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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hiller-monument-t06902

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Susan Hiller's installation Monument incorporates forty-one photographs of memorial plaques the artist came across in Postman's Park, near St Paul's Cathedral, London. There is one photograph for each year of the artist's life (at the time the work was made). Each plaque commemorates an ordinary man, woman or child who died while performing an act of heroism. One memorial reads, for example: 'Elizabeth Boxall/Aged 17 of Bethnal Green/ Who Died of Injuries Received/In Trying to Save/ A Child/From a Runaway Horse/June 20 1888'. The photographs are arranged in a diamond shape on the gallery wall, in front of which is set a park bench. The bench faces away from the wall and a cassette player and headphones rest on its seat. Hiller's own voice plays through the headphones and her flowing and associative commentary addresses the nature of heroism as well as the themes of death, memory and representation.

Hiller's work often takes what she terms 'cultural artefacts' as a starting point. These artefacts take many forms but Hiller consistently focuses on ideas, events or objects that have been ignored or forgotten. In the case of Monument, Hiller noticed that the very tiles that were meant to have a commemorative function were themselves being overlooked. When she returned to photograph the tiles she found that:

there were people sitting on park benches in front of them eating their lunches, who turned round over their shoulders to look, as if for the first time, at what I was photographing. And when they had seen the plaques they said things like 'Oh! Isn't it sad? Isn't it dreadful?' But what struck me was that they had sat in front of these perfectly visible objects for years and years, and the objects had been, literally, invisible.

(Quoted in Susan Hiller, p.77.)

Hiller's work is collaborative, often involving the direct participation of the audience in some form. In Monument,as in much of Hiller's work, there is an emphasis on the frontier between public and private experience. The title of the work refers to a very public and official form of art and the visual elements of the work are viewed in a public and collective way by the audience. Hiller's voice, however, can only be heard by the individual wearing the headphones, setting up a one-on-one relationship between the artist and her listener. Moreover, the individual listening to her monologue sits with his or her back to the photographs, facing the audience for the work and momentarily becoming a part of it. As Hiller has explained:

'In Monument (1980-81), for instance, where the entire piece is activated by a person who sits on a bench listening to a sound tape, a person must be prepared to be seen in public performing a private act of listening. Since that person is seen by other viewers against a backdrop of photographic images, the piece exists as a tableau with a living centre, while the person is also part of the audience for the work.'

(Interview with Stuart Morgan, Susan Hiller, p.38.)

Monument poses questions about the relationships between heroism and death, memory and representation. For Hiller, there is a significant distinction to be made between two modes of existence for each of the individuals commemorated in the plaques. In the audio tape, the artist reads a list of the individuals' names distinguishing between the duration of their existence in the body (the number of years they lived) and the duration of their existence as a representation (as a commemorative text on a plaque.) She elaborates: 'We could exist forever, inscribed, portrayed, as inscriptions, , representations. I'm representing myself to myself... and for you, to you. This is my voice.' ( Monument, 1981, p.6.)

Further Reading
Monument, exhibition catalogue, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1981.
Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery Liverpool 1996, pp.77-80, reproduced, pp.78-80.
Barbara Einzig, ed., Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, Manchester 1996, pp.182-192, reproduced, pp.188-9.

Kathryn Rattee
March 2003

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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Susan Hiller's installation Monument incorporates forty-one photographs of memorial plaques the artist came across in Postman's Park, near St Paul's Cathedral, London. There is one photograph for each year of the artist's life (at the time the work was made). Each plaque commemorates an ordinary man, woman or child who died while performing an act of heroism.

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Why have we become so fearful of statues? Art Review, 2022

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Why have we become so fearful of statues? Art Review, 2022

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Taking a hammer to Eric Gill's sculpture Prospero and Ariel is a sign of our cultural orthodoxy: that nothing bad or wrong or disagreeable should exist in the public realm
Amid the furious arguments that now surround whether statues should be toppled, destroyed, removed to a museum, 'interpreted' or just left where they are, the truth that most statues, most of the time, go unnoticed, is rarely acknowledged. Every day, thousands of Londoners walk past the old entrance of the BBC's Broadcasting House and never give Prospero and Ariel (1932), installed in an alcove above it, a second glance. But on Wednesday evening, a man scaled a ladder to take a hammer to the sculpture, knocking lumps out of the naked Ariel figure's feet and legs, and suddenly everyone looked up.

David Chick, a lone protestor previously known for campaigning for custody rights for fathers (in 2003 he occupied a 150ft crane dressed as Spiderman, protesting not being able to see his daughter), also scrawled 'Noose all paedos' on the statue, alongside 'BBC PEADOS (sic) + PROPAGANDA', and the long-known biography of the sculpture's maker, British artist Eric Gill, has rushed back into the headlines.

Gill, an eccentric and controversial arts-and-crafts modernist of the early twentieth century, died in 1940. A 1989 biography, drawing from Gill's own diaries, revealed that he had regularly sexually abused his two young daughters. The revelations shattered Gill's reputation. But this latest physical attack on Gill's work has reinflamed the debate over whether it's possible to separate the quality of an artwork from the deeds of the artist. Chick's cranky protest comes only days after the 'Colston Four' - the protesters involved in pulling down the statue of the English slave-trader Edward Colston during the George Floyd protests in Bristol in June 2020 - were found not guilty of criminal damage, leading some commentators to worry that this would encourage other protestors to take to smashing whatever other statue or monument they object to.

Neither Colston nor Gill are laudable characters, and it would be perverse to weigh the relative virtues of a man who, while later becoming a great local philanthropist and benefactor, headed a company which traded over 80,000 Africans as slaves, against those of an artist who raped his daughters and had sexual relations with his sisters. But Gill was never disgraced or punished for his crimes in his lifetime and many of his works are in national collections and adorn public buildings in Britain, including churches and war memorials. What then, should be done with these works?

Britain is a country still cluttered with the paraphernalia of its colonial and imperial past, a history of oppression and exploitation that many radicals throughout history, from English communists to African and Indian anti-colonialists, fought hard against. But much of the anger at present inequalities, catalysed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, projects contemporary political problems back on to the leftover artefacts of a now distant past.

Many who supported the toppling of Colston would argue that the present and the past cannot be separated, and that current demands for social justice also demand the reordering of such historic public symbols - as one of the Colston Four put it: "We didn't change history, we rectified it."

These emotionally-charged acts of 'rectification', though, arguably do little to advance social and political progress for British people today, just as Chick's lone protest does nothing substantial when it comes to protecting children from sexual abuse in the here-and-now. Instead, the focus on toppling statues vests them with an almost mystical, totemic power. But if, as Dan Hicks has argued previously for ArtReview, pulling down statues is 'not about iconoclasm, but about ridding our cities of the enduring infrastructures of white supremacy ', then everything must come down. How could it stay?

But as this fury has spread, it reinforces the worst, most censorious aspects of 'cancel culture'. Rather than leave the old relics to the affections of older generations who still have some traditional attachment to them, rather than accept differences of opinion, or that what exists in the public realm should be negotiated by some form of consensus or agreement or democratic process, the demand is always that the public realm be 'rectified'. This is orthodoxy and conformism masquerading as if it were radical, insurgent outrage. It is definitely one that is hostile to anyone who dissents from its indignant convictions.

That growing culture of orthodoxy, that is now everywhere, turns on a key shift in cultural attitude - that nothing bad or wrong or disagreeable should exist in the public realm. That also means, of course, any cultural artefact of the past that has survived thus far, and which no longer conforms to the etiquettes and values of the present. That this form of intolerance should have taken over culture so quickly signals, ironically, how fearful we seem to have become of the power of dead artefacts. This is backwards superstition and magical thinking, not rational politics. But because it's fearful and superstitious, it leads to a culture in which one's emotions, of anger, or injustice, or of just believing that you are right and everyone else is wrong, counts for more than the opinions of others, and justifies any action - even taking a lump-hammer to an artwork, or pulling down an old statue.

But what about Gill? Gill's public works are not obscene or pornographic, even if their author was a pervert and an abuser. His works are part of a larger art-historical movement and moment, and they have content, form and style that have nothing to do with Gill's perverted personal life. There is, in some of Gill's weird, mawkishly sentimental fusion of pagan eroticism, classicism and Christian religious iconography something that may hint, in hindsight, at his own confused and messed up inner life, but his acts, not his art, were his crimes. We can take these into account, but they still cannot explain his work. To erase artworks in the rush to erase artists, though, is leading to a kind of cultural philistinism which, while indifferent to the qualities of artworks, is also contemptuous and dismissive of the opinions of others, and in which only the 'correct' way of thinking about public culture is permitted.

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Why Have We Become So Fearful of Statues?

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Taking a hammer to Eric Gill's sculpture Prospero and Ariel is a sign of our cultural orthodoxy: that nothing bad or wrong or disagreeable should exist in the public realm Amid the furious arguments that now surround whether statues should be toppled, destroyed, removed to a museum, 'interpreted' or just left where they are, the truth that most statues, most of the time, go unnoticed, is rarely acknowledged.

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Before he switched to art history, the British sculptor Antony Gormley studied archaeology and anthropology. Obviously. How could any other training possibly have pushed what Skye Sherwin has called Gormley's 'one-size-fits-all universalism' to such an extreme? Those twin Victorian disciplines claim as their mutual field of enquiry the humanity of everyone on the planet on the one hand, plus the entirety of the human past on the other. Think of these nineteenth-century academic subjects, steeped in colonial violence, as human subjects: their vampiric subjectivities exhumed at Oxbridge in the 1960s just as other structures of empire were falling away. Just in time to haunt Gormley's generation of students for the rest of their careers.

Museums were constructed as the public spaces of these disciplines. Here, through displays like the Parthenon Marbles their universalist worldview is presented as natural, immortal and eternally resistant to change. I confess that I'd always drawn the same feeling from any Gormley. From Birmingham to Crosby Beach to Gateshead, his figures seemed to cling to a death-drive imperial masculinity, desperate to endure for posterity. Call it toxic monumentality. Fast-forward to May 2021 and Gormley's brassneck suggestion that Oxford must disregard the democratic decision of Oriel College to dismantle its proto-fascist, white supremacist monument to mass-murder and apartheid, and simply swivel Cecil Rhodes around to face the wall like a naughty schoolboy. 'Public statuary becomes subject to collective amnesia extremely quickly,' he told the FT. 'But by removing them you accept the amnesia.'

