this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk with me, zeinab badawi. i'm in the serpentine galleries in london where there is a major exhibition of the work of the renowned american artist barbara chase—riboud. her art is on display in museums around the world, and she is also an award—winning novelist and poet. throughout her long career, barbara has been fascinated by public memorials and her sculptures honour various historical and culturalfigures. but how should society commemorate

controversial people from the past? barbara chase—riboud, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. we're sitting here at a major exhibition of your work called infinite folds, and you started your artistic training at the age of seven. how on earth did you know at that early age that you wanted to become an artist? i didn't know i wanted to be an artist. it was my mother and my grandmother who decided that i was going to have something to do with the arts. they weren't quite sure what. you were 16 and you were the youngest person to ever have a work acquired by moma, the museum of modern art in new york.

it was reba, which was a woodcut print of a young girl with a plant next to her. and you have said that "success as a child came easily to me," and that "i grew up as a confident, curious child, "not willing to settle for anything but the best." were you always very ambitious from an early age? i wouldn't call it ambition. i didn't know what it was. i knew that i wanted to do something, you know, significant, but i had no idea what and i had no idea how. and i had no concept of the world except my little family, which is very small. you know, it was very intimate. and it seemed to me that the world was intimate too. i mean, i didn't... i wasn't afraid of people and i wasn't afraid of the world.

i wasn't afraid of, um... ..stepping out and having opinions about things. 0k. well, that lack of fear and stepping out is very much reflected in your work. you have a very innovative, experimentative approach to your work, and you forge figures in bronze, for instance, using animal bones and vegetable matter. mm—hm. you know? and we're looking at adam and eve from 1958, which is being shown publicly for the first time, and it depicts two figures entwined underneath a tree canopy. and you completed that whilst you were at the american academy in rome. but, you know, art critics, barbara, find it very hard to describe the genre of your work. how would you, in a nutshell, describe it? it is hard to describe. and it changed so much over the years, which are very long. and i would say that i'm

a surrealist, abstract, um... what can i say? poetic... ..literary. .. ..artist. and there is this combination of literature and visual art that are so entwined now, although i tried to keep them separate most of my career, but now they have simply resurged in their own way, and so i'm...|'m stuck with it. one of the features of the way you work is that you also like to commemorate. the commemorative aspect of your work is very important. so, for example, this

sculpture ofjosephine baker, the celebrated african—american, black american singer—actress. this is the last... yeah. this is the last big monument. this is the last series of, you know, of steles that arrived absolutely un. .. you know, i had no idea i was going to do ajosephine until i did it. so how important is that commemorative aspect of your work to you? why is it so significant? i think that is not only commemorative, but it's also the poetic... ..the poetic aspect of my work. and it's there as a persona. these sculptures are notjust sculptures in space. they are also personas.

they are also histories and monuments of these people. so included in your sculptures are the stelae to malcolm x, the assassinated civil rights activist who was killed in 1965 and a very hugely important figure for you. and you say that his assassination came like a bombshell to you. how did you feel at the time when you heard about his death? and how did that influence the stelae, which have taken you the best part of five decades to make? i had been living in europe for many, many years when malcolm was assassinated, and it was at his assassination that i realised... you know, the shock of it, i realised that this was... ..one of the most important figures

in history and certainly in american history. and i was outraged, you know, that his life had been taken at such a young age, and these steles were not supposed to be, you know, portraits of him or political statements. it was the essence of... the essence of malcolm. the essence of revolution. the essence of a martyr. and theyjust grew like topsy, one after the other. i made... first i made four. then maybe ten years later, i made another four. and then maybe...

..15 years later, i made another ten. but, barbara, you say what an important figure malcolm x was, and you were really a bit of a trailblazer yourself. african american woman, black american woman, studied at temple university, yale school of architecture and design. you were the first black american woman to receive a masters in fine arts. and yet, you decided to settle in paris, in france, late 1960, 1961. but why did you not stay in the united states and be part of the civil rights movement if it was so important to you? it was not a question of going or staying for me. it was a question of my own...life. it was my own star i was following. it was... i was supposed to have a life in london, as a matter

of fact, when i left yale, and something happened. and so my sort of... ..interest in history and in monuments and so on is not... it is part of me, but not the main part, not the... not the very soul of me. it is more like following the star, following my own path, following my own destiny. but you didn't want to use any influence you might have had to help advance the civil rights movement by staying in the united states? well, i married a frenchman. i was a runaway bride.

