Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It can expose these histories and make us think about how these histories affect us in the present and how they reflect on our attitude to contemporary Britain and the past.
Did you know that that work was in St John's College before you took on that project at the Esmolian?
Or was there a kind of eureka moment where you actually found it and thought, oh my God, you know, I've got to work with this stuff?
So let's describe what happened.
So basically a pirate, a British pirate, goes to the Philippines and brings back with him this boy and his mother.
His mother dies on the ship back to the UK and then this grieving son gets displayed as an exotic being or almost basically like an animal in an inn, the Blue Boars Inn in Fleet Street.
I mean, the level of inhumanity is just sort of deeply shocking, right?
His skin is tattooed, and so they use it as a kind of... ..as a document, effectively.
It's using the language of art to sort of give a gravitas or an importance to this violence that they're enacting, right?
Yeah, it's a deeply shocking work, but tremendous that you brought it to such a wide audience's attention.
Which contemporary artist do you most admire?
Well, this is the thing.
He's regularly mentioned on this podcast and I'm pleased to say because I think of him...
Yeah, I was going to say about the economy, because one of the things about your work, and it seems to me to be a real strength of the work, is that you are dealing with subjects that could necessitate a kind of maximalism.
But there's always a tremendous restraint, which in the case of the work about Giolo, for instance, it therefore articulates the reflection on violence all the more, that somehow that restraint gains a potency.
And I think that's something that Felix did amazingly well, was... The best, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, we shouldn't lose sight of his radicality as we appreciate his economy and minimalism.
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