Testament, a new exhibition at London's Goldsmiths CCA, shows us that what's presented as a risk of forgetting some 'Great Man History' is in fact about a collective right. The right to choose what to remember. To reimagine monuments beyond nostalgia for colonial patriarchal iconography. In this respect, Testament is very different from how we might imagine a traditional exhibition of monuments. For example a few weeks ago I visited the melancholy, carceral space of the Zitadelle, Berlin's Renaissance fortress situated in suburban Spandau, where since 2016 the city's outmoded memorials have been preserved in a permanent display called Unveiled: Berlin and its Monuments. Walking among the Prussian statues from the imperial Siegesallee (1898-1901), Arno Breker's fascist Zehnkämpfer (1936), and the immense head of Nikolai Tomsky's colossal Lenin which once stood in East Berlin (1970), there is a sense that the curatorial work of 'recontextualisation' is itself starting to show signs of fatigue.

What a contrast then for Testament to assemble 47 artistic responses to a brief that asks for proposals for future monuments, as yet unrealised. An anticipatory recalibration of the monumental is underway here which is about neither the counterinsurgency of putting fallen idols back on display, nor the centring of the negative space that's opened up by an empty plinth. It's as if the gap being opened up here isn't merely spatial but temporal. I was reminded of something Achille Mbembe wrote after 2015's Rhodes Must Fall protests in Cape Town. He called it 'a negative moment' - which he defined as a period in which 'new antagonisms emerge while old ones remain unresolved'. A parallel 'negative moment' opened up for public art in Britain when the statue of Edward Colston fell in Bristol on that bright day in June 2020. We're still in that moment. And we don't know when or how it ends.

But Testament shines a light on how the principal task of public art today lies in removing one massive monument. It's a removal not so much of the material as of the conceptual; of a subject rather than of an object. The monument being replaced is the historical category of the human subject itself. What this means in practice is that artists are reclaiming monumentality as a collective project. There are echoes of human footsteps in Untitled (monument for Oxford Circus) (2021) by Tenant of Culture - a patchwork of foam, rubber, and plastic from scores of discarded trainers proposed as a 20-metre-high installation. Invisible traces of the living, breathing bodies that once wore and used the clothes and domestic textiles unpicked, sewn up and rolled out in Stuart Middleton's Motivation and Personality (2018). These statues to systemic obsolescence stand alongside Yuri Pattison's remarkable Decommissioned Border Force immigration and passport control desk (Heathrow) (2018), the 'found object' presented as a kind of anti-monument to the violence of border regimes. It is an artefact formed by the tens of thousands of human bodies that have been classified from behind its counter, and variously objectified or subjectified by its shattering text: 'Please wait to be called forward. No phones. No photography. Thank you for your cooperation'.

Some subjects are newly remembered. Alvaro Barrington quotes Tupac: 'Long live the rose that grew from concrete'. Jeremy Deller proposes a Tomb of the Unknown Refugee (2022). Other subjects are absent because they're not yet here. Aaron Ratajczyk imagines 'an inverted monument, a hole, a city cave' without memory and with only possibility, the title of which he takes from the final line of Ben Okri's poem 'Turn on your light' (1999): 'Our future is greater than our past.'

The silk-satin patchwork of Elizabeth Price's Renderer for an unspecified statue (2022) recalls the artist's childhood memory of the seasonal veiling of Catholic church monuments during Passiontide. But the bodily form to be covered is absent here. Tai Shani's NHA 7 (2021) meanwhile is a cursed neon hieroglyph that takes us beyond any sense of the mortal body towards the possibility of new subject positions, of realisms that are just as unpredictable as relativisms. Shani's work enacts the partible, distributed personhood of a witch; their jesmonite hand, containing small niches and objects like organs, holds the promise of a bad trip. Insofar as the speculative, revolutionary work of recasting monumentalism involves taking stuff down, Shani tells me later over tea: "We need to allow the monolith of gender binarism and other oppressive monoliths to fall, as part of this more general collapse of what is perceived as a natural order".

Shani's words are still in my head as I'm back on the train rereading Gary Younge's call for us to imagine a realm of public art and public memory beyond human figures outlined and fixed in stone or bronze. It's an argument that echoes Sylvia Wynter's critique of the overrepresentation of 'monohumanism'. The fabricated, patriarchal, idealised image of 'Man' in nineteenth-century liberal humanism has been presented, Wynter shows us, as universal and thus as naturalised, exclusionary, extractivist, militarist, dehumanising, woven into the fabric of cultural whiteness, toxic, enduring.

What's the message? Liberal monohumanism dehumanises. Subjects are harder to topple than statues. Fallism was always about what can happen next: the negative moment, not just the negative space. For these reasons and so many more, in the 2020s artists are starting to rebuild new forms of collective monumentality.
Dan Hicks is a curator, author, and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His most recent book Testament is on view at Goldsmiths CCA until 3 April 2022. The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution is now out in paperback.

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Can We Imagine Public Art Beyond 'Toxic Monumentality'?

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Before he switched to art history, the British sculptor Antony Gormley studied archaeology and anthropology. Obviously. How could any other training possibly have pushed what Skye Sherwin has called Gormley's 'one-size-fits-all universalism ' to such an extreme?

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Let's Keep Colston Falling, Art Review, 2021

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Let's Keep Colston Falling, Art Review, 2021

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The statue of the slave trader is now on display in a museum, a year after it was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters
'When people die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.' The opening lines of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet's 1953 essay-film Les statues meurent aussi (Statues also die) - about African artworks in European museums - came to mind as the statue of slave trader Edward Colston fell in Bristol, UK, last year. As a warning.

Six and a half thousand weeks. Just under 125 years. However you measure the time that elapsed from that bleak November afternoon in 1895 when the statue was erected, what felt certain was that we learned something on 7 June 2020 when it fell. We learned that Colston was not immortalised. Or was he? He lived for 84 years as a man, for 174 years as a ghost, and then for 124 years as a monument. And yet four days later he was winched out of the water, and placed on loan with Bristol Museum. 'The idea is at the moment just to stabilise him,' the collections manager told the BBC documentary Statue Wars. When the 'botany of death' caught up with Colston, the museum interposed itself. Now the urgent question is: what is being stabilised?

Fallism - the grassroots practice of physically dismantling cultural infrastructure that promotes white supremacy - has been part of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles since at least the early 1960s, when a 'statue war' broke out in Algeria at the moment of independence. The impulse towards preservation was also part of that history from the start. Back then, it operated as a kind of counter-insurgency. Algerians started defacing and destroying plaques and statues that commemorated colonial domination, making that domination and violence persist. The French military responded with a massive salvage operation. More than one hundred monuments were collected, shipped across the Mediterranean, and, as Alain Amato documented in his 1977 book Monuments en exil, re-installed in towns and cities across France. The Enlightenment maxim expressed by Diderot in 1795 hung in the air: 'My friend, if we love truth more than the fine arts then let us pray to God for iconoclasts'.

Fast-forward to the footage of Colston falling, blindfolded, ropes slung around his shoulders and ankles, rolled along the street, drowned in the harbour, shared across the world. Like any image, and like the statue itself, and like Colston's role in the enslavement of tens of thousands of African people, this is not a moment frozen in time; it's still here in the present. Rewind to 1961 when Frantz Fanon described colonialism as 'a world of statues'. In The Wretched of the Earth, he wrote how each statue never stops representing the exact same message: 'We are here by the force of bayonets'. We learn from Fanon that every monument to anti-Black violence operates to re-inscribe that violence every day it remains on display. But is Colston still falling? Or did the museum break his fall?

Last Friday afternoon I stood at the empty plinth at Magpie Park, between the traffic of Colston Avenue South and St Augustine's Parade, a space created in 1892 by the culverting of the River Frome, suspended in paving slabs above the flow of water. I walked the short distance to Bristol's M-Shed museum, retracing Colston's short journey last year from one regime of display to another. In a corner of the museum there's a window onto the city and the harbour and the light streams in. Laid flat, his height (now length) is a surprise - a monstrous 2.565 metres. Museum-goers queued up to gaze at his shoe-buckles, unbuttoned waistcoat, stockings gartered at the knee, hands sprayed red. His cane is still missing, rumoured to have been kept as a protestor's memento. Sections of his coat are absent too; some bronze chunks perhaps remain in the harbour. A four-year-old boy exclaimed: "It's that man from the video who fell over!" His dad replied: "Yes that's right, but remember that he was pushed over".

It's not patina. It's not just another layer in the life history of a Victorian statue. Fallism is removal. Fallism is the unfinished work of abolition. The inverse of conservation. And yet from the Houston Museum of African American Culture in Texas to the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, South Africa to the Barbados Museum and Historical Society in Bridgetown, many monuments to white supremacy were removed from the streets to museums during 2020. The M-Shed exhibit is framed as 'the start of a conversation'. The claim by the Telegraph 's art critic Alasdair Sooke that the display is 'partisan' is clearly wrong - the M-Shed exhibit is a carefully-curated exercise in balance and listening. But can any curated exhibition be a conversation? Would reclamation, retention, the preferred government ideology of 'retain and explain', the gesture of re-contextualizing and re-writing the label, always speak over - or erase - the voices of those who toppled Colston?

Last week in her opening comments for the panel ' Beyond Museums in the Aftermath of Colston', Sado Jirde, Director of the Black South West Network, observed that: "This work is really about reclaiming humanity, and we cannot do that in spaces that for so long were committed to dehumanising practices." Her words chime with Sylvia Wynter's critique of 'monohumanism', which is a critique of the universalist project of liberal humanism that statues like Colston's embody. The statue is only on loan - it's not yet accessioned. Its display reminds us that in Bristol and beyond the work of abolition is not over. The work of emancipation is not over. The work of compensation and repair is unfinished. The failure of public process over three decades to see the statue removed was a failure of our models of curatorial expertise, of public 'engagement', of authority. The fall remains unfinished.

Does Colston's provisional preservation repeat the nostalgic counterinsurgency of the French army in Algeria? Or could it catalyse some new form of co-curation that destabilises the statue, and makes the fall rather than the man endure? For this to be possible, the very project of the museum would need to rebuilt from the ground up. But such a rebuilding might be possible at M-Shed if we recognise that the tearing down of Colston represents a new model for curation. This temporary display would be a positive first step in such a process. As someone who lived in Bristol for twelve years - first in in the 1970s and then in the 1990s-2000s - and like many who know this statue, I was moved to tears by visiting. Everyone who cares about racism, empire and slavery should see this exhibit. It should win awards. But that's hardly the point. This is the kind of exhibit you come away from feeling that you can't wait for it to be closed. I mean, the kind of exhibit that you come away from wishing to God it had never been necessary to create.

Should Colston now be venerated in the carceral spaces of the museum store for posterity? I'd prefer to see him returned to the bottom of the harbour, sunk forever into the Avon mud and forgotten. But whatever the fate of the statue, let's keep Colston falling.
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. He is the author of The Brutish Museums (Pluto Press).

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The statue of the slave trader is now on display in a museum, a year after it was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters 'When people die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.'

