Over the past two decades, British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (b.1969 in London, lives and works in London and Amsterdam) has acquired an outstanding reputation for his work. Major museums worldwide have devoted exhibitions to his award-winning œuvre, including Dia Art Foundation (2024), Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2022), Tate Modern (2020), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017), Schaulager (2013), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2012). His project Year 3 was showcased at Tate Britain in 2019. McQueen received the Turner Prize in 1999, and he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2014, Harvard University awarded him the W.E.B. DuBois Medal in honour of his contribution to African and African American studies and in 2016, he received the Johannes Vermeer Award from the Dutch government. McQueen is the director of five feature films, Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013), Widows (2018), and most recently Blitz (2024). In 2020, he made Small Axe, an anthology of five films about London’s West Indian community and, in 2021, Uprising, a 3-part documentary with James Rogan, about the New Cross Fire in London in 1981. McQueen won the Oscar for best motion picture for 12 Years a Slave at the Academy Awards in 2014. He was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2011 for achievements in both the fine arts and filmmaking and was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours list. Most recently, McQueen and his wife Bianca Stigter were awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Amsterdam for their joint project Occupied City (2023). McQueen has been appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Artist Talk: Steve McQueen in Conversation with Christina SharpeSunday, September 14 2025, 4 PM
Loading area
Steve McQueen
Photo: Pati Grabowicz
Christina Sharpe
At Schaulager, Steve McQueen and Christina Sharpe pick up on a conversation that began in February 2024. Invited to contribute to the publication Steve McQueen: Bass (2024), they first discussed the work while it was still in progress. Now, more than a year later—after its presentation at Dia Beacon and currently on view at Schaulager—they return to Bass to reflect on its resonance: how it anchors us in the present moment and how it speaks to Black life, memory, and history.
With Bass, the acclaimed artist and Academy Award–winning filmmaker continues his practice of foregrounding overlooked and neglected histories. Working masterfully with light, color, and sound, he explores what can unfold when our physical perception of space and time is altered. Award-winning writer and scholar Christina Sharpe, in turn, examines Black life across literature, film, visual arts, and the everyday in her work. Her deeply intimate, historically grounded thinking moves between individual experience and broader social structures—without reducing one to the other. This approach resonates with McQueen’s practice, which challenges racialized ways of seeing and feeling history while bringing neglected stories into view.
Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Research Associate, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Ordinary Notes (2023)—winner of the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize and a Finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the James Tait Black Prize in Biography, and The Los Angeles Times Book Award (Current Interest/Nonfiction). Sharpe is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities (2024), a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction (2024) and the Killam Prize (2025). Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2027) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist.
ARTIST TALK tickets include admission to the exhibition.