Ekow Eshun, Artistic Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts

Interview by Anthony Gardner

In the cult Sixties television series The Man from UNCLE, members of the international law-enforcement agency would enter their ultra-high-tech headquarters by way of an old-fashioned tailor's shop. At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the process is rather the reverse. While the ICA seen by the world is a sleek, modern exhibition space, the administrative area behind it is marooned in the past, with dingy stairwells, scuffed carpets, and a lift which has groaned its way between floors for several decades. Even the artistic director's office is an aesthetic vacuum - its furniture chipped, its lighting outmoded, its walls empty of pictures.

What the office does have, though, is one of the most glorious views in London, across the Mall and St James's Park towards Whitehall. 'I spend a lot of time looking at it,' admits the room's current occupant, Ekow Eshun. 'It makes you think about this city and this country, and how our experience of them keeps changing.' So fascinating does he find the subject that he is contemplating a book about 'what Britain feels like - if it's possible to articulate that. Politicians are endlessly trying to suggest that Britain is this, that and so on, but no one can ever put their finger on it.'

Eshun, 39, took charge of the ICA three years ago, but his association with it goes back much further. He remembers attending a children's book event there as a young member of the Puffin Club, and later reviewing films for the LSE's newspaper. 'But what really struck me was finding an ICA publication at my local library when I was 16 or 17 which was a series of talks and essays about post-colonial identity, by people like Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. That really did change my life, because it opened me up to whole new ways of thinking about belonging, about identity, about race and culture in general; and it also encapsulated what I came to believe were the possibilities of the ICA - a place that was cool, that was informed, that was intellectually weighty, but also creatively exciting.'

His own racial roots are in Ghana - the subject of his book Black Gold of the Sun, published in 2005. Writing it, he says, allowed him to put his 'sense of outsiderness' into context. 'Caryl Phillips wrote a book called The European Tribe, where he travelled across Europe as a black person born in Britain and tried to figure out whether he felt European or not - and I had some of that in mind. I don't think I'll ever really lose the sense of being not quite of Britain, or indeed not quite of Europe; but part of that is psychological, as well as to do with race discrimination.'

While researching the book he was amazed to discover that his great-great-great-great-grandfather had been a white slave trader. It gave him, he says, 'a very good sense of the interconnectedness of history, race and so on. You feel more at home in a place purely because you realise that home is a weird concept anyway - that it has all these tangled skeins to it. And I quite like that feeling: it's slightly uncomfortable, but it makes sense to me.'

Casually dressed in dark trousers and a purple shirt, and weighed down by a colossal but bling-free watch, Eshun has all the style you would expect of a former editor of Arena. On Newsnight Review he comes across as a sleek cultural Exocet, streaking to the heart of whichever film or book he is discussing, but in person he is more relaxed and ruminative. Having made his name as a journalist, he joined the board of the ICA at the end of the 1990s. 'It was something that I leapt at, because I'm always interested in several areas of culture simultaneously - art, music, film, politics, philosophy - and there aren't that many places that encompass all those things within four walls.'

He uses the word 'cornucopiescent' of the ICA's possibilities. But, he adds, the challenge for the director is to pick only the choicest offerings for his horn of plenty. 'There's a temptation here to do stuff that's merely interesting. We need to ask ourselves what is truly necessary, truly urgent, truly of now. If someone else could be doing it, if it could have existed last year or five years ago, then I think "Why?"'

He has, nevertheless, been giving a good deal of thought to the past recently, thanks to the ICA's continuing 60th anniversary celebrations. One area that particularly interests him is the institute's role as the home of Pop Art in the Fifties and early Sixties. 'Richard Hamilton, one of the leaders of the Independent Group, curated a set of exhibitions in a genuinely bold way - he was one of the first artists to mix up art and architecture and the made world. Those ways of thinking become quite inspirational several decades on.'

This historical excursion brings us back to the question of how Britain has changed. 'Take our relationship to Europe,' says Eshun. 'It's really weird when you hear Eurosceptics and Europhobes talking, because it's as if they exist in a wholly different time and country.' Does he, then, consider the ICA to be British in its outlook, or European? 'There is quite a strong European influence in terms of the films or the art we show, and historically there's been a strong trend of French philosophers who've spoken here. But I think one of the important things about Britain is its scepticism, its willingness to reinvent itself, its eagerness to embrace new areas of creative endeavour. I'm probably interested in Britishness not so much in terms of the work we show, as the sensibility with which we show it.'

To keep in touch with what is happening on the Continent, he looks not to other institutions but to international events: 'Biennales for instance - Venice, Istanbul; Documenta; and film and music festivals around the world, where you get a lot of people coming together. I think that's when you discover what the currents of thought are across Europe and beyond.'

In his view modern Europe is 'the most amazing invention', but its unity has yet to find satisfactory expression in art and architecture. This is not to say, however, that such a thing is impossible. 'I actually think there's a lot of opportunity to seize the imagination by suggesting that Europe can be about possibility, about inspiration, about adventurousness, about innovation - and one of the really strong ways to do that is through culture.'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.