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Memory Games: Exploring the Meaning of Monuments, 2022

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Memory Games: Exploring the Meaning of Monuments, 2022

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Monster Chetwynd's A Monument to the Unstuffy and Anti-Bureaucratic, 2019, from Testament at Goldsmiths CCA. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ Credit: Rob Harris

What would be a suitable monument for the UK in 2022? That was the question put to the 47 contributors to Testament, a new exhibition at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London.

The diversity of responses, including monuments to alien species and money laundering, certainly challenge preconceptions of what a monument should represent. Traditionally structures to either commemorate or celebrate a person or event, monuments have the potential to be powerful focal points for remembrance. But, as illustrated by the recent Colston statue toppling in Bristol, they can also be highly problematic given that they reflect the agenda of those who build them. When times and attitudes change, what should happen next to these seemingly permanent structures? In the context of Brexit and Black Lives Matter, and with the prospect of a national Covid monument of some sort in the offing, this feels like a particularly good time to tackle such a highly charged subject.

In Testament, it is the artists who are calling the shots when it comes to who or what should be commemorated, and how. The results are not celebratory memorials to glorious endeavours but mostly explore concerns about the divisiveness of contemporary society, whether issues of displacement and belonging, grieving families wronged by government, or the impact of consumer waste.

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art director and Testament curator Sarah McCrory was nonetheless surprised that the hugely diverse responses weren't even darker, given the 'awful' times. Perhaps because of this resonance with contemporary issues, they are certainly engaging with plenty of scope for interpretation.

Jeremy Deller contributed an array of bright ideas. I liked the notion of Monument to Money Laundering, conceived as a plaque that could be attached to many a high-rise new-build tower in London, as well as a Culture War memorial and a Tomb of the Unknown Refugee. He also suggests a Memorial to Civilian Dead in the Vietnam War, which would stretch 34 times longer than Maya Lin's celebrated memorial to US military deaths in the conflict, in direct proportion to the far greater loss of civilian life.

Alfie White's Portrait of Britain, 2021, from Testament at Goldsmiths CCA. Credit: Rob Harris

Several proposals relate to ideas of displacement and immigration. Adham Faramawy's film is on one level a homage to the parakeets that have become a colourful but controversial fixture in London parks, and on another can perhaps be read as an allusion to the migrants who have also made the city their home. Jay Tan's Sojourners Settlers Sponge is dedicated to the Chinese sailors and travellers who settled in London more than a century ago. Proposed for Limehouse, it is an upbeat confection - a giant festive cake referencing dragons, phoenixes and lotus flowers. In a different take on displacement, Saelia Aparicio's monument to alien plant species is a celebration of 'plant intelligence and plant agency', proposing a walking garden inhabited by plants labelled invasive.

Some artworks are responses to real events. Roger Hiorns's placards installation draws attention to the 177 young victims of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the 1990s, linked to BSE disease in cows. This is a tragedy that has, as McCrory points out, disappeared from contemporary memory. Hiorns proposes a monument to honour those who died - a simple silver sheet in the Westminster built environment 'so that it becomes part of the materials and texture of remembering the systemic fault lines and limitations of governance'.

As might be expected, several exhibits reference the pandemic. Stuart Middleton's Motivation and Personality, which rises up through the triple-height space, is created from stitched together, cast-off unpicked clothing. This is conceived as a monument to human resource and also to contact, with the clothes embodying 'the smell of skin, dust and old cells decomposing' at a time when human contact was limited. Mark Wallinger's film focuses on the notorious Marble Arch Mound commissioned to entice shoppers back to the West End - billed as the only major civic commission created as a result of the pandemic. Wallinger was clearly rather more interested in the view from inside, with shadowy figures climbing the steps up, and in the happenings at the nearby Speakers' Corner, than the view out.

Proposed for further down the road, Tenant of Culture's Oxford Circus is a pertinent comment on consumerism at odds with its location in the heart of the West End. Conceived as a 30m-high sail made of post-consumer waste in the form of discarded trainers, it is intended to remain in place for 200 years, the period it would take to decompose.

Many of the exhibits draw attention to universal themes. Rabiya Choudhry's The Lost Ones proposes a giant candle-shaped light sculpture. This serves both as a testament to those who feel lost in the world or have lost loved ones, and as a light to make people feel safe in dark parts of town. Oscar Murillo's installation uses cheap, little-valued plastic chairs, chosen as the antithesis of the monumental and the idea of triumph. Instead, it is a comment on the perils facing society, whether through the general decline of social fabric or through displacement.

Alfie White's Portrait of Britain is a collage of images from the last few years, that offers a rather bleak snapshot of a fragmented society beset by a pile-up of austerity, inequality, racism, need, Grenfell and Covid.

On a lighter note, Monster Chetwynd's huge green mouth filled with seating was one of the most popular exhibits with young children when I visited - and who wouldn't want to sit inside a giant creature's mouth? They might have not realised that they were inhabiting 'A Monument to the Unstuffy and Anti-Bureaucratic', also described by the artist as a monument to authenticity and to 'emotion in art and to spiritual connection'.

A fair few of the exhibits, despite the excellent gallery guide, remained puzzling to me. But there is plenty here to provide food for thought and speculation, whether as individual pieces or part of a broader exploration on the concept of the monument. It's also a great reason for those who haven't already visited the Assemble-designed CCA, which opened a few years ago, to do so.

Testament, until 3 April, 2022 (Wed-Sun), Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, St James' New Cross, London SE14 6AD

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Memory games: exploring the meaning of monuments

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What would be a suitable monument for the UK in 2022? That was the question put to the 47 contributors to Testament, a new exhibition at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London. The diversity of responses, including monuments to alien species and money laundering, certainly challenge preconceptions of what a monument should represent.

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Monuments and memorials, The Modern Arts Notes Podcast

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Monuments and memorials, The Modern Arts Notes Podcast

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Episode No. 391 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast looks at art and its relationship to monuments and memorials in the United States and features art historian Sarah Beetham, artist and activist Julia Pulawski and artist Ebony G. Patterson.

Sarah Beetham ( Twitter) is an assistant professor of art history at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She's working on a book titled "Monumental Crisis: Accident, Vandalism and the Civil War Citizen Soldier," a look at how monuments have become central to a range of American discourses in the many decades since the Civil War.

Julia Pulawski is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and along with artist Annie Simpson is part of an ad hoc group of Chapel Hill activists that erected guerilla monuments to James Cates and an anonymized Negro Wench in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At the February 12, 2019 dedication of the James Cates monument, the group handed out 50 free copies of a free zine about James Cates's life and murder that was adapted from research conducted by Mike Ogle. It is available for free here.

The Anti-Racist Activist Fund is helping to defray the legal costs of Silent Sam-related protesters. You may donate here.

Ebony G. Patterson is an artist whose work updates the memorial form and expands it to include people and groups typically excluded from the American memorial and monument tradition. Among the works she and host Tyler Green discuss are two recent memorials: , presented last year at Open Spaces Kansas City; and two works recently installed at the Baltimore Museum of Art: ... and babies too... and an untitled installation of 150 hand-embellished toy guns presented with with Joshua Johnson's Charles Herman Stricker Wilmans (ca. 1804). The Perez Art Museum Miami is presenting a solo exhibition of Patterson's work titled ... while the dew is still on the roses... through May 5.

Air date: May 2, 2019.

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Episode No. 391 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast looks at art and its relationship to monuments and memorials in the United States and features art historian Sarah Beetham, artist and activist Julia Pulawski and artist Ebony G. Patterson. Sarah Beetham (Twitter) is an assistant professor of art history at the Pennsylvania Academy of the...

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New works by Thomas J Price and Larry Achiampong on the line extend the debate on public sculpture, The Art Newspaper

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New works by Thomas J Price and Larry Achiampong on the line extend the debate on public sculpture, The Art Newspaper

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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In this summer of social distancing and increasingly stringent indoor mask-wearing, what better way to experience contemporary art than along a three mile riverside sculpture trail? The Line, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a series of new commissioned projects, propels walkers through East London's natural and industrial landscapes as it follows the Greenwich Meridian Line through East London's natural and industrial landscapes, linking the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, down to the O2 in Greenwich. Now London's first dedicated art walk is on the cusp of ushering in a new phase that both celebrates its past track record as well as looking to a more collaborative future that challenges and confirms the role of public sculpture.

The brainchild of the young art dealer Megan Piper and the late urban regeneration specialist Clive Dutton, The Line opened in 2015 with a changing exhibition programme of works borrowed from the vaults of both private and public collections. These included an original lineup of pieces by Damien Hirst, Bill Viola and Eduardo Paolozzi , as well as younger artists such as Thomas J. Price; with sculpture by Gary Hume, Laura Ford and Joanna Rajowoska among the loaned works currently in situ. Alongside this changing lineup are pre-existing, permanently sited works such as Antony Gormley's monumental Quantum Cloud and Richard Wilson's chunk of sand dredger, both installed by the O2, as well as the unholy alliance of Anish Kapoor and Karsten Holler in the ArcelorMittal Orbit that forms The Line's finale-or starting point-in London's Olympic Park.

When The Line first opened, Piper declared her desire "to shine a light on the extraordinary world class work that is hidden from public view and to bring the inside out", describing the project as "a walk, not a park-a dynamic exhibition that's about linking places and people in a part of London that doesn't have the museums and galleries afforded to other parts of town."

As it prepares to mark its fifth birthday, The Line finds itself in a radically different world. In addition to the arrival of Covid-19, public sculpture has become a lightning rod for Black Lives Matter protests across the US, the UK and Europe as the abominable subjects of so many historical monuments are laid bare and their removal demanded. At the same time, the glaring inequalities and injustices that permeate every part of the contemporary art world have also been put under scrutiny. As Marc Quinn's recent intervention in Bristol confirmed, the realm of public art continues to be an enduring bastion of pale, male entitlement; yet this is something The Line has attempted to redress right from the start, when Thomas J. Price's Network, a nine-foot bronze of a young black man gazing at his telephone, was part of its inaugural lineup.

Price's work is now back on The Line as part of a special anniversary programme of specially commissioned works to be shown alongside the existing loaned pieces. On 7 August, the artist unveils Reaching Out, a new monumental bronze, also around nine feet high, this time of a young woman who will be cradling her phone in almost exactly the same location as her male predecessor, near the historic Three Mills by Bow Creek. "Tom has been part of our story from the very beginning," Piper says, "and we are so pleased to have him back with a new piece made especially for The Line."

The work was made earlier this year and Price comments that his informally dressed subject, who is created from an amalgam of photographs, scans and earlier works "is not the visual acceptance in the mind of a white man of what a black woman should look like, or what power should look like. I want everyone to be able to identify her, it's about drawing people to the sculpture so they can feel the humanity of this character". Despite the monumental size of the statue, "I tried to make it so that she's actually slightly vulnerable," Price says, "because in this vulnerablity and openness, in this sort of naturalism, she has a real power."

