The World Reimagined
The World Reimagined is a ground-breaking, mass participation art education project to transform how we understand the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impact.
The World Reimagined sees trails of large globe sculptures in cities across the UK, including Leeds, until October 2022, created by artists to bring to life the impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The trail will be the centre of a broader education and engagement programme, with hundreds of schools, community groups, sporting and cultural institutions taking part across the country.
Leeds has a unique story to tell, as a culturally vibrant city, enriched by its diversity and the cultural heritage of all its citizens. Together, we can learn from our past, understand our history and reimagine our future, creating a world that is one rooted in unity and diversity. Explore this story following a trail of 10 hand-painted globes across Leeds city centre and onwards to Chapeltown. Each globe has been painted by an artist to explore the diversity of our city and reimagine our past, present and future.
If you complete the trail by scanning all of the QR codes on the globes then you could be in for the chance of winning the World Reimagined book!
At the end of the campaign, the Globe sculptures will be auctioned to raise funds that will create a grant-making programme for projects and organisations across the UK that work to make racial justice a reality.
The World Reimagined is a vibrant project that will inspire and instil pride in what it means to be black and British and help us all better understand what it means to be British. The project hopes to help our society come together in dialogue – to re-examine our understanding of our history and reimagine the world that we can create together – one rooted in acknowledgement, dignity and unity, cherishing our diversity.
Trail and Artist Information
Further details on each of the globes and the artists who created them can be seen below. There is also a downloadable trail map at the bottom of this page. Alternatively you can view an interactive digital map on The World Reimagined website here.
Mother Africa by Rodell Warner
Norma Hutchinson Park, Chapeltown
Globe one explores the richness and reality of Africa before the Transatlantic Slave Trade; the impact of the Slave Trade and Empire on Africa; and considers and celebrates the present and future of Africa.
Rodell Warner (b. 1986) is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. His works have been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2016 Dreamlands exhibition as part of the collective video project Ways of Something, and at The National Gallery of Jamaica in the 2016 exhibition Digital, and at the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018 in I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not #14. Rodell is a recipient of the 2011 Commonwealth Connections International Arts Residency, and the 2014 summer residency at NLS Kingston, and was commissioned in 2017 to create the Davidoff Art Edition, a series of five artworks printed onto a limited edition of five thousand boxes of luxury cigars and presented and sold at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Miami, and Basel. Rodell lives and works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and Austin, Texas, in the US: www.rodellwarner.com
The Reality of Being Enslaved by Mussarat Rahman
Lovell Park, North Lane
Globe two is about making real the experience of those people who were enslaved, from their capture and voyage to lives enslaved in different contexts, places and generations.
Mussarat Rahman is a community artist and poet. For the last few years she has been experimenting with 3D art and installations with a variety of community groups and festivals. She runs social action projects, and delivers community programmes with different communities, and in particular with refugees and asylum seekers. Her work addresses themes of migration and movement, religion, spirituality, materialism, politics, and gender. She designs projects around local and global issues which affect society and particularly affect communities. Her projects are designed to create a reaction and be interactive to engage audiences.
Stolen Identity by Marcia Brown
Merrion Centre
Globe 3 brings to life how Britain was transformed as a result of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the free labour of the enslaved. It explores the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in building the financial and trading power of Britain; strengthening the Church and the might of universities; and establishing dynastic influence and power.
Marcia Brown M.A (QTLS) is a Multi-disciplinary Community Artist and Teacher based in West Yorkshire. She graduated from Leeds Beckett Park University with a master’s degree in Contemporary Fine Arts Practices. She is a recipient of the Edna Lumb Travel Scholarship and the Black Achievers awards for her work in Community Arts. Originally trained as a painter, she taught herself to play the guitar and became a music maker. Her passion for Roots Reggae Music is at the core of her creativity and informs her paintings, digital artworks and music production ideas. The retention of her cultural heritage using the lyrical content of Roots Reggae Music and photographic images is paramount to her art practice. Her vibrant paintings seek to explore the relationship between music and colour and the annihilation and lost function of African Artefacts/objects held in Museum Collections throughout the world. Her mission is to create art and music that inspires, empowers, and educates: www.marciabrown.co.uk
Abolition & Emancipation
Clay Pitt Lane Pocket Park
Globe four shares the story of the Campaign for Abolition, its key events, heroes and allies. However, it also lays bare the full, messy motivations and process of abolition, which were not as pure as often represented.
Gherdai Hassell is a Bermudian born, China trained, multidisciplinary contemporary artist, writer and storyteller, based in Manchester, UK. Her work investigates memory and nostalgia to construct and deconstruct identity. She uses collage and painting to thread and weave histories, and tales of transformation passed down through family lineages. Her work typically centres female bodies, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future. Her work is ultimately about migration, a gradual process of being and becoming the future. Her multimedia work reimagines relationships with the body as avatar, social space and the invisible world. Her artwork is a part of public and private collections across the world.
