a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ by the Bombay-born artist Atul Dodiya (b.1959). While Mondrian’s Composition B (No.II) with Red 1935 is composed in his signature geometric style, Dodiya’s Meditation (with open eyes) 2011 is a miscellany of sorts.

‘Before conceptual understanding there is a state of perceptual mystery’ – Hamad Butt Hamad Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1962, and moved with his family to Britain two years later. He was brought up and educated in London, and was initially drawn to the study of science, taking biology, chemistry and maths alongside art for his A-Levels.

CATHERINE WOOD I’d like to start by asking you about the origins of your art. You’ve said before that you let the slow, hidden voice within you rise above your European education. Is this where it all began? CECILIA VICUÑA My art began on a very particular day in January 1966. I was on the beach, and I could feel the wind, but instead of just blowing past me, the wind made itself into something like a knot around my body. I remember turning around, as if I had been enveloped, caressed, by the wind.

The Operating Table by Ellie Perry She holds the weight of every walk home in the palm of her hands. The dice, its black silhouette dotted with white, casts a shadow on her palm like a housing block at night. A series of crossroads will be unleashed as soon as she sets it down. Where to put the streetlamps? The plant pots? The bins? How does she make a safe space here? The stakes, like the housing block, are high. All three women understand. Embedded in their anxious glances is a familiar fear.