Covid-19 has curtailed The Line's full anniversary programme, with new site specific pieces from Anne Hardy and Rana Begum and a series of billboards and window vinyls celebrating the work of the Newham-based Spiritualist painter Madge Gill, all slated for installation early next year. However, this August bank holiday weekend will also see the inauguration of another anniversary commission: an important new audio piece by Larry Achiampong made especially for The Emirates Air Line, the cable car that stretches across the Thames linking the Greenwich Peninsula to the Royal Docks on the north bank.

Larry Achiampong is creating a new audio work for The Line Photo: Emile Holba

Titled Sanko-time after the Ashanti phrase "Sankofa", meaning to go back and retrieve, the work combines audio recorded both in the UK and Ghana, input from local London primary school children and a monologue written and performed by the artist. "It talks about a personal journey, but hopefully from a perspective that allows people access," says Achiampong, whose parents came from Kumasi Ashtown in Ghana to settle in the UK in the early 1980s. He observes that "the Royal Docks are a celebrated global centre of innovation and industry and yet there's still the sting of colonialism in the water", and the artist hopes that his audience might "even consider themselves as the voice that is talking about the reverberations of the horrors of slavery, the discussion of Empire and the relationship with the Meridian."

The work consists of two ten-minute tracks, one for each journey across on the cable car, which can be downloaded to mobile devices by activating a QR code at the entrance to the Emirates station or the individual cable cars. While Achiampong feels that the best experience of the piece will be "on the cable car moving through the air and across the water", he says that he also likes the fact that, once downloaded, it can be experienced everywhere and "potentially becomes more of an ongoing conversation".

Achiampong works in many media-his recent Art on the Underground commission for Westminster station replaced the classic roundel tube logo with colours and patterns from the Pan African flag-but he's especially happy with how his sound work for The Line pushes at the notion of what a public artwork can be. "I'm really excited about how it can travel and be shared and become part of a conversation with other people" he says. "You don't perhaps experience as many audio art works as sculpture or paintings yet audio is one of the most consumed aspects of media and to bring an artistic process and critical conversation to that has been really exciting for me."

These projects by Price and Achiampong, along with the other commissions which have now been pushed back to early next year, not only celebrate the first five years of The Line but also usher in a new phase of collaborations and commissions that aim to build on its track record of opening up and democratizing public sculpture. "The Line launched with a loans programme of monumental sculptures, which will now be complemented by site-specific projects involving a wider range of media, including sound, film and performance," says Piper. "We will also place greater emphasis on health and wellbeing and the benefits of being outdoors and think creatively about how we can use public space in different ways."

Both Price and Achiampong are happy to be helping The Line mark this turning point. "I think Megan has done a fantastic job" says Price. "She appreciates good sculpture that is not made by committee but starts with the quality and the integrity of the work. Now she's helping more artists to recognize their practice in the public realm." Achiampong especially hopes that his work Sanko-time "might inspire young black people", stating: " I imagine how a younger self might have experienced that work? At that age I'd never experienced anything like that. There are so many young black artists out there who aren't being given the space to contribute to these important conversations. It feels really special to be a part of something that is trying to redress that."

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New works by Thomas J. Price and Larry Achiampong on The Line extend the debate on public sculpture

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In this summer of social distancing and increasingly stringent indoor mask-wearing, what better way to experience contemporary art than along a three mile riverside sculpture trail?

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Guerrilla Girls, 3 White Women, 1 Woman of Color and No Men of Color – out of 71 Artists?, 1977

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Guerrilla Girls, 3 White Women, 1 Woman of Color and No Men of Color – out of 71 Artists?, 1977

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Guerrilla Girls Portfolio Compleat Update 1991-2012 is a portfolio of works produced between 1991 and 2012 by the anonymous collective of American female artists known as the Guerilla Girls. It contains fifty-four poster projects of variable dimensions - twenty-six black and white offset lithographs on paper and twenty-eight colour digital prints on paper - alongside a printed plastic bag, three sheets of stickers and two issues of the newsletter Hot Flashes from 1994 (vol.1, nos.2 and 3, and vol.1, no.4). The portfolio also includes three books produced between 1998 and 2012 - The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, Bitches Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes and The Guerrilla Girls' Art Museum Activity Book - as well as their most recent text, The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It Was Cured, in digital form on compact disc in advance of publication. Two of the black and white prints are accompanied by postcards addressed to Thomas Krens and Margit Rowell - former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York respectively - that the public were encouraged to fill in and post as a sign of support for the Guerrilla Girls project. This version of the portfolio has been uniquely compiled for Tate to complement its existing holdings( Guerrilla Girls Talk Back [Tate -], a portfolio of thirty posters produced between 1985 and 1990), and each work is an artists' proof aside from the edition of fifty.

Since their formation in 1984, the Guerrilla Girls have fought to expose sexual and racial discrimination in the art world. Conceived as a response to the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture exhibition held in the same year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York - a survey show of 169 artists which, despite claiming to showcase the very best of contemporary art practice, included the work of only thirteen females and no artist from outside Europe or the United States - the group conceal their identities by wearing gorilla masks in public and by adopting pseudonyms taken from such important deceased female figures as the writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986).

Describing themselves as 'the conscience of the art world', the Guerrilla Girls began with a poster campaign that responded to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition in 1984, targeting the institutions, dealers, art critics and artists who they felt were responsible for - if not silently complicit in - the exclusion of women and non-white artists from mainstream artistic circles (Chadwick and Guerrilla Girls 1995, p.15.) Tacked up around the streets of SoHo under the cover of darkness, their posters shamed commercial galleries showing few or no women artists (see [no title] 1985-90, Tate ), and questioned the morality of the city's most renowned institutions, asking 'Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?' (see [no title] 1985-90, Tate ).

In the same way that artists such as Jenny Holzer (born 1950) and Barbara Kruger (born 1945) turned to mass media techniques in the 1980s, the Guerrilla Girls also appropriated advertising strategies - and the practice of fly-posting in particular - to disseminate their messages quickly and easily to a wide audience. Containing information compiled from museum reports and magazine articles, their posters arrange stark statistics into bold graphics and eye-catching lists, designed for maximum impact in the public sphere. Whilst each project is grounded in data and research, wit and irony are also used as strategies through which to draw attention to what they see as the inadequacies of the art world and the hypocrisies and double standards of those in positions of power. Speaking about their use of humour, the group have said: 'We've discovered that ridicule and humiliation, backed up by irrefutable information, can disarm the powers that be, put them on the spot, and force them to examine themselves.' (Guerrilla Girls, 'Frequently Asked Questions', http://www.guerrillagirls.com/interview/faq.shtml, paragraph 24, accessed 29 September 2014.)

Whilst the group are perhaps best known for their campaigns confronting gender and racial discriminations in the art world, they have long addressed inequalities of a political and social nature. The group have said: 'Almost from the beginning, we did campaigns about homelessness, abortion, and war, among many other issues. We've never been systematic, we just go after one target after another.' (Ibid, paragraph 30.) Compiled of works produced between 1991 and 2012, Guerrilla Girls Portfolio Compleat Update tackles a wide range of social injustices, highlighting intolerance of sexual orientation ( Supreme Court Justice Supports Right To Privacy For Gays And Lesbians 1992, ), disproportions in museum pay ( MoMA Mia!!! 13 Years And We're Still Counting 1997, ) and political election propaganda ( Republicans Do Believe In A Woman's Right To Control Her Own Body 1992, ) alongside inequality at the Oscars Awards ( Anatomically Correct Oscar Billboard 2002, ) and the Venice Biennale ( Where Are The Women Artists Of Venice? 2005, ). Dear Art Collector 2007(Tate L03724), which critiques the absence of art by women in private collections, demonstrates the group's acute understanding of the vagaries of the art market when translated into Greek and Chinese (Tate L03725-L03726), whilst Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met. Museum? Update 2012 (Tate L03735) - a repurposing of the iconic poster of 1985 (Tate P78793) - reinforces the Guerrilla Girls' campaign for justice and equality as an ongoing one.

Whilst posters pasted onto the streets of New York have been the mainstay of the Guerrilla Girls activities, some of the works in Portfolio Compleat demonstrate the variety of tactics they have used to disseminate their so-called 'public service messages' across cities and countries. Sheets of stickers such as As Good As It Gets? 1998 (Tate L03706), In This Theatre 1998 (Tate L03707) and Sundance Stickers 2001 (Tate L03712) turn individuals into mobile billboards - allowing them to take ownership of political and social causes by affixing slogans and graphics to themselves - whilst 10 Trashy Ideas About The Environment 1994 (Tate L03698) shames anti-environmentalist clichés via a (humorously green-coloured) plastic carrier bag.

Further reading
Whitney Chadwick, Guerrilla Girls, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, New York 1995.
Guerrilla Girls, '2009 Guerilla Girls Frequently Asked Questions', https://www.guerrillagirls.com/2009faqs/?rq=faq, accessed 29 September 2014.
Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz, 'Transgressive Techniques of the Guerrilla Girls', Getty Research Journal, no.2, 2010, pp.203-8.

Hannah Johnston
September 2014
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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1 woman of color and no men of color out of 71 artists?’

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'3 White Women, 1 Woman of Color and No Men of Color out of 71 Artists?', Guerrilla Girls, 1997 | Tate

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Guerrilla Girls Portfolio Compleat Update 1991-2012 is a portfolio of works produced between 1991 and 2012 by the anonymous collective of American female artists known as the Guerilla Girls.

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Artists: Saelia Aparicio, Phyllida Barlow, Alvaro Barrington, JJ Chan, Monster Chetwynd, Rabiya Choudhry, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Navine G. Dossos, Ryan Gander, Carl Gent, Holly Hendry, Roger Hiorns, Sam Keogh, Scott King, Phillip Lai, Lawrence Lek, Ghislaine Leung, Lloyd Corporation, Paul Maheke, Stuart Middleton, Oscar Murillo, Nashashibi/Skaer, Olu Ogunnaike, Hardeep Pandhal, Yuri Pattison, Elizabeth Price, Laure Prouvost, Aaron Ratajczyk, Tanoa Sasraku, SERAFINE1369, Tai Shani, Peter Spanjer, Jay Tan, Tenant of Culture, Edward Thomasson, Jala Wahid, Mark Wallinger, Dominic Watson, Alfie White, Gray Wielebinski, Bedwyr Williams, Cerith Wyn Evans, Zadie Xa & Benito Mayor Vallejo, Abbas Zahedi.

As the UK navigates seismic shifts triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental crises and Brexit, the role of monuments has been brought into sharp focus, becoming the centre of public debate. Testament was a large-scale group exhibition across the entirety of the CCA building, staged in response to this tumultuous period.

