The Big Smoke

Next time you visit Tottenham – if ever, for those Londoners who behave as if intra-city travel requires foreign currency and a course of anti-malarial tablets – be sure to look around. Come out of Seven Sisters tube station, past the Columbian café, the Pakistani-owned afro hair shop, the Jamaican music store, past the Polish deli, and eventually you will discover one of the most important recent additions to London’s cultural landscape. After a decade of campaigning, spearheaded of late by his widow Sharon, Bernie Grant’s dream of a purpose-built arts space for Tottenham has been posthumously realised.
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The eponymous black-led arts venue, which opened last month, is billed as a flagship centre for developing and showcasing culturally diverse work: a fitting testament to a political firebrand who devoted his life to racial equality. Across three buildings, the £15 million project houses a 300-seat auditorium, a 70-seat studio space, a café-bar, state-of-the-art training facilities for accredited technical arts courses and work space for creative entrepreneurs. Work by the likes of black aerial artist Upswing, jazz vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, children’s puppet theatre from Horse and Bamboo and b-boy trailblazer Jonzi D has or will pass through its doors, alongside main-house performances from emerging artists. According to shortMAN, a south London spoken-word artist whose incredible spitfire poetics reach the Bernie Grant Arts Centre (BGAC) later this month: ‘There are lots of opportunities for young people to be creative, but there is a limit on how far they can go with it. So to have a theatre where they can showcase their work alongside established artists is a big thing.’ In an area with few public spaces and even fewer artistic provisions, one synonymous with ’80s race riots, where the magic wand of regeneration is only now starting to make its presence felt, the arrival of a striking, modern, public building with ambitions both for and beyond its locality, speaks volumes.

Rivington Place's first visitors are asked to mark their birthplaces on a map of the world

Not far away in Shoreditch, Rivington Place has just opened, providing a much-needed home for the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), headed by Sebastian Lopez, and photographic agency Autograph ABP, headed by Mark Sealy. The £8 million structure is the only permanent public space dedicated to culturally diverse visual arts and photography in the UK, as well as London’s first new-build public gallery since the Hayward Gallery in 1968. Chairman Ken Dytor says he hopes Rivington Place will ‘create a stepping stone for culturally diverse artists to come together and provide a platform from which people, and the organisations around them, can actually grow.’ The opening exhibition, ‘London is the Place for Me’ takes its inspiration from Lord Kitchener’s famous calypso number and features photography from Dinu Li, video installations from Harold Offeh, Mona Hatoum and Keith Piper, as well as a contemporary revision of Harry Jacobs’ famous Brixton photographic studio by Leticia Valverdes. For Offeh, it’s been a long time coming: ‘We finally have an institution with a remit to work with culturally diverse artists that is on a par with other major spaces in London.’

That both projects were designed and built (on time and on budget) by Ghanaian-born architect David Adjaye – with a third Adjaye Associates building opening this month (the Stephen Lawrence Centre in Lewisham) – signifies the permanence of multiculturalism in Britain. ‘Everybody talks about London and its diversity but to be a part of the place and not part of the architecture is a really big misfit,’ he says. ‘An immigrant or a diverse group is not accepted as part of the community until it builds part of the community. For me these buildings signal the real assertion that diversity is part of the image of London.’ Both projects also provide an eloquent counterpoint to the idea that the arts are white. Art is everywhere, it belongs to everybody, and no city in the world matches London’s incredible scope, dynamism or creativity. From Yellow Earth’s east Asian physical theatre, new black writing theatre company Tell Tarra, hijab-rocking spoken-word rebels Poetic Pilgrimage, west African theatre company Tiata Fahodzi, World Bollywood Dance Champions Shri Academy and street dance superstars Flawless, to arts spaces such as the Rich Mix in Bethnal Green, the Arcola in Dalston, artsdepot in North Finchley and the 198 Gallery in Brixton – our city is pulsating with artistic expression.

What gets funding, the oxygen of publicity, recognition and thus validation from the white mainstream, is, as Mira Kaushik artistic director of leading south Asian dance company Akademi points out, an entirely different matter: ‘London has a thrilling and diverse artistic landscape. However, the reality is that non-white art forms, artists and art-makers survive in the system with or without press support.’ This is because ‘the arts’ as a mechanism of institutionalised expression is still run almost exclusively by the white middle classes. Pat Cumper, artistic director of Talawa Theatre Company says: ‘Including a picture of a BAME practitioner on the website of major creative organisations doesn’t alter the power structures within those organisations. We have a long way to go before either funding or the work that is available is truly representative of the UK’s population.’

