On a spring afternoon in April 2025, in a studio in Islington, Takenya Holness picked up some markers and began to tell us a story. This was the setting for Tell a Tale, a mixed media series from Àse exploring the creative minds of artists and the experiences that shape what they make.

In 2024, during Àse’s birth, we had the privilege of sitting with Kandre Arámidẹ Hassan, a self-described Visual Artist and Cultural Practitioner whose work transcends any singular idea or theme. This collaboration came very naturally, as Kandre’s practice speaks to the very questions Àse was founded upon: how art fills the voids that language so often leaves, and how it can tell stories in a tongue understood by all. For Kandre, this has always been true. As a child she would draw rather than speak an idea aloud, and today she still describes art as a non-verbal language.

The history of Black street gangs and their relationship with Black communities, particularly in the West, is a terrain as intricate as it is misunderstood. This history is layered with trauma, survival, resistance, and expression, a web that cannot be unraveled without confronting the systemic racism, economic disenfranchisement, and state violence that birthed these organisations. What is often flattened into narratives of violence and criminality deserves a more nuanced and human view. Though I do not claim authority or lived experience to tell the full story, I aim here to sketch an idea, one that links Black gang culture to art, and the art world's uncomfortable tendency to erase that origin.