Artists were invited to make proposals that consider what is at stake in tearing down and erecting monuments, and what it might mean to rethink the idea of the monument. Are they defunct, illusory statements of permanence, continuity, and manifestations of power? Whose narratives do they preserve, and whose do they suppress? Can they still play a vital role in mediating communal grief and providing a locus for memory? Is there space for them to be re-envisioned?

The exhibition featured 'proposal' artworks by 47 artists, including those who are either resident in the UK, and those who are abroad but hold an understanding of the UK's complex relationship with the past and present. Their contributions unambiguously or indirectly addressed the idea of a monument, or alluded to the treatment of monuments in the UK in 2022, and sought to magnify a multitude of conversations, from discussions about decolonising institutions, fallism, dislocation, memorialising, remembering and forgetting, to our current relationship with history, along with some intimate and personal responses. Submissions incorporated notes and sketches, drawings, poems, instructions, installations, sculptures, paintings, films, performances, and text, and included critical and celebratory positions and conversations about coping and surviving, ranging from the individual to the universal, and the local to the national.
Exhibition Guide
A full public programme accompanied the exhibition. The publication accompanying the exhibition is available here.

The exhibition was kindly supported by the Testament Gallery Circle: Carlos/Ishikawa, Corvi-Mora, David Zwirner, GRIMM Gallery, Hales Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Herald St, Lisson Gallery, Modern Art, mother's tankstation, Niru Ratnam Gallery, Soft Opening, Southard Reid, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Galerie Sultana.

Artists: Saelia Aparicio, Phyllida Barlow, Alvaro Barrington, JJ Chan, Monster Chetwynd, Rabiya Choudhry, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Navine G. Dossos, Ryan Gander, Carl Gent, Holly Hendry, Roger Hiorns, Sam Keogh, Scott King, Phillip Lai, Lawrence Lek, Ghislaine Leung, Lloyd Corporation, Paul Maheke, Stuart Middleton, Oscar Murillo, Nashashibi/Skaer, Olu Ogunnaike, Hardeep Pandhal, Yuri Pattison, Elizabeth Price, Laure Prouvost, Aaron Ratajczyk, Tanoa Sasraku, SERAFINE1369, Tai Shani, Peter Spanjer, Jay Tan, Tenant of Culture, Edward Thomasson, Jala Wahid, Mark Wallinger, Dominic Watson, Alfie White, Gray Wielebinski, Bedwyr Williams, Cerith Wyn Evans, Zadie Xa & Benito Mayor Vallejo, Abbas Zahedi.

As the UK navigates seismic shifts triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental crises and Brexit, the role of monuments has been brought into sharp focus, becoming the centre of public debate. Testament was a large-scale group exhibition across the entirety of the CCA building, staged in response to this tumultuous period.

Artists were invited to make proposals that consider what is at stake in tearing down and erecting monuments, and what it might mean to rethink the idea of the monument. Are they defunct, illusory statements of permanence, continuity, and manifestations of power? Whose narratives do they preserve, and whose do they suppress? Can they still play a vital role in mediating communal grief and providing a locus for memory? Is there space for them to be re-envisioned?

The exhibition featured 'proposal' artworks by 47 artists, including those who are either resident in the UK, and those who are abroad but hold an understanding of the UK's complex relationship with the past and present. Their contributions unambiguously or indirectly addressed the idea of a monument, or alluded to the treatment of monuments in the UK in 2022, and sought to magnify a multitude of conversations, from discussions about decolonising institutions, fallism, dislocation, memorialising, remembering and forgetting, to our current relationship with history, along with some intimate and personal responses. Submissions incorporated notes and sketches, drawings, poems, instructions, installations, sculptures, paintings, films, performances, and text, and included critical and celebratory positions and conversations about coping and surviving, ranging from the individual to the universal, and the local to the national.
Exhibition Guide
A full public programme accompanied the exhibition. The publication accompanying the exhibition is available here.

The exhibition was kindly supported by the Testament Gallery Circle: Carlos/Ishikawa, Corvi-Mora, David Zwirner, GRIMM Gallery, Hales Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Herald St, Lisson Gallery, Modern Art, mother's tankstation, Niru Ratnam Gallery, Soft Opening, Southard Reid, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Galerie Sultana.

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Artists: Saelia Aparicio, Phyllida Barlow, Alvaro Barrington, JJ Chan, Monster Chetwynd, Rabiya Choudhry, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Navine G.

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Kara Walker, artist: The well overfloweth its banks and changes course, away, away from this island fort, towards a new world, taking with her gods and dreams and men and women. We cross the Atlantic in many ways. We swim or we sink.

This is a piece about oceans and seas traversed fatally.

The Fons Americanus is an allegory of the Black Atlantic and really all global waters which disastrously connect Africa to America, Europe and economic prosperity.

My name is Kara Walker I'm an artist. I'm really interested in making work that explores the power struggles and history and mythologies that inform the way we perceive ourselves and the way we perceive others, particularly around race or gender. I'm interested in grand themes and small human frailties, the macro and the micro.

Well I first saw the Victoria Memorial at Buckingham Palace on a lark, I mean not on a lark, on the way to the airport. I saw the monument, I took some quick snapshots, moving snapshots out of the window of the taxi and then forgot about it promptly as one does with monuments and memorials.

I think that there's this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible. The larger they are, in fact the more they sink into the background.

I'm not an actual historian, I'm an unreliable narrator. I sort of let characters or caricatures sort of emerge. Sometimes they are culled straight from pop culture, looking at the types of depictions of blackness or of slavery as they have emerged, you know, specifically in the 19th century moving through the 20th century and changed somewhat over time.

It's this kernel of experience that can never quite be told in art and I'm always fascinated by these paradoxes and problems.

Although slavery didn't exist on these shores, England was the beneficiary of the slave trade and its products and so you have this kind of institution that spans many hundreds of years and everybody's implicated in it.

I wondered how to return the gift of having come to be through the mechanics of finance, exploitation, murder, rape, death, ecological destruction, co-optation, coercion, love, seafaring feats, bravery, slavery, loss, injustice, excess, cruelty, tenacity, submission and progress, conceived in the U.S. to live in this time and place, with this opportunity, this ability.

So I was working in a different way than I normally work, although there's some common threads. I do tend to do a bit of writing beforehand, just to figure out where my head is. It took a while before I had a concept but the concept, when it came, came sort of flooding, let's say, quite literally flooding out of me so that it got very large and fluid and funny.

So I made these small clay models every day marvelling at the characters and caricatures who emerged. From there I scanned the figures and forms and worked with digital imaging, inserting them into a digital mock-up of the Turbine Hall space and changing and arranging things as needed.

It's very strange really to go from like the thumbprint to the digitised version to sort of back to this machine and then back to our hands again.

I think that with this piece I really wanted to make sure that my hand was still present in it and it wasn't something that was just easily machined and shipped off and moved into the Turbine Hall.

The Turbine Hall Commission functions as a one-person version of the 19th century World's Exposition. The World's Fair was a public entertainment exploiting the wealth and bounty of rich nations often literally carried on the backs of its colonised subjects.

As a one-woman World's Fair I have created a space for reflection, joy even, amid the miasma of conflicts racial, economic and cultural which still lodge themselves in our collective gullet, thanks to the rise of white nationalism, xenophobia, fundamentalist violence and a poisonous populism which has everyone mouthing off thoughtlessly at once.

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Kara Walker, artist: The well overfloweth its banks and changes course, away, away from this island fort, towards a new world, taking with her gods and dreams and men and women. We cross the Atlantic in many ways. We swim or we sink. This is a piece about oceans and seas traversed fatally.

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Monuments to Immortality, Jake and Dinos Chapman, 2021

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Monuments to Immortality, Jake and Dinos Chapman, 2021

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Lockdown reduced the tendency to travel to London, and it looks as if some of that decentralising shift may be permanent. That fits with an increasingly wide spread of art initiatives. The Turner Prize is in Coventry this year - following on from Hull (2018) and Margate (2019). Last week I was in Bournemouth and Sheffield for two admirably selfless initiatives which promise to become ongoing models of how to bring interesting contemporary art to non-London publics.

In Bournemouth, artist Stuart Semple not only has a huge studio and team in the upper two floors of The Avenue shopping centre, he has just taken over a floor of the former Debenhams as an exhibition space, having persuaded the new owner to give the support of free rent. The scale and location should be a winner, and GIANT has made a good start with plenty of big names and big works in the initial show. 'Big Medicine', curated by Semple himself, issues a somewhat tongue in cheek rallying call for art to heal cultural wounds through shared experience - with plenty of drug-related works. And the Project Space has another interesting show: Lee Cavalier's curation of 'Why We Shout - The Art of Protest'.

Jake and Dinos Chapman could have fitted in either show with their new series of bronze-cast suicide vests, copied from youtube clips of suicide bombers but rendered as useless as Jeff Koons' 1985 casts of aqualungs in bronze, which the brothers cite as an inspiration. Some are art bombs, with paint and brushes where one would expect explosives. 'The risk and danger of being an artist', says Semple in one of his informative labels, 'is pitched against the power of the artist's conviction to fight for belief'. Regular new shows and performance events are planned.

Sheffield has a quite different collaboration: 'Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape' is a curation by the Roberts Institute of Art of selections from both the David and Indre Roberts's and Sheffield museum collections. The former moved from a physical gallery base in London to a more fluid model, emphasising performance, in 2017, and this approach is a logical way to extend public access to the collection. A second such collaboration is already lined up for the Hunterian in Glasgow. The timing exploits the temporary closure of Sheffield's Graves Gallery for refurbishment to incorporate some works normally shown there in the Millennium Gallery.

The largest and darkest work in the show is this peculiar and disturbing reproduction - scaled down to mimic Balka's own measurements so he can just reach the top at full stretch - of a zoo built-in 1943 in the Treblinka extermination camp. Commissioned by the commander of the SS as entertainment for his family and other officers, the top part hosted a dovecote, while foxes and other animals were kept beneath. Inside it, red wine bubbles and circulates in a vat, adding Catholic themes to the reflections on what humans can do.

Art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent sees a lot of shows: we asked him to jot down whatever came into his head

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Paul Carey-Kent
Art critic and curator, based near Southampton. I write most regularly for Art Monthly, Frieze, World of Interiors, Seisma, Border Crossings, Artlyst, ... and, of course, FAD.

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Art Decentred - Bournemouth and Sheffield

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Lockdown reduced the tendency to travel to London, and it looks as if some of that decentralising shift may be permanent. That fits with an increasingly wide spread of art initiatives. The Turner Prize is in Coventry this year - following on from Hull (2018) and Margate (2019).