The Seas Lament Becomes a Battle Cry by Shivanee Ramlochan
Cookridge Street
Globe five explores the impact on destination countries; their relationship with the ‘Mother Country’; key historical events in the relationship such as the Windrush; and the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on the UK’s role and reputation in the world. It is accompanied by a poem of the same name.
Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian writer. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) was a finalist for the People’s Choice T&T Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. “The Red Thread Cycle”, the central suite of seven poems from her debut collection, won a Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry (second-place), and was on audiovisual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. Shivanee has received residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Millay Arts, and Catapult Caribbean Arts Grant. She has served as a poetry reader and judge for Commonwealth Writers, Honeysuckle Press, Moko Magazine, Forward Prizes and others. A Spanish-language edition of Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting is to be published soon. Her second book, Unkillable, on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2023.
Echoes in the Present by Larry Amponsah
Briggate
Globe six focuses on how the Transatlantic Slave Trade has present day negative consequences: systemic inequalities and injustice; entrenched racism and prejudices; and generational echoes with traumatic physical, behavioural, psychological and material consequences.
Larry Amponsah (b. 1989, Accra-Ghana) is a multimedia artist whose practice investigates traditional modes of image-making whilst employing unconventional strategies of production to look at the contemporary politics of imagery. Amponsah, traditionally trained as a painter, creates collages made of archival images, objects, and stories from various cultures in order to negotiate systems of power and create new ways of transcending boundaries. Amponsah transforms, prints and cuts into archival images, which he assembles in collages that are further worked upon using mechanical processes and his honed skills as a trained painter. In this succession of strategic moves about image-making techniques, dynamic compositions emerge, as well as compelling narratives or portraits that reference his own West African upbringing within a greater global narrative.
Still We Rise by Kwaky Anokye
Victoria Arcade
Globe seven looks to recognise how even when faced with adversity, cooperation and sacrifice within the Black community has led to the conquering of obstacles and barriers throughout history. From our darkest times in slavery and colonialism, to problems faced today, people of African descent have somehow managed to thrive, excel and ascend into a reimagined future.
Kwaku Anokye is promising young artist from Ghana and Dominica. He was born in Hong Kong and has lived in Tokyo, London and Ghana. Working primarily with acrylic, spray and oil paint; Kwaku has also worked digitally and in fashion.
Despite his classical and figurative background in portraiture and live drawing; Kwaku’s work has become more abstract, drawing from his diverse upbringing to inform his artistic style. He combines elements of traditional African art and hip-hop culture to graffiti and Japanese Manga, using simplistic figures and bold colours to explore his past experiences.
Community Globe: Currents in Motion led by artist Rosanna Gammon
Kirkgate Market
Globe eight celebrates the spirit and culture that, even in the face of incredible physical suffering, has endured, stayed vibrant and found expression across the world in music, art, food and so much more.
Rosanna is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher based in Leeds, Yorkshire. She uses a playful approach to mark-making, incorporating elements of collage, drawing and experimental painting to explore shifting cultural representations of everyday life.
Expanding Soul by Emmanuel Unaji
Corn Exchange
Globe nine recognises and honours the enslaved and their descendants who resisted, who succeeded, and who broke new ground. It will share the well-known and celebrated and shed light on untold legacies and events.
Emmanuel Unaji was born in 1994 in London. He studied fashion design and completed a degree in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art, London in 2020. Dubbed by British GQ as the Nigerian Artist reinterpreting fashion illustration, Unaji’s a polymath whose multidisciplinary practice is a wide spectrum, spanning fine and commercial artforms freely combining painting, drawing, collage and product design with adept experience in High Fashion, modelling for Brands such as Gucci, British GQ, Adidas amongst others. Emmanuel has carved out his own space, at the junction of luxury, performance and fine art, where he mechanically deconstructs select images and identities that the media offer up to us. Emmanuel is interested in engaging the viewer in a conversation, by exploring what lies beneath the surface of content that we consume. The essence of Emmanuel’s art practice navigates the socioeconomic dichotomy of creativity and business, investigating the intersection of autonomy and public persona, self and celebrity.
Reimagine the Future by Ali Elly
Meadow Lane Park
Globe ten gives us free rein to imagine the society we can create when we have a full understanding of our shared history; the place the UK can hold in the world when it acknowledges its past; and who we can be as people when we give full dignity to all.
Ali is a Northumberland based professional artist who studied and worked in the fashion and textiles industry. Her artworks observe the composition of patterns as an artform. Using the irregularities found in the everyday she builds a repetition of elements that begin to tell a story. Ali has previously painted her designs onto a variety of large scale sculptures and is a published illustrator, helping create books that have become best sellers. As an environmental artist, her current work is inspired by the textures and the chaotic patterns of the underwater world. With an emphasis on illustration, her work blends traditional painting with digital techniques. Her work is commissioned commercially by clients in the UK, USA, Europe and Australia.