A Conversation with Steve McQueen and Paul Gilroy

This event was recorded live on April 4, 2025.

Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen and scholar Paul Gilroy join in a conversation concurrent with two exhibitions of McQueen’s work at Dia Chelsea and Dia Beacon. Over many years, Gilroy and McQueen have sustained a dialogue about the political and cultural dimensions of what Gilroy terms the Black Atlantic, as it relates to visual art, music, and other contemporary sociopolitical subjects. Gilroy has also written extensively about McQueen’s work, including most recently for the catalogue Steve McQueen: Bass, documenting the immersive light-and-sound installation at Dia Beacon, co-commissioned by Dia and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel. In this conversation, they focus on music, taking the complex musical idioms associated with Bass (2024) and the Black Atlantic as points of departure.

Steve McQueen, whose many acclaimed films include the Oscar–winning 12 Years a Slave, is an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, and other world-class venues. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Turner Prize, W. E. B. DuBois Medal, Johannes Vermeer Award, and Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Gilroy is the author of many influential books, including as The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness; Against Race; and Postcolonial Melancholia. He is an emeritus professor of humanities and was the founding director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London.

Presented with Dia Art Foundation and the Ph.D. Program in Art History.

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