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What was Judson Dance Theater? A group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers gathered in Judson Memorial Church in New York's Greenwich Village for a series of workshops in the early 1960s that ultimately redefined what counted as dance. Stripping dance of its theatrical conventions such as virtuoso technique, fanciful costumes, complex storylines, and the traditional stage, the Judson dancers drew on everyday movements (sitting, walking, kneeling, and other gestures) to create their pieces, often performing them in ordinary spaces. The result, according to Village Voice critic Jill Johnston, was the most exciting new dance in a generation. To its members, Judson was as much an expression of community as it was a site of radical experimentation. As choreographer Aileen Pasloff put it, "Judson is open arms. Judson is big mama. Judson is whatever you need, come in. We're going to try and give it to you."

In the audio below, Pasloff and other Judson artists tell the story from the inside: they reflect on how it came to exist, and the way it sought to democratize dance through collaboration.

The speakers, in order of appearance, include:
Al Carmines
Yvonne Rainer
Steve Paxton
Aileen Pasloff
Valda Setterfield
Carolee Schneemann

Original audio captured by Sara Bodinson, Vivian A. Crockett, Nina Callaway, and Christine Murray.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done runs through February 3, 2019. Buy tickets today.

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The Voices of Judson Dance Theater | Magazine | MoMA

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What was Judson Dance Theater? A group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers gathered in Judson Memorial Church in New York's Greenwich Village for a series of workshops in the early 1960s that ultimately redefined what counted as dance.

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'Monuments' Redmond Entwistle USA, 2010, 25 minutes, Colour, Sound (Mono), 4:3 (Artists' film)

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'Monuments' Redmond Entwistle USA, 2010, 25 minutes, Colour, Sound (Mono), 4:3 (Artists' film)

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The artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark are revived from the dead and ejected from their makeshift mausoleums in New York by the forces of redevelopment.
https://lux.org.uk/work/monuments

Watch online: https://lux.org.uk/writing/artists-project-redmond-entwistle

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The artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark are revived from the dead and ejected from their makeshift mausoleums in New York by the forces of redevelopment. Led through New Jersey by a young Dan Graham, they debate their artistic positions with the 'non-actors' they encounter at the sites of their work in New Jersey.Monuments re-enacts the narrative subtext of Post-Minimalism with some of the crude poetry of the American B-movie, drawing on the treatment of the figure in the landscape in North American cinema from sources as diverse as John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln and Fattie Arbuckle & Buster Keaton's 'two-reeler' films.The film retraces Post-Minimalism's abiding interest in the relationship between New York and New Jersey. What at first seems to be a film about art history, becomes a portrait of the areas of New Jersey that were once the industrial belt of New York, and a second story emerges of the demise of industry in the region and the changing position of North America within a globalized economy.'A brainy, beautifully imagined film with an unexpectedly dry humour to boot.' IFFR 2010Funded by the Arts Council England with support from Film London and Film London Artist's Moving Image Network and a New Commissions grant from Art in General.

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The artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark are revived from the dead and ejected from their makeshift mausoleums in New York by the forces of redevelopment.

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Turner Prize 2022 nominees: Heather Phillipson “I wanted to make my own news. I wanted to make a monument to hubris and impending collapse,”

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Turner Prize 2022 nominees: Heather Phillipson “I wanted to make my own news. I wanted to make a monument to hubris and impending collapse,”

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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The nominees for the 2022 Turner Prize include Veronica Ryan, who created the Hackney Windrush commission in London, and Heather Phillipson whose Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square-a swirl of whipped cream topped with a drone-is still turning heads. The other nominees are the Black British photographer Ingrid Pollard and Sin Wai Kin (formerly Victoria Sin) who identifies as non-binary. The prize returns to Tate Liverpool this year (20 October-19 March 2023) after a 15-year hiatus.

Heather Phillipson's THE END (2017)© David Parry/PA Wire

Phillipson's subversive work on the Fourth Plinth, THE END (2017), is the 13th piece to be commissioned for the prestigious public art platform located in the heart of London. "I wanted to make my own news. I wanted to make a monument to hubris and impending collapse," she told the Financial Times. Last year Phillipson reimagined the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain as a sequence of "charged ecosystems, maladaptive seasons and unearthed lifeforms". She discussed her recent maximalist exhibition at Tate on The Week in Art podcast.

Installation view of Veronica Ryan's Along a Spectrum (2021) at Spike Island, Bristol Commissioned by Spike Island, Bristol and supported by Freelands Foundation. Photo: Max McClure. © Veronica Ryan. Courtesy of Spike Island, Bristol, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and Alison Jacques, London

Veronica Ryan has worked with tropical fruit, feathers and dust, dyeing and embroidering a wide variety of fabrics, casting works in plaster, bronze and clay. After a number of high-profile shows in the 1980s and early 1990s, she went off the art world radar however. In an interview with The Art Newspaper last year, Ryan said: "Although I didn't finish my MPhil at Soas [the School of Oriental and African Studies in London] I'm interested in archaeology and anthropology, thinking about early cultures and the creative ways that people have always needed to express themselves and I see my work as a continuation of that." She is nominated for her solo exhibition Along a Spectrum at Spike Island, Bristol, last year.

A still from Sin Wai Kin's video It's Always You (2021) Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery

The Canadian-born artist Sin Wai Kin was nominated following their participation in the British Art Show 9 (BAS9) and their solo presentation at Blindspot Gallery, Frieze London, last year. "The jury highlighted their film Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021) in which traditional Chinese philosophy and dramaturgy intersects with contemporary drag, music and poetry," a Tate statement says. "Through parody, the artist reveals and interrogates constructed images of idealised Western femininity. In recent years, their drag aesthetic has drawn upon roles found in Peking and Cantonese Opera," a statement from BAS9 says.

Installation view of Ingrid Pollard's Carbon Slowly Turning at MK Gallery Photo: Rob Harris

Ingrid Pollard was nominated for her solo exhibition last year, Carbon Slowly Turning, at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. A key figure in the Black British art movement in the 1980s, and an active member of grassroots campaigns for women's liberation and LGBTQ rights, Pollard has been making experimental work that explores themes such as race, sexuality and identity for more than 40 years. "She raises questions around Britain's history, its entanglement with empire, slavery and colonialism, and how the residues of this are still embedded in the landscape today," the MK Gallery curator Gilane Tawadros said.

The Turner Prize winner is awarded £25,000 with £10,000 going to the other artists shortlisted. The members of the Turner Prize 2022 jury are Irene Aristizábal, the head of Curatorial and Public practice at BALTIC; Christine Eyene, a research fellow at the School of Arts and Media at University College London; Robert Leckie, the director of Spike Island; and Anthony Spira, the director of MK Gallery.

Helen Legg, the director of Tate Liverpool, says in a statement: "The jury has travelled the length and breadth of the country, taking advantage of the easing of lockdown to enjoy the explosion of creativity that has emerged from the pandemic. The result is a diverse group of artists, each with a singular vision, who impressed the judges with the intensity of their presentations, while also dealing with important issues facing our society today."

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Contemporary drag and fruity sculpture: Turner Prize 2022 shortlist announced

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The nominees for the 2022 Turner Prize include Veronica Ryan, who created the Hackney Windrush commission in London, and Heather Phillipson whose Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square-a swirl of whipped cream topped with a drone-is still turning heads. The other nominees are the Black British photographer Ingrid Pollard and Sin Wai Kin (formerly Victoria Sin) who identifies as non-binary.

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Bridget Minamore: Grey, like memory, white like history books. Gift from the new world that is old world to me. Large, unlike most quite large things, this is big. Crude like water spurting out of breasts. Crude like water flowing from a hole in a topless woman's neck. Crude like grooves in stricken, drowning faces, crude like oil. Crude like something black that sits on water. Crude like a hangman's noose on the right-hand side of a tree, sharks snapping under feet. Crude like me in a gallery, daughter of water.

These are the lines that came to me, stood underneath the Fons Americanus, Kara Walker's new installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. It's an epic, 40 feet high fountain, dedicated the forgotten figures of transatlantic slavery and colonialism.

Vanessa Kisuule : We are all aware of the pain and the trauma of our past, and what happened to our ancestors. And to wear that in such an immediate way, everywhere you go, everywhere you walk, is to not function, right. So, if I'm honest, there is a part of me that has to switch that off, and shut that down, most of the time.

Hannah Catherine Jones: I think, Britain is beginning, maybe, to address these legacies of slavery and colonialism. It's tip of the iceberg stuff, though. It makes me think of this meme where British history, according to Britons, is represented by this fluffy little puppy. And then the other side of the meme is like, Britain in every other country's history books, and it's this rabid, terrifying wolf.

BM: I love Kara's work. She's a Black artist, making work about Black lives, and she makes our stories so huge, that they are impossible to ignore.

Kara Walker: Most of my work over the last 25 years, I guess it has been now, has been wrestling with how the past is remembered and forgotten, simultaneously. And I became interested in that as a teenager, moving to the American South, because it's a place that's quite steeped in its own mythology, around race, and segregation, and slavery, and how it immortalised people.

Yeah, I guess, you know, I don't know what it's like to grow up here, I think that the UK maybe gets an easy pass, sometimes, from thinking about slavery, or it gets the, you know, abolition card. It seems, it could be very liberating to, you know, grow up here and not be sort of, like, asked to think about it. And then, here I come with this work, and I'm like, well just think about it.

BM: In each of our lives, our histories, we have things we want to celebrate and remember, and things we'd rather forget. But what happens when important histories are erased, and why are some stories easier to forget than others. This is the Art of Remembering, a Tate podcast.

[Music].

BM: I'm Bridget Minamore, and I'm a poet from London. Growing up here, you're surrounded by statues, fountains, and monuments. It's only as I've gotten older that I've started to pay attention to who we put on plinths, and who we don't.

The Fons Americanus is based on the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace in London. It commemorates Queen Victoria, and the British Empire she upheld, but it doesn't quite tell the full story. To check it out, we sent a few members of Tate Collective down there. Young 15 to 25 year olds, who collaborate with Tate on creative projects.

Libertee: I've never been here, so to be honest, you would think it would look like any other monument, but it's quite vast in comparison to other ones. And I'm quite short, so it's very, very tall in comparison to me, and I think that kind of represents her reign, because obviously, she was a big, big figure, and she was very powerful. And you really get the sense of that from this, because you feel that you're the lower figure.

Sai: I'm someone who's from the Caribbean, so when it comes to, like, monuments that represent colonial histories, it's quite conflicting feelings, I guess. Because a lot of people were abused, and were killed, and suffered, for us to be, like, Great Britain. So, I think there's a lot to dissect there.

Haris: Stature, and power, and empire, and blood, too, and slavery, they're all woven and threaded into the fabric of British history. Narratives are sort of heading towards a more modern attitude, in the sense that people are understanding and engaging more with the darker sides of history, that have either been covered up, or swept under the rug, or overlooked. I feel quite detached from it. It's kind of a capsule of a certain period of time in history. And I think, in that sense, it needs to be left alone, and sort of understood, and accepted, so we can move on.