any regrets? we went to paris for the weekend. and the man i married was a world traveller, was one of the great photographers of the world. that's marc riboud, the late french photographer. and he sort of opened up a whole new universe to me, which was international, which was... ..had nothing to do with america or europe or africa, but had to do with everything. and so i became this kind of country—hopping, international, you know, explorer, whatever, that i had started in egypt on my own with him, which lasted 20 years.

so he opened up a whole new world for you. but you always maintained this interest in monuments, as you said, and i want to ask you about the controversy that we have been debating all over the world, really, about the role of monuments in society. here in the united kingdom, for instance, the 17th century slave trader edward colston had his statue torn down by an angry crowd and they threw it into the water. you have had the controversies in the united states about confederate statues and so on. where do you stand on this? should monuments come down if some people deem them offensive? where? well, my stance on that is very famous. my stance on that is what i did with thomas jefferson. i should just remind everybody you're referring to the fact there's a historical novel you wrote in 1979 about sally hemings, who was the enslaved woman in the united states who had a relationship and bore seven children to thomasjefferson,

the third president of the united states. why was it important for you to tell that story? i didn't think that it was as important as it turned out to be. i had looked at, you know, the relationship of this invisible woman with the most powerful man in the world, really, in the western world, as a kind of mythic. it's a sort of half love, half hate story to tell. i mean, it was... it's operatic in its, you know, in its stance. and it was only after all the hullabaloo and all, you know, the controversy,

which lasted for 38 years. mm. 38 years. and it was finally solved by dna. some people didn't actually want to accept that the story was true, that thomas jefferson had this relationship with a black woman. the jeffersonians didn't. thejeffersonians didn't want to accept it. yeah. the public did. the public realised that this was a possibility. because you did a follow—up book as welland, indeed, you... idid. you received awards for that work. not only did i do a follow—up, the president's daughter, but this book began a whole series of other historical novels about invisible women or invisible historical personages, which went on to valide, sarah baartman, and many others.

seven, to be exact. sarah baartman, and many others. you mentioned sarah baartman, and of course she was the southern african woman who was known in a derogatory way as the hottentot venus and was put on display and travelled around the west in the 19th century. and of course, sarah baartman is the subject of africa rising. it's sarah baartman that is the winged victory, that is the nike on top of the statue. with naomi campbell's profile. just going back to statues, though, because there's also a statue of theodore roosevelt who was us president in the early 20th century, and there's an equestrian statue of him outside the natural history museum in new york, flanked by two shirtless figures — one native american, one african — and the idea was people objected

to it because of the racial hierarchy depicted in that statue. it was removed earlier this year, early 2022, after being there for 80 years. do you think that was the right thing to do? and what would you like to see in its place? i would like to see in its place africa rising, which is a statue... ..which is a commission that i did for general services in 1997, which is, you know, downtown, completely obscured, because it's in the... ..it�*s in the area of 9/11. i think it was absolutely right to remove... ..to remove roosevelt's statue.

0k. and i'm hoping that something significant will happen with mine replacing it. so... it's, um... and it wouldn't be... it's not a matter of exchange. it's a matter of historical truth. it's a matter of... you know, 1619 — it goes back a long time. you'd like to see the roosevelt statue replaced with one of your sculptures, africa rising from around 1997—98, which is of a large concave black platform, on top is a winged figure. it's in manhattan now, and it stands on the site where bodies of enslaved africans were buried. i want to ask you this question. how important do you think the legacy of slavery is today? how relevant is it?

it is the... you know, it is the original sin. it is something... it is so, um... how can i say it? so essential a historical event in the soul of america until... i really don't think that we will ever be free of this history. now, we have to deal with it. it's not going to go away. it's not going to... it can be rewritten 1,000 times, but it is still going to be there. and as, you know, a great sort of... a great thinker has

said that history... ..that art is the only proof that history has ever happened. and, um... levi—strauss. and this is my... this is my contention that this is necessarily a question that has to be monumentalised in every way. history and art are very important to you, barbara chase—riboud, in your work and you use bronze a lot in homage to the lost wax method that was used in the ancient kingdoms of benin with the guild of bronze makers there. you have your own twist on it.

how important is your african heritage to you? well, you know that the benin method of lost wax is medieval and is the beginning, is really the foundation of lost wax casting, so i'm returning to my, quote unquote, roots. you're returning to your roots, but it's interesting because i know that you don't like being referred to as "african american." you call yourself "black american," so you're taking the african out of your identity. why is that? i'm not taking the african out of my identity! but you don't describe yourself... people are putting the african into my identity! if you, you know, allow me to say that. and as long as there are white americans, there are going to be black americans. america is not a one—race country.

