Art, appropriation, activism

Rosa Johan Uddoh, South London Gallery
Photographs of Benin objects from the Northcote Thomas collection. Artist Rosa-Johan Uddoh preparing for a workshop with the Art Assassins at the South London Gallery.

[Re:]Entanglements is collaborating with the Art Assassins, the young people’s forum of the South London Gallery in Peckham. As part of the project, the Art Assassins are working with a number of London-based artists and researchers with connections to West Africa. The idea is for each artist or researcher to use their creative practice to help the Art Assassins explore the collections and archives assembled by the colonial anthropologist, Northcote Thomas, in Nigeria and Sierra Leone in the early 20th century, and consider their relevance for young people in South London today. The Art Assassins’ work will culminate in an exhibition at the South London Gallery which they will curate themselves.

The second artist to collaborate with the group is Rosa-Johan Uddoh. Rosa is an interdisciplinary artist inspired by black feminist practice and writing. Using performance, ceramics and sound, she explores a seeming infatuation with places, objects and celebrities in British popular culture, and the effects of these on self-formation. Rosa originally studied architecture at university, and she continues to draw upon this background, rooting stories in specific spaces and materials. 

Rosa Johan Uddoh, The Serve, 2007
Blurring reality and fiction, Rosa-Johan Uddoh’s performance art, The Serve, 2017-19. Photograph by Sam Nightingale.

For her project with the Art Assassins, Rosa is working with the group to create a performance piece inspired by the material culture collections made by Thomas, now in the care of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Linking back to her own practice, Rosa is challenging the group to consider what these objects can tell us about colonial legacies in contemporary British society. Confronted with the huge number of items within the collection, the Art Assassins and Rosa have chosen to focus on materials Thomas collected from Benin City, in present day Edo State, Nigeria. Benin and Britain both possessed empires – a fact that has provided a starting point for the Art Assassins’ performance.

Art Assassins workshop with Rosa Johan Uddoh, South London Gallery
Rosa and the Art Assassins working on their collages at the South London Gallery.

In her first workshop with the Art Assassins, Rosa asked the group to explore the possible dialogues between the Benin City objects and contemporary British culture. Presenting the group with a stack of free newspapers, Rosa asked the Art Assassins to produce collaborative collages that juxtaposed the objects with images of celebrities, current affairs headlines and advertisements. When sharing back their finished collages, the group discussed whether notions of empire were still prevalent in the UK today and how pop culture can address serious subjects.

Rosa Johan Uddoh, Benin collage
Examples of the Art Assassin’s collaborative collages – appropriating the archive, juxtaposing historical collections from Benin with newspaper images, headlines and adverts.
Art Assassins, Benin collages

In the next workshop the Art Assassins started to plan more specifically which objects they would focus on for their performance. By looking into the biographies of objects in more detail, via the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Cambridge’s online catalogue, the group found out about their origins. Rosa then asked the group to ‘cast’ these objects into a TV show format of their choice. By combining the object biographies with a TV show structure the group then formed possible narratives for the performance. These played out the complex relationship between anthropology and its subjects and objects.

Art Assassins workshop with Rosa Johan Uddoh, South London Gallery
Rosa and the Art Assassins discussing TV show narratives inspired by the object biographies of material culture collections assembled by Northcote Thomas in Benin City.

In recent workshops the Art Assassins have been working on ideas for the costume in their performance. As research the group have been looking at how archival objects and images have been appropriated in design for activism and protest. The group explored examples such as Black Lives Matter in the USA, Sisters Uncut in the UK and the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eight Amendment in Ireland. These have all used strategies of appropriation, scaling and performance to convey a message.

Black Lives Matter, Eric Garner eyes
Examples of the appropriation of images and objects in activism. Above, Black Lives Matter protesters march behind a large banner featuring a photograph of the eyes of Eric Garner, New York City, 2014 (Photograph JR-ART.net); Below, Rachel Fallon’s ‘Aprons of Power‘, part of the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eight Amendment, Limerick, 2018. (Photographs by Darren Ryan and Alison Laredo.)

Over the next months the Art Assassins will continue to work with Rosa to develop the narrative, costumes and staging for their performance. They will also participate in museum conservation training at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology to learn more about uncovering the stories that objects in the Thomas collection can tell.

The Art Assassins are making a film about their explorations of the Northcote Thomas archive. At each of their meetings, they take it in turn to make video diaries recording their experiences. Here Mia and Phaedra reflect on the workshops run by Rosa.