[Music].

BM: My parents are from Ghana. And from a young age, I got used to feeling disconnected from the figures I saw in statues. But when it comes to the legacies of slavery and colonialism, it's pretty hard to just move on.

VK: A letter to you. Here's to the people who have at least 16...

BM: Vanessa Kisuule is a good friend of mine, as well as an amazing poet. She is of Ugandan heritage, and we've had a lot of chats over the years about the way our backgrounds sit alongside the art we make.

VK: ...the accents that lilt, and swell, like an orgy of castanets, nibbling at...

BM: Vanessa lives in Bristol, in the southwest of England. And is the official city poet.

VK: ...even the tallest, a most formidable of towers, was once just a pile of bricks.

[Music].

BM: She told me all about Countering Colston, a movement to remove the icons and name of the 17th century slave-trader, called Edward Colston, from the city. I'm visiting her for a personal tour.

BM: Hi, how you doing?

VK: How are you, I'm good, I'm good. So, we're on Colston Street, which is in a very central part of Bristol, we're about five minutes away from the main Broadmead area, which is essentially the high street of Bristol. And this street is quite interesting, because it is pretty much end to end independent businesses and shops. So, I have a lot of fondness for this street in terms of what it represents in that sense. But its name is a very difficult, and fraught thing.

BM: Edward Colston made his fortune transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas. He also poured huge amounts of his money into Bristol, so his name is plastered everywhere. A recent campaign to rename the city's main arts venue, Colston Hall, has created a knock-on effect.

VK: The big debate with Colston Hall was happening, and then not long after that, Bristol Yard had a complete refurbishment, and then renamed itself, so it was called the Colston Yard, until very recently. And I just find that really interesting, that it clearly created a domino effect of sorts, in terms of the general consciousness of businesses in the area. And this is what I mean about where does that end. I've not heard anything about the girls' school changing its name, I've not heard anything about the statue being taken down, or having something put on it, in terms of a plaque that might acknowledge the history of Colston's involvement in imperialism. So yeah, it's interesting how far these changes go. And what they ultimately mean, in terms of how people are reflecting on the history.

BM: I might feel a bit more sort of grey area around the practicalities of changing names, but I am really in favour of the campaigns. Because I think, at the very least, they inspire a conversation, that it's hard to inspire in any other way. People have actually started to engage with this idea of what it means to walk around in cities, in countries, that are just built on, I don't know, colonialism and slavery. And it is, and we don't really accept it. In the States, you know, they definitely have, I'm not saying it's necessarily better, but they definitely are aware of their history, of American history involving slavery.

VK: And I think it's because of the fact that the slavery itself was not occurring on this land.

BM: Yeah, of course.

VK: So, there's an ability to dissociate from the reality of it. Because in America, you can go and you can visit those former plantations, you can't escape it in the way that we can. Because, obviously, it was happening in these far away islands, and then we reaped the sugar, and the rum, and the tobacco, et cetera. But a lot of people that owned slaves in Britain, didn't see these places, these far away islands, where people were suffering, once, you know. So, they just saw these people as, these vague pieces of property, on an island somewhere, that they would probably never visit. So, I think that's why we have such a sense of convenient amnesia about it, because in terms of the very grounded geographical sense of place, we're not able to go, right there is where this happened.

[Music].

BM: I never learned about slavery or colonialism in school. In Britain, those histories feel very much, out of sight, out of mind. Which is why I love the written declaration that goes along with Kara's work. She asks us to witness the Fons Americanus, the Daughter of Waters. To behold the swirling drama of the merciless seas, and to marvel and contemplate the monumental mis-remembering of colonial exploitation. It's an invitation for us to begin to see the figures, stories, and histories that have been obscured or hidden from view. And it's really powerful when we do.

[Music].

HCJ: I was ten years old, I went Barbados with my dad, it was my dad's first time returning since he'd left, to move to England. And we were driving around, and there was this roundabout, and then there was this figure, with arms upheld, chains broken, in this like heroic stance. I guess I'd never really looked up that far, a Black person in a sculpture, ever. And that had a very big effect on me.

BM: Hannah Catherine Jones is an artist, scholar, and composer. One of her recent video art performances was inspired by a monument to a rebel slave in the Caribbean, the Bussa Emancipation Statue.

[Music].

HCJ: It was made by an artist called Karl Broodhagen. And it's to honour Bussa, the Bajan slave of Igbo descent, who led the 1815 rebellion in Barbados. And then, I've been able to come back and really research that in recent years. And I do a work called, Ode to Bussa, where it's kind of like a screen recording video of me researching, just googling, Bussa, and finding Wikipedia, and highlighting the information, looking at Google Images. And then relating it to things that are, or were going on at the time, contemporaneously, like Kendrick Lamar's Grammy performance, where he and his band entered the stage as, like, prisoners. Or like, the British Black Panthers, like, who are these freedom fighters, how are they connected across time.

Every time I perform that work, it's about ten minutes, it's kind of a lament, where I just sing the name, Bussa, over and over.

[Music].

HCJ: Because I want that name to have life breathed into it regularly. It's a meditation. And it's my kind of offering. And it's ongoing. The more I learn about different struggles, the more important it is to remind yourself of that. And, you know, maybe one day in the not too distant future, everyone will be learning about Bussa on the curriculum. So, these things really do matter, they really do matter, they can change the course of your life.

BM: These monuments and sculptures aren't just dead objects. They do have the power to move and inspire us. And they're especially powerful when they represent the people on the margins.

[Music].

Rene Matić: Do you remember Olive Morris, or her strength, or her pride? Do you remember Olive Morris, all the fire she had inside? Do you remember Olive Morris, all she did for me, and for you? Do you remember Olive Morris, could we be like her, too?

My name is Rene Matich, I'm 22, and I'm an artist currently studying in London.

BM: Rene designed a series of sculptures that commemorate the life of Olive Morris, a Black activist whose legacy is often overlooked.

RM: Olive Morris was a British community leader and activist in the feminist Black Nationalist, and Squatter's Rights campaign of the 1970s. And she was really integral to British Black Panther movement, and helped a lot, a lot, a lot of people out. So, it's kind of wild, that a lot of people don't know who she is. So, I created four black Perspex fists, that stood outside the Black Cultural Archives. And the image of the fist has lots of connotation of power, connotations of Blackness, and strength. So, I took that as my symbol, I suppose, of Olive. But to connect it to her, I made it five foot two, which is her height, and also my height, which felt really important, to imagine her as a body, in a space, and a human being.

I think that sculpture can be incredibly helpful, and important, because it's a physical object that's in a space, it takes up space. That was probably the most important thing about the piece, honestly. Because it stood in people's way, and I wanted it to be, like, this kind of forest of fists, that you had to weave through, to get to the entrance of the Black Cultural Archives. And they're quite hard to ignore, and I think that that's what's the main thing. My main concern is, about these stories, is that we make them hard to ignore, and we make them impossible to forget.

BM: I'm totally with Rene, when it comes to celebrating forgotten heroes. But what do we do with the stories that hurt us, the monuments and statues that remind us our collective wounds? Personally, I'm a bit on the fence about pulling them down. But I didn't think I'd feel so strongly about seeing the statue of Colston in Bristol. When I ended up standing underneath him, I actually felt a bit ill.

BM: He is looking down at us in a sort of pensive way. He's got a cane, his arm is folded across his other arm, he's dressed up, I think, I don't really know what 17th century fashion was like, but he seems like he's quite well dressed. And he's on this plinth that's sort of surrounded by these carp, I think, large fishes with their mounds open, that look kind of grotesque, actually.

VK: Oh my god I love it - erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city.

BM: Oh my god. See, that is just like...

VK: That's actually mad, isn't it?

BM: I really dislike it; I really dislike it. I love sculpture...

VK: I will admit, and I feel very ignorant of this, that I've not actually read that until now.

BM: Really?

VK: I've not read that, and that makes me want to vomit.

VK: It makes me really uncomfortable that you could be like a kid, or someone, or a tourist, and you're not going to sit and read a plaque, or multiple plaques about his, like, crimes, or whatever. But you just see this man, and he's important. And I think that, you know, I come from a culture where, like, names are so important, and faces are so important, and the way we speak things into existence is so important. And speaking this name, all the time, adds to a collective consciousness, even if people aren't necessarily conscious of the specifics of this man. And seeing his face, the number of people who see his face on a daily basis, right, adds to him sort of staying alive, even in a small way, and I don't like that.

BM: I don't know whether, hmm, this might be a bit naughty, but I am a sneaky advocate of mindful vandalism, if such a thing exists, i.e. cutting through the grandeur of a statue by putting a traffic cone on its head. Which sounds silly, and juvenile, but I feel like there's something about that...

VK: No.

BM: ...that's really powerful.

VK: That's totally valid, to me.

BM: It essentially means that, like, the public are able to engage with these statues, there's not this reverence around them of, we don't touch them, we don't mark them, we don't, essentially, exist to be in dialogue with them, you know. And I think it's our general attitude around art and history, it's this thing on a plinth over here, that us lowly people aren't supposed to engage with. So, I really like it when we can intervene with these things. So again, I'm not necessarily for getting rid of statues, or commemorative things, I want people to scribble on them, to make counteractive art about them, to really engage with it.

[Music].

KW: Those monuments, what they end up doing is they, they speak to no one, they speak to themselves. And they actually need to be in conversation, or in dialogue. They create tension, because they don't respond when we get angry with them. And then the only way we can get angry with them is to make then go away. If we remove it, what justice do we replace it with, what is the commitment that we replace it with? I don't know, I guess, it's almost like I have this kind of pathos for the fragility of that wish for the thing to be what it really is. For the Queen to really be what she is meant to be.

Isn't that sad that they have to hurt me, in order to rise above, isn't that too bad that we can't actually all be equal, here.

BM: The act of remembering can be painful, especially when we have personal connections to these histories. I wonder if Kara felt that way when producing her work. I definitely feel like I'm churning up a lot of difficult emotions when I write about these subjects myself.

HCJ: With Ode to Bussa, I was finding out things for the first time about enslavement, you know, when you're doing your research, that's heavy. Especially when the reason you're, kind of, drawn to it is because you can recognise the echoes of that, quite profoundly, in your day to day life. That might sound over-dramatic, but it's true, you know. So, like, you have to kind of take breaks. I think, sometimes, it can be, it can feel like a really dangerous game, like your personal life, and your academic work are intrinsically linked in a way that, yeah, can be unhealthy. Especially if you don't take breaks, or if you do something too extreme. For example, staying on a former plantation in Barbados for five weeks. That needs so much preparation, breathing time around it. Don't expect that to be an easy thing to do.