but do you recognise your african heritage and you pay homage to it? you have only to look at my sculpture. of course. so looking at your sculpture, your work as a celebrated black american artist and sculptor, you know that there was a report the french government carried out in 2018 that said that 90% of african treasures and artefacts, works of art are held outside the continent. 0utside. do you believe in restitution? that these works should be returned to their continent? i believe in restitution. i believe, not in total restitution. i believe that certain works are universal and belong to humanity, not to africa or to europe or anybody else. but, basically, i'm for restitution.

even if there are circumstances which mean that the works of art may not be secure? we saw how the treasures of timbuktu... that's a... no. ..in mali — when it was overrun by extremists, people really worried about what would happen to these fine treasures in 2013. that is really a colonial attitude towards art and also towards museums. and the fact that africa has made incredible progress in sort of excavating their own history and celebrating it, so that's not the problem. you know, it's a false excuse. you are not only an artist and a sculptor, you're also

a poet and a novelist, and you have said you sculpt what you can't write and write what you can't sculpt. so how do you decide which is which, barbara? that is a very good question. i don't know how i do that. all i know is that for a very long time, i kept the two professions totally apart, and that now at the end of my life, finally there is a kind of conversion, or convergence of literature and sculpture. i have two retrospective sculpture exhibitions on back—to—back and i have my memoir, i always knew. yes. so you've published your memoir, i always knew, which is structured around 30 years of letters

to your late beloved mother. you know, you've been awarded the legion d'honneur france's highest order of merit. what would your mother, vivian may, think if she could see the heights which you've reached and the decorations you've received? my mother had such a kind of wondrous attitude toward me. she often made jokes and said, "i don't know where you came from, barbara, "but i think they exchanged babies in the hospital!" i was very lucky to have lived a life of great adventure without ever being wounded by my colour. now, this, i think this isjust dumb

luck, because i was in a lot of situations where something like that would have happened or could have happened, but didn't happen. and so this kind of liberation of not having a brick, not having to face a brick wall made me perhaps brave, which is what my mother wanted me to be. barbara chase—riboud, thank you very much indeed for coming on hardtalk. i was delighted to be here. thank you.

hello there. the easter weekend just around the corner, a heads—up for what to expect coming shortly, but first of all, let's take a look at wednesday's weather. best of the sunshine was certainly across eastern england. yes, it clouded over into the afternoon, but most of us had skies like this — fairly grey with outbreaks of rain at times. now, that rain is pushing its way east and it will clear over the next few hours and allow this ridge of high pressure to build and quieten things down. so, first thing thursday, it's a rather grey, damp, dreary start across the east, but it's a mild one with the cloud around, temperatures holding up above freezing, so that early rain will ease away. mist and fog patches lift to sunny spells and scattered showers into the afternoon. maybe some of those showers filtering down through the cheshire gap could be quite heavy, maybe with the odd rumble of thunder mixed in there as well. so, by the middle part of the afternoon, it's sunny spells

and scattered showers. highs of 11—14 degrees, slightly drier, brighter skies into northern ireland and western scotland as that ridge of high pressure takes over. but there will be some showers across the northeast of england and eastern scotland here, highs of 9—12 celsius. so, by the end of thursday, the high pressure is building and quieting things down quite nicely. a spell of really wet weather for a time, moving away through east anglia and southeast england. but under those clearer skies out to the west, once again, those temperatures fall away low enough for a touch of frost to form first thing on friday morning. but good friday is going to be a reasonable day — dry, settled and sunny. these weather fronts trying to push in from the atlantic, but they will take most of the easter weekend before they arrive. so, on the whole, we could just see a little more in the way of cloud just pushing in off north sea coasts, unfortunately for eastern england. but most of us dry with some sunshine coming through and light winds. it'll be pleasant enough —

highs of 10—14 celsius. similar story as we go into saturday, but there's a greater chance of seeing more cloud developing from the north sea with that easterly flow. there's our weather front, trying desperately hard to push in from the atlantic. it takes its time to do so, perhaps not arriving until sunday with more significant rain for some of us by easter monday. take care.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore. i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines. the speaker of the us house of representatives meets taiwan's president in california, despite threats of retaliation from china. i believe our bond is stronger now than at any time or point in my lifetime. and of course, president tsai is a great champion of that bond. western leaders are on a state visit to china as they try to get beijing to play a bigger role in ending the war in ukraine. ukraine's president gets the red—carpet treatment in poland and a pledge of fighterjets.