Listening to images, troubling the archive

Art Assassins, South London Gallery, Government Anthropologist
Photograph of Northcote Thomas and assistants at a meeting of chiefs in Neni to discuss a land dispute, 1911. Annotated by one of the Art Assassins as part of Emmanuelle Andrews’ free-writing workshop at the South London Gallery.

[Re:]Entanglements is collaborating with the Art Assassins, the young people’s forum of the South London Gallery in Peckham. As part of the project, the Art Assassins are working with a number of London-based artists and researchers with connections to West Africa. The idea is for each artist or researcher to use their creative practice to help the Art Assassins explore the Northcote Thomas collections and archives, and consider its relevance for young people in South London today. The Art Assassins’ work will culminate in an exhibition at the South London Gallery, which they will curate themselves.

The first researcher-in-residence to collaborate with the group is Emmanuelle Andrews. Emmanuelle is a researcher and social justice advocate, specialising in the human rights of LGBTI+ people across the Commonwealth, where the criminalisation of same-sex intimacy exists predominantly as a result of colonial-era laws. Domestically, Emmanuelle focuses on racial justice and community resilience, researching issues such as the 2011 London Riots and the Notting Hill Carnival as well as exploring solidarity-making across histories of black radical movements, as in her film Coming to Love.

Since October Emmanuelle has been guiding the Art Assassins through provocative encounters with Northcote Thomas’ work and its legacy. Through discussion and creative exercises she has challenged the group to confront the archive as a method for reflecting on their own entanglements with colonialism. In this guest blog post Emmanuelle looks back on her experience working with the Art Assassins.

Northcote Thomas photograph, Oshodi's brothers, Benin City, 1909
The ‘anthropological gaze’ returned. Photograph of ‘Oshodi’s brothers’, Benin City, taken by Northcote Thomas, 1909. NWT 310. RAI 400.15461.

Confronting the disciplines

In my first encounter with the Art Assassins I began with sharing a personal reflection on a visit to the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) with Paul Basu, leader of the [Re:]Entanglements project and Professor of Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Having studied Anthropology and Law for my undergraduate degree, before studying a Masters in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, this experience was a (re)visit to my disciplinary ‘home’: Anthropology. What I wanted to encapsulate to the Art Assassins was the feeling of lacking belonging here and the field of Anthropology as one that invites, for a black women like myself, a visceral combustion of self and other, as I reflected on my position as being a recipient of the colonial anthropological gaze, as well as potentially an instigator of it. Sitting in the RAI, I considered the historical reality that I was never meant to be there in this form – valued (at least originally) as the ‘viewed’ and not the ‘viewer.’ I hoped to bring to the forefront for the Art Assassins the fact that any dabbling in Northcote Thomas’ work will always be personal, as our very beings refract through the colonial archive.

During my visit to the RAI, I also looked at the collection of Thomas’ plate glass negatives, and handled some of his photographic registers, in which he categorised and annotated the images. Afterwards, I joined the Art Assassins at the British Library Sound Archive where we explored its collection of Thomas’s and other historical ethnographic and ethnomusicological wax cylinder recordings. You can read more about our visit here.

SLG Art Assassins, Emmanuelle Andrew's screening of Faces|Voices film
The Art Assassins viewing Faces|Voices, directed by Paul Basu and Chris Allen, during Emmanuelle Andrews’s first workshop at the South London Gallery.

Listening to images

The visit to RAI and the British Library Sound Archive inspired me to begin my first workshop with the Art Assassins at the intersection of sound and image. I invited the group on a journey through the archive by other means: through a privileging of the senses that confront Western ontology’s desires to judge knowledge through the rationale of scientific certainty.

Watching the beautiful and award-winning film, Faces|Voices, produced as part of the [Re:]Entanglements project, and featuring the film’s participants voicing their responses to Northcote Thomas’ photographic archive, I moved the group to consider whether Thomas’s images were necessarily ‘silent’ in the first place. (In what ways are these images silent? For whom? In what languages?)

Drawing the link between Anthropology’s motivation of filling supposed gaps about distant others and the related violence of Western knowledge-making, I used the film as a starting point to complicate questions of who, in the colonial anthropological project, had voice and who were silenced. I wanted to push the Art Assassins away from a simple reading of Northcote Thomas as the powerful agent of colonialism and his subjects as agentless victims. While we cannot, and should not, ignore the colonial context of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys, it became clear that we can achieve this without reproducing its grammars of violence.

Tina M Campt, Listening to Images book
Tina M. Campt’s inspirational book, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017).

