In two months, The World Reimagined will see trails of over 100 large globe structures in seven cities across the UK from 13 August – 31 October 2022. The sculptures will be created by artists to bring to life the reality and impact of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and invite the public to engage with the dialogue and actions of making racial justice a reality.

All artists will create globes responding to the themes ranging from ‘Mother Africa’ and ‘The Reality of Being Enslaved’ to ‘Still We Rise’ and ‘Expanding Soul’. Each globe will enable the public to experience, discover and be inspired by art as well as present the opportunity to be part of the discourse around racial justice and what it means to be British.

THE ARTISTS

Larry Amponsah
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.

Marcia Brown
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

Rosanna Gammon
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. 

Gherdai Hassell
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. 

Mussarat Rahman
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.

Linnet Rubaya
Winner of the Saul Hay emerging artist award (2021), Linnet Panashe Rubaya (b. 1991, Harare, Zimbabwe) is a self-taught British-Zimbabwean figurative artist based in Leeds. Born in Harare and raised in London, Rubaya studied Biomedical Science (BSc) at the University of Brighton and moved to Leeds to work as a Software Test Analyst.  The Black female identity along with the  diverse multiethnic and multicultural melting pot of London is central to Linnet’s practice as she draws from her experiences and conversations to create predominantly acrylic paintings that emanate relatability and radiate emotional and intimate engagement with otherwise marginalised Black subjects. Rubaya’s works aim to inspire, empower and educate observers.

Herfa Thompson
Herfa Thompson is a London-born artist, currently based in Leeds. She studied Sculpture and Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art. Having grown up in Southern Africa, Thompson experienced frustration that her return to the UK was not made to feel like a return home. Her work explores a world where brown bodies are peacefully and joyfully existing, referencing nostalgic memories of her time in Africa and Martinique, as well as exploring the relationship between humans and bodies of water.

Emmanuel Unaji
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 who’s 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. 

Rodell Warner
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