While there has been a concerted effort to redress this imbalance in recent years – with Arts Council initiatives such as the Inspire curators programme, Decibel and the Sustained Theatres initiative – Selina Papa of Cultural Co-operation thinks the issue of diversity goes deeper than education workshops and funded ticket schemes: ‘Access is a problem that a lot of big institutions are trying to address at the moment. But how do you do that when what you represent is completely alien?’

Maybe the answer lies in reverse outreach/artistic missionary work? Providing artistic power brokers with free tickets to events, institutions and communities that are completely outside of their comfort zone and understanding, to engage with art on someone else’s terms. For theatre maker Deborah Williams, the future of an equitable artistic landscape lies in ‘developing a critical language that covers the length, breadth and depth of experience in Britain’, one that d acknowledges other points of view. For visual artist Alvin Kofi, it’s about creating a forum for debate, ‘whether it takes place in an intellectual setting or in a creative setting. If they’re brave enough, there needs to be a discussion about what the purpose of art is and who defines it.’

For Mem Morrison, a performance artist whose work explores his experiences as a British Turkish Cypriot, it’s about artistic freedom: ‘The challenge is, do we as non-white artists try and fit into the mainstream, or do we try and speak in our own voice? I think we have to believe in our stories and let people come to us for a change.’

But do we need a different home for black, brown, yellow, BAME, ‘raced’, non-white or just plain ‘other’ artists? Does signposting culturally diverse work create equality, or are these developments, as Sir Laurence Olivier told Cy Grant when he tried to enlist his patronage for a black arts centre in the ’70s, ‘separatist’? JB Rose, head of Tell Tarra, says her organisation exists to ‘counterbalance the story of black dysfunction perpetuated by the white mainstream’. For Gaylene Gould, head of programming at BGAC, it is still vital that culturally diverse artists have what she calls a ‘safe place’ to develop ideas that aren’t constrained by mainstream notions of what art should be. A place for artists to define themselves, for themselves, which in a society where ethnicity tends to pip humanity to the post, she feels is a necessity.

But for artists such as Kinsi Abdullah, this poses a double bind. Founder of Kudu Arts, a small Somali arts organisation that champions cross-art collaborations, culminating in the Numbi festival at the Hackney Empire next month, she welcomes visibility and recognition of her cultural experience. But, like many artists, she is frustrated that her work requires an ethnological prefix. ‘I don’t want to be a seasonal artist who is only called on in Black History Month. It’s like a soup kitchen. I want to work with Tate Modern as well as the BGAC, because that is the kind of freedom that I think we are entitled to.’ She is bitterly disappointed that plans to hold Numbi at the BGAC were scrapped in favour of what she feels are more mainstream offerings. ‘If the BGAC is an African-Caribbean space, then the Somali community needs its own space and then the whole thing becomes rather divisive. Bernie Grant was somebody who did a lot for the Somali community. We were his community. So for us now to be on the outside, it’s really very sad.’ But Foster is adamant that while the initial programme draws heavily upon African-Caribbean artists – which she says refers to the demographic make-up of south Tottenham – projects such as Chi2’s ‘Monkey King’, Nitin Sawhney’s week-long residency in December, and new offerings born out of Diane Morgan’s creative development, will be reflective of Haringey’s cultural diversity. It is, she insists, an inclusive space. ‘It’s dangerous to set up spaces that only attract a particular section of the population. One, because creatively it’s very limiting; but also, the arts should be about shared experience.’

Naseem Khan – former Time Out theatre editor and author of ‘The Art Britain Ignores’, the seminal text widely credited for opening up the debate about race and arts funding in the ’70s, agrees: ‘We have made huge progress in this country in the arts, as so many European countries acknowledge. [But] the next stage will come when we can call them simply “arts centres” and uncouple the issue from race.’

That both Rivington Place and BGAC have received widespread support from bodies such as the Arts Council, the London Development Agency, the European Regional Development Fund and their respective boroughs councils, demonstrates a clear understanding of the multifaceted approach required to broaden access to the arts. But getting the buildings is only half the battle; keeping them open is the challenge. The prospects for Rivington Place look very promising – both inIVA and Autograph ABP are established organisations with strong industry links, not to mention a £1 million partnership with Barclays. The BGAC, on the other hand, is a new organisation, surviving on very little funding, and it is grappling with the very thing that makes it special – its location. Making it accessible to both locals and a wider audience is the challenge. Despite a three-year funding commitment from the Arts Council, this issue, coupled with marginal publicity and cheap ticket prices, mean that the stakes are high. Opera director Larry Coke, whose production of ‘Mary Seacole’ sold out at BGAC earlier this month, worked with Bernie Grant during the early stages of this project and knows more than most the importance attached to it: ‘We’ve had ten good years of funding from the Arts Council and you know what that’s meant for black arts. But the ten years are over. The Olympics is the priority now. So we really have to do what we can to keep this place open. We lose it, and that’s it.’