To ground this reading, I introduced the group to Tina M. Campt’s concept of ‘listening to images’, which she describes as both…

a description and a method … [It] opens up the radical interpretive possibilities of images …. To ‘listen to’ rather than simply ‘look at’ images is a conscious decision to challenge the equation of vision with knowledge by engaging photography through a sensory register that is critical to Black Atlantic cultural formations: sound.

Resisting the practice, then, of allowing the eyes to ‘read’ silence in Northcote Thomas’ ‘voiceless’ photographic archive, we instead privileged alternative frequencies by listening closely to the images and expressing our discoveries in a free-writing exercise. Rather than finding misery in the archive, the Art Assassins wrote of joy, talent, romance and longing. It is here that the ‘low hum’of resistance to the colonial project might be found.

Art Assassins, South London Gallery, Free-writing exercise
Free-writing workshop with the Art Assassins, South London Gallery.
Art Assassins, South London Gallery, Free-writing with Northcote Thomas archive
Examples of the Art Assassins’ free-writing engagements with Northcote Thomas’s photographic archive. Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge.
The Art Assassins are making a film about their explorations of the Northcote Thomas archive. At each of their meetings, they take it in turn to make video diaries recording their experiences. Here Fatima reflects on the free-writing exercise.

Confronting Northcote Thomas

Since the Art Assassins’ experience of Northcote Thomas had hitherto been exclusively through the archives of his anthropological surveys, I felt it was important to separate Thomas, the man, from his professional role as Government Anthropologist. Drawing on Paul Basu’s article ‘N. W. Thomas and Colonial Anthropology in British West Africa’, I attempted to take the Art Assassins on a journey that simultaneously elucidated what anthropological methodology looked like in practice, and lead the Art Assassins to reflect on whether we might potentially decolonize the anthropological tradition through making Northcote Thomas the object of inquiry.

SLG Art Assassins, Emmanuelle Andrew's presentation Uncovering Northcote Thomas
Complicating our understanding of the Government Anthropologist. Emmanuelle Andrews making a presentation about Northcote Thomas to the Art Assassins at the South London Gallery.

Looking into his controversial legacy as illustrated by the comments made by Thomas’ peers as well as contemporary anthropologists, we considered how we might learn about Thomas and the period he was working in through various lenses, such as medical anthropology, or critical race theory.

Considering tales spread by his dissenters that he was ‘a recognised maniac in many ways’ (what might this tell us about the stigma of mental health in the 19th/20th century?) and the accusation that he brought ‘a certain amount of discredit upon the white man’s prestige’ (how might this complicate our understanding of Northcote Thomas as a puppet of the colonial state?), we were confronted with the possibility that we might in fact sympathise with Thomas, or at least consider him in a new light, particularly given the fact that he was sometimes a nuisance to the colonial project.

I encouraged us all to sit with the discomfort of these findings, whilst at the same time question what was at stake with any attempt to view him as a human being with the flaws and quirks of any other.

The unfolding discussion was rich, with the Art Assassins demonstrating yet again their interest in, and talent for, dealing with theoretically difficult concepts and disciplinary interrogations, such as whether anthropology was really the appropriate discipline to confront some of the challenges we were facing.

SLG Art Assassins, notes
Notes from the session with Emmanuelle Andrews made by the Art Assassins.

We all left the session buzzing with questions. Northcote Thomas had gone to Nigeria and Sierra Leone to find answers and provide solutions, and we realised that in order to ethically embark on this project, we had to part with the ideal of knowledge as a signifier of value. Surprising a lesson it may be, coming from someone who embodies the role of researcher-in-residence, we nonetheless learned that it is our ability to sit with uncomfortable questions that can provide the most intellectual and creative freedom and, hopefully, culminate in a practice that truly is decolonial.

Art Assassins, Ivo and Nathan, reflect on how their understanding of the colonial archive and how it can be decolonized have changed through the workshops.

Archival Soundscapes with Onyeka Igwe

Northcote Thomas wax cylinder records at British Library
Wax cylinder recordings made by Northcote Thomas stored in their original cases in the British Library Sound Archive.

[Re:]Entanglements is collaborating with the Art Assassins, the young people’s forum of the South London Gallery in Peckham. As part of the project, the Art Assassins are working with a number of London-based artists and researchers with connections to West Africa. The idea is for each artist or researcher to use their creative practice to help the Art Assassins explore the Northcote Thomas collections and archives, and consider its relevance for young people in South London today. The Art Assassins’ work will culminate in an exhibition at the South London Gallery in May 2020, which they will curate themselves.

