Contemporary Conversations: Cultures of Memory

How can art resist forgetting, or question state-endorsed histories? Can memories articulated through art enable us to think about and create possible futures? How does art enable us to understand the histories and the challenges of diaspora?

For the second of our talks on themes of the Turner Prize 2025, we're joined by Shanaz Gulzar MBE, artist and Creative Director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture; contemporary international art curator and current Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine Tamsin Hong; multidisciplinary artist Rudy Loewe; and artist and filmmaker Karanjit Panesar. 

Joanne Crawford, Professor in History and Theory of Art and Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, introduces and chairs the conversation.

We hear about how memory figures in their work and practices, those of the artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and in the wider landscape of contemporary art.

'Cultures of Memory' was curated by Yorkshire Contemporary in partnership with the University of Leeds. The discussion took place in front of an audience at the University during the final weeks of the Turner Prize exhibition, in February 2026.

Biographies

Joanne Crawford is a Professor of History and Philosophy of Art, specialising in French and American abstract painting and sculpture. She has taught the History of Art across both undergraduate and postgraduate levels for over 30 years. She is now the Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and works closely with a number of regional arts organisations to enable and encourage inclusive collaboration between higher education and public engagement. 

Shanaz Gulzar MBE, Creative Director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, is an acclaimed artist, producer and presenter whose career spans film, visual arts, theatre, public art and media. She led on the creation of the Bradford 2025 cultural programme; working with local, national and international partners to deliver an ambitious programme of work rooted in the unique heritage and character of Bradford district, ensuring local people were at the heart of the programme. Shanaz has previously worked as a producer at Manchester International Festival (MIF) and has presented a number of BBC television programmes including Yorkshire Walks and the documentary film Hidden Histories: The Lost Portraits of Bradford. 

Tamsin Hong is a contemporary international art curator. Her intersectional research interests draw from her upbringing on unceded Ngunnawal Country on the land now known as Australia and include feminism, women’s knowledge systems, embodied practices, re-indigenising approaches and decoloniality. Hong is Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine, London where her projects include the 2026 Pavilion, Arpita Singh: Remembering (2025), Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States (2024) and Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015 (2023). She was formerly Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, specialising in performance, worked on African and Australian acquisitions, and co-curated the land rights exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992.

Rudy Loewe is a multidisciplinary artist who creates spaces to consider collective practices and resistance histories. Through media such as painting, drawing and sculpture, Loewe questions the power of gathering in collectivity. Alongside conversations, workshops and archival research, Loewe weaves in African and Caribbean folklore, embedding community and accessibility at the centre of their practice. Loewe is the ninth exhibiting artist for the Art on the Underground Brixton Mural Programme. Last year, they unveiled The Congregation, a new work that honours the historic role that Brixton has played as a gathering space, particularly for London’s Black communities, adding another layer to Loewe’s ongoing exploration of culture, identity, resistance and collective memory. 

Karanjit Panesar is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Leeds. Running through his practice are oblique explorations of identity and its formulation within political, economic and social structures. Often starting from moving image, he constructs stylised and layered installations that contain sculpture and other media. Environments, ideas and objects spill into and out of the space of the screen; artworks are in some way unfixed, asked to be more than one thing at once. Panesar’s work is underpinned by capitalist critique, using metaphor to build and re-configure myths, worlds and stories. Recent solo presentations include: Furnace Fruit (2024), Leeds Art Gallery; Clarence Pier (2022), Aspex Portsmouth; Parts of Wholes (2022), Workplace Foundation, Newcastle; Actor, Container (2021), Two Queens, Leicester; Strange Loop (2019), Turf Projects, Croydon; and THE WAY THINGS ARE (2018), arebyte Gallery, London.