Nue Forms: Reimagining Material Culture

Join a conversation with The New Black Aesthetic exhibition guest curator Charlene Prempeh and designers Mac Collins and Giles Tettey Nartey to explore how memory, material culture, ritual, and diaspora shape contemporary design, chaired by co-curator Tiya Dahyabhai.

What happens when memory, ritual and cultural knowledge become material?

Join this conversation to discover how inherited forms become new cultural languages, discuss who gets to shape design history, challenge conventions, and imagine Black futures. We will explore how objects, spaces and acts of making carry histories, and how those histories can be transformed.

Moving beyond the idea of a singular 'Black design' aesthetic, the discussion considers the nuance of diasporic experience and the many ways identity becomes material. From domestic objects and inherited forms to craft, ritual and contemporary spatial practice, designers Mac Collins and Giles Tettey Nartey join the exhibition's guest curator Charlene Prempeh to reflect on how familiar references can be distorted, reimagined and reactivated.

Chaired by co-curator Tiya Dahyabhai, this panel will explore making memory material and designing Black futures, asking who gets to shape design history, how inherited forms become contemporary, and what new visual languages, institutions and archives might emerge from this moment.

This is an unmissable event for designers, architects, makers, creatives, students, educators, curators and anyone engaging with themes of design, decolonisation, race and diaspora.

This conversation is part of the programme of The Nue Black Aesthetic exhibition.

This event is wheelchair accessible, with step-free access throughout the museum.

Adult: £17

Concession: £14

Members*: £13

Carer: Free

*Please note that this benefit applies only to the cardholding Member’s ticket and not to those of additional guests.

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Background image: Open Code, 2023, by Mac Collins. Photo: Megan Jepson