The first artist to collaborate with the group is Onyeka Igwe. Onyeka is a filmmaker, programmer and researcher. She is widely known for her video work which uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose hidden narratives. Her work explores the physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning. Onyeka won the 2019 Berwick New Cinema Competition for her film the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered. The film explores three interconnected narratives – a story of the artist’s grandfather, one of ‘the land’, and another detailing an encounter with Nigeria.

Onyeka Igwe, still from 'the names have changed'
Onyeka Igwe. Still from her prize-winning film the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered.

For her project with the Art Assassins, Onyeka has been exploring the sound recordings made during Northcote Thomas’ anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The work is ongoing, so here we report on our activities so far and our plans for developing this strand of the project over the coming months.

Listening to the archive

At an initial workshop with Onyeka, the Art Assassins explored the [Re:]Entanglements SoundCloud site, at which the complete set of Northcote Thomas’ digitised sound recordings have been made available. They spent time listening to a selection of the recordings on high quality speakers in the South London Gallery’s Clore Studio. Participants were struck by the texture of the phonograph recordings and how the crackles and pops created their own rhythms. This led into a discussion about how the recordings were made and Onyeka explained more about the wax cylinder recording process employed by Thomas. To give a more contemporary context, Onyeka set up a vinyl record player so the group could get hands on with the analogue sound equipment and learn how sounds can be manipulated.

Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins listening to Northcote Thomas recordings at SLG
Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins listening to a selection of the digitized Northcote Thomas recordings in the Clore Studio, South London Gallery.
One of the first recordings made by N. W. Thomas. Recorded in Benin City on February 2nd, 1909, a few days after his arrival in Nigeria, this song is performed during the Ugie Ewere festival to bring ‘Ewere’ blessings to all homes.

Visiting the archive

The group visited British Library Sound Archive in Kings Cross to find out more about its huge collection of historical ethnographic and ethnomusicological wax cylinder recordings. The British library holds over 700 discrete recordings made by Thomas between 1909 and 1915. It was also responsible for producing the digitised versions of the recordings that the Art Assassins were able to access online. Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music, hosted the visit. After travelling down several floors deep into the basement of the British Library the Art Assassins were amazing to find themselves face-to-face with shelves of Thomas’ original wax cylinders. They were then introduced to the team responsible for digitising the wax cylinders and witnessed a live demonstration of the process.

Janet Topp Fargion showing the Art Assassins the Northcote Thomas wax cylinder records at the British Library
Dr Janet Topp Fargion showing the Art Assassins the Northcote Thomas recordings in archival storage at the British Library.
Janet Topp Fargion showing the Art Assassins the Northcote Thomas wax cylinder records at the British Library
The Art Assassins gained an insight into the work of conservators and researchers at the British Library Sound Archive.
Wax cylinder phonograph recorder at the British Library
The British Library’s sound conservation department has a large collection of historical recording equipment, including this wax cylinder phonograph recorder similar to the one Northcote Thomas would have used during his anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone, 1909-15.
In order to digitize the wax cylinders, the British Library had this bespoke machine built for them. British Library sound conservators demonstrated the digitization process.

Making an audio archive

Back at the South London Gallery, Onyeka and the Art Assassins started to plan how they might create their own archive of sounds reflecting their own lives. Relating back to the Thomas’s work, Onyeka asked the group to consider the categories he had used in his anthropological reports. Would these same categories work for understanding young people living in London today? The group debated this and offered up other categories to guide their sound recording process.

Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins discussing Northcote Thomas recordings at SLG
Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins back at the South London Gallery, reflecting on what they have learnt about sound archives and considering how they might include sound recording in their response to the Northcote Thomas collections.

The group are continuing to build up their own archive of sound recordings ranging from everyday sounds and actions to capturing their own and their families’ accents and phrases. They will also be conducting oral histories with people living the UK with a connection to Nigeria and Sierra Leone which will become part of their larger archive.

Onyeka Igwe and the Art Assassins discussing Northcote Thomas recordings at SLG
Comparing the categories that Northcote Thomas used to order his anthropological data and collections with the Art Assassins’ lists of topics that reflect their own experiences in contemporary South London, and which will guide their sound collecting work.

In preparation for the exhibition in at South London Gallery in May, the group will be working with Onyeka to explore how this developing sound archive can take shape as an artwork. Some of the early ideas are to draw on the technologies and techniques of sound systems and other urban music cultures, using sampling and remixing to produce new arrangements of sound.


The Art Assassins are making a film to document their project. As part of this they are interviewing each other about their experiences. In this clip Art Assassin, Sam Baraitser Smith, reflects on the visit to the British Library and some of the issues raised engaging with the sound archives.

