For this month’s artist talk as it is Pride Month and today is Global Pride, we are posting a conversation that took place in 2018 for a commision from the artist Ajamu. After Dark was a live broadcast event through instagram that hosted six artists – Ajamu, Claire Heuchan, Nosheen Kwadja, Raju Rage, Kareem Reid and Camara Taylor – for a conversation in the exhibition Polygraphs after the museum had closed. It payed homage to the TV series After Dark, a late-night discussion programme broadcast between 1987 and 2003 and brought 6 queer artists of colour together to talk openly together in the Gallery of Modern Art about legitimacy, care, joy, activism and the queer and POC presence in the institution.

One of the key texts that Ajamu invited the artists to look at before the conversation was Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and they also looked at exhibition at GoMA – Stones Steeped in History. Both of these were referenced by the artists in the conversation which was availabe in full via instagram for 24 hours and then After Dark was edited by Ajamu with Hakeem Kazeem to be an archival conversation as part of the Queer Times project, which was supported by a Heritage Lottery Fund Grant in 2018/19. We are very grateful to all the artists who gave permission for this edited version of the conversation to go online which has recently been subtitled for At Home.