Community outreach with the Art Assassins

Art Assassins visit to UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation Labs
Members of the Art Assassins examine artefacts collected by Northcote Thomas during his anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone during a visit to UCL Institute of Archaeology Conservation Labs.

One of our objectives in the [Re:]Entanglements project is to reach out to a wide range of communities to explore the different values, meanings and possibilities they perceive in the archival traces of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys. This includes people living in the towns and villages in which Thomas worked in Nigeria and Sierra Leone over a century ago, but also artists, activists, academics and others who identify with the groups Thomas studied in one way or another – regardless of where they live now.

We have recently begun a new collaboration funded by the UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund with the Art Assassins – a youth forum based at the South London Gallery in Peckham. Peckham is a wonderfully diverse area of London, where there is a large British-Nigerian and Sierra Leonean community. The South London Gallery – or SLG, as it is now known – is a vibrant cultural hub. Its young people’s programme, which includes the Art Assassins and REcreative, who we shall also be working with, is especially inspiring.

South London Gallery, Fire Station Annexe
South London Gallery’s newly-opened ‘Fire Station’ annexe on Peckham Road, South East London. The Art Assassins will be curating an exhibition at the annexe in May 2020 based on their engagement with the archival traces of Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys.

This is the first of a regular series of blogs that members and coordinators of the Art Assassins will post as the project develops. The project will culminate in an exhibition based on their engagement with the Northcote Thomas archives and collections that the Art Assassins will curate in the SLG’s new Fire Station annexe in May 2020. Over to the Art Assassins…

The Art Assassins, South London Gallery

My name is Tommie Introna, and I have been working with the Art Assassins over the last two-and-a-half years. The Art Assassins is an ever-evolving group for young people aged between 14 and 20 years old that formed ten years ago at SLG. They work collaboratively with each other and with established artists and experts to create platforms that represent themselves and their ideas.

Over the coming months, we will be working with SOAS, UCL’s Museum Conservation programme, the Igbo Studies Initiative, Autograph ABP, two ‘researchers-in-residence’, Emmanuelle Andrews and Emma Dabiri, and artists including Onyeka Igwe and Rosa-Johan Uddoh to examine the archives and collections associated with Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The project will enable young people in South London to get an insight into the professional world of archives and museums as they engage with the photographs, sound recordings, artefacts, botanical specimens and texts relating to Thomas’s surverys. We will be visiting the institutions that care for them today, and explore other related collections, gaining insights into conservation practice, collections based research and curatorship.

SLG Art Assassins project participants
Some of the researchers and artists that the Art Assassins will be working with as they explore Thomas’s anthropological collections and archives. From left to right: Emmanuelle Andrews, Onyeka Igwe, Emma Dabiri and Rosa-Johan Uddoh.

Working with these anthropological archives and collections from the early twentieth century will provide an opportunity to explore colonial history in Britain and West Africa. This is an area that is neglected in the school curriculum, but central to the experiences of many communities living in South London today. We will be working with researchers and artists to explore how history can inform our understanding of our everyday lives and our collective futures.

Art Assassins visit to Horniman Museum with Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp
The Art Assassins are introduced to ethnography and ethnographic collecting during a visit to the new World Gallery at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, South London. Curator, Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, shows the group displays of brass plaques looted from the Oba’s Palace in Benin City during the British Punitive Expedition of 1897, opening up a discussion of the politics of colonial collections and current repatriation debates. Northcote Thomas spent several months in Benin City during his tour of Edo-speaking peoples in 1909-10, just 12 years after the Punitive Expedition.

The project has only recently begun, but already we have been very busy. We have been introduced to the field of ethnography and the history of ethnographic collecting during a visit to the Horniman Museum’s recently refurbished World Gallery. We have got to handle some of the artefacts collected by Thomas during his surveys and learnt about the process of museum conservation in a visit to the Conservation Labs at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. We have had an initial meeting with Onyeka Igwe, the first of the artists with whom we will be working. And we have had several sessions now in which we have begun to discuss our initial ideas and plans for the project.

Art Assassins planning meeting, South London Gallery
Members of the Art Assassins share their initial ideas about the Northcote Thomas archives and collections in their regular meeting room at the South London Gallery’s Fire Station annexe.

We are really excited about the project and can’t wait to see what develops through the collaboration. We’ll be posting regular updates to the [Re:]Entanglements blog and you will also be able to follow our progress through Instagram.

The Art Assassins welcomes new members. If you are aged 14-20 and able to meet regularly at our base in Peckham, South London, please join us! Drop us an email at [email protected]

Tommie Introna, Young People’s Programme Coordinator, South London Gallery.