As a diasporic person, or Black British, or mixed, Black Caribbean and white, or whatever, it almost feels as though it's not a choice, it's a necessity. It's almost a responsibility. So, for me, it's the only way - the only way - to go at the moment. Which is kind of a shame, because sometimes, you know, you're, kind of like, why can't I just make work, and it not be about Blackness. But the truth of the matter is, we're just not there yet.

[Music].

RM: That whole conversation that we get forced upon us, that dreaded question about slavery and pain, that's actually not my story. It's my ancestors' story, and it's a huge part of my strength, and my spirituality, and my energy. But I really love to talk about Blackness in a way that is shocking, and not shocking in a way that is about bad things. Shocking in a way that it's about really beautiful things that no one's ever thought about before. Blackness is my flat, my dog, my, I don't know, these really nice jeans that I'm wearing. Those are all very material things, but no, Blackness is, it just is. We're never going to be healed if we keep recycling, reusing language and images that are painful for us, and actually easier for the white gaze to look at. Rather than, for us to look at.

[Music].

BM: I guess it's about finding the balance. When it comes to racism and oppression, unfortunately, the past isn't really over. So, I suppose I feel a sense of responsibility to speak out in my work. And sometimes that means going over a difficult subject matter. But art and creativity can also be a refuge and a safe space, and we need those, too. It certainly is for me, and Vanessa.

V: What I like about poetry is that, it's a place where language can do more unusual and unexpected things than we would expect in an article, in a newspaper. Whereas, poetry, I believe, is the language of feeling, of thought, which is weird, and tangled up, and...

BM: Messy, and...hmm.

VK: ...and messy, exactly. I think we have to be armed with many things; I think the facts are important. I think historical specificity is important. But poetry, and art, is so integral to us making our peace with the complexity of this stuff. Because I think people are obsessed with wanting to know what is it, is it bad, is it good, did it happen, did it not happen. Am I the villain in this story or the victim, like, people really want to place things in specific boxes? And what art does is, it just goes, here's one way of looking at it, here's another way of looking at it, here's six different things all happening at one. And you, as the viewer, or you as the reader, you are going to pick out what you are going to pick out, because of who you are, and that is okay. So, yeah, I think art has an interesting role to play in how we look at history, and it's nice to be an artist in that sense. I feel like we have a freedom to look at these narratives in a way that other people perhaps don't.

BM: Do you think art, then, has the power to help us heal from a kind of collective trauma that can be churned up every time we're asked as, maybe Black artists specifically, to look at slavery and colonialism?

VK: Can I ping that question back at you, because I'm interested to know what you think. And then I might be able to offer my own thoughts. Because it's a big one and I'm not sure. What do you think?

BM: Oh, I think, art has the power to help us heal, but I don't think it should be burdened with...

VK: Yes, yes.

BM: ...being a healing thing.

VK: That makes sense.

BM: And I don't think, anywhere near all art, has the power to help us heal. I think it's actually a very small minority of it. I think, inherently, art is not a mode for change, I don't think art is inherently powerful or healing. But it can be, and that's exciting.

[Music].

KW: As an artist, or a story-teller, I'm an unreliable narrator. And I think that that's one of the problems that I've been kind of thinking about. Or, the problem that I've been thinking about, when it comes to talking about the past. It's, well it's never really past, in the first place, but it's very hard to grasp all of its particularities. It's so much easier to kind of have a blanket overview, this happened, and here we are. Because we need to know a little bit of something, in order to sort of justify, you know, the things that we do today.

That's a good line to end on, because I have nothing more to say.

[Music].

BM: Visit the free Hyundai Commission, Kara Walker, at Tate Modern, from 2nd October 2019, to 5th of April 2020. In partnership with Hyundai Motor, supported by Sikkema Jenkins and Co, with additional support from Tate Americas Foundation. The exhibition is curated by Clara Kim and Priyesh Mistry.

[Music].

BM: You've been listening to The Art of Remembering, a Falling Tree production for Tate, produced by Zakia Sewell, executive produced by Hannah Geddes. With music by Vula Viel, and Ufa.

[Music].

End of transcript

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Bridget Minamore: Grey, like memory, white like history books. Gift from the new world that is old world to me. Large, unlike most quite large things, this is big. Crude like water spurting out of breasts. Crude like water flowing from a hole in a topless woman's neck.

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Rear Window - THOMAS HIRSCHHORN GRAMSCI MONUMENT

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The Battle of Orgreave, 2001

"In 1998 I saw an advert for an open commission for Artangel. For years I had had this idea to re-enact this confrontation that I had witnessed as a young person on TV, of striking miners being chased up a hill and pursued through a village. It has since become an iconic image of the 1984 strike - having the quality of a war scene rather than a labour dispute. I received the commission, which I couldn't believe, because I actually didn't think it was possible to do this. After two years' research, the re-enactment finally happened, with about eight-hundred historical re-enactors and two-hundred former miners who had been part of the original conflict. Basically, I was asking the re-enactors to participate in the staging of a battle that occurred within living memory, alongside veterans of the campaign. I've always described it as digging up a corpse and giving it a proper post-mortem, or as a thousand-person crime re-enactment."

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"In 1998 I saw an advert for an open commission for Artangel. For years I had had this idea to re-enact this confrontation that I had witnessed as a young person on TV, of striking miners being chased up a hill and pursued through a village.

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Abbas Akhavan 'curtain call, variations on a folly' 14 August 2021 - 17 October 2021 Chisenhale gallery

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Abbas Akhavan 'curtain call, variations on a folly' 14 August 2021 - 17 October 2021 Chisenhale gallery

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https://chisenhale.org.uk/exhibition/abbas-akhavan/#4edb3e997ea46a16a7ec1397c3d69209

The cob installation is built in the image of the colonnade that once approached the monumental Arch of Palmyra, a 2,000-year-old heritage site in Syria.

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https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/monster-chetwynd-12108/marvin-gaye-chetwynd-studio-visit

Chetwynd describes her work as ‘impatiently made’, often re-using materials that are easy to process and to use by the many performers she invites to participate, emphasizing the notion of collective development that informs much of the artist’s work.

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Enter the world of Monster Chetwynd as the artist shows TateShots around her studio. In this film the artist discusses her varied work and features clips from her recent performances and films.

Monster Chetwynd (formely Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, formerly Spartacus Chetwynd) is a British artist working with a variety of media including performance, sculpture, installation and film. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012.

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Monster Chetwynd: 'My work is about boosting morale' | Tate

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Enter the world of Monster Chetwynd as the artist shows TateShots around her studio. In this film the artist discusses her varied work and features clips from her recent performances and films. Monster Chetwynd (formely Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, formerly Spartacus Chetwynd) is a British artist working with a variety of media including performance, sculpture, installation and film.

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Rebecca Belmore, 'Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside)' 2017

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Rebecca Belmore, 'Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside)' 2017

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Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) – Rebecca Belmore

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2017 / documenta 14, Filopappou Hill, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany / Sculpture

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Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside)

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Sonia Boyce and Simone Leigh at Venice Biennale

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Sonia Boyce and Simone Leigh at Venice Biennale

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The U.K. pavilion and American artist Simone Leigh won the top prizes at this year's Venice Biennale. Sonia Boyce, who represented the U.K. with a multimedia installation dedicated to five Black female musicians, accepted the Golden Lion for best national participation in the event. Simone Leigh was recognized for her 16-foot-tall bronze bust Brick House, which opened the main exhibition in the Arsenale.

Both Boyce and Leigh were the first Black women to represent their nations at the 127-year-old biennale. They are also the first Black women to win Golden Lions.

The five-person jury chaired by Whitney Museum curator Adrienne Edwards commended Boyce for raising "important questions of rehearsal" as opposed to perfectly tuned music, as well as for creating "relations between voices in the form of a choir in the distance."

Boyce's pavilion opens with a four-channel video chronicling a recording session in the studio where Abbey Road was made. Musicians Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram, and composer Errollyn Wallen experiment with sound and breath, seemingly in real time. The subsequent rooms focus on individual performers, creating an evolving, overlapping soundtrack as the audience moves through the space.

In her acceptance speech, Boyce thanked the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who offered her early encouragement. After the ceremony, Boyce told Artnet News that her collaborators' performances were born out of a simple question: "As a woman, as a Black person, what does freedom feel like? How can you imagine freedom?"

Simone Leigh accepted the Golden Lion for the best participation in the central exhibition. Her monumental Brick House- originally commissioned for New York's High Line, where Alemani serves as curator-opened the Arsenale portion of the exhibition.

Leigh, who is also representing the United States in its national pavilion, thanked mentors including the late curator Bisi Silva, the late collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz, and curator Rashida Bumbray, who is organizing a convening of Black thinkers and makers this fall as part of the programming for the U.S. pavilion.

Unlike in years' past, when there has often emerged a clear front-runner for the top prize-such as Anne Imhof's uber-cool brooding goth pavilion for Germany in 2017 or Lithuania's captivating climate opera in 2019-there was little consensus going into this year's awards ceremony.

The Silver Lion for a promising young artist in the central exhibition was awarded to the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, whose work taps into the Biennale's themes of our relationship to nature and the heavens. The artist contributed three mud sculptures, Titans (2022), based on ancient gods, and a three-channel film, Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022).

For the central exhibition's Golden Lion, honorable mentions went to American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona. Leeson contributed a video, Cyborg 1, that puts a woman and an A.I. version of herself in conversation about the power artificial intelligence exerts over society. Ashoona created drawings and paintings that explore Indigenous traditions and the interconnectedness of species.

Two pavilions were granted special recognition: France and Uganda. Both exhibitions represented important firsts. Zineb Sedira, whose joyous installation was a tribute to post-colonial film, is the first Algerian artist to represent France at the Biennale.

Uganda, which presented work by Acaye Kerunen and Collin Sekajugo, won for its first-ever participation in the event.

German artist Katharina Fritsch and Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña also accepted Golden Lions for lifetime achievement. Fristch's monumental, surreal sculpture of an elephant opens the Giardini chapter of the central exhibition, while Vicuña is represented by a new installation of objects found around Venice and fantastical paintings from the 1970s.

Emma Dexter, the British Council director for visual arts and commissioner of the U.K. pavilion, said the award for Boyce represented an important moment in U.K. art history.

"Sonia was a key member of the Black British art movement that took place in the U.K. in the 1980s and still to this day is not sufficiently known, recognized, and appreciated both at home and internationally," she said.

Asked about her plans after the award ceremony, Boyce told Artnet News, "I'm going to close the blinds, lie down, and cry for an hour."

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Sonia Boyce and Simone Leigh Win Golden Lions at the Venice Biennale for Work Honoring the Visions of Black Women | Artnet News

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The U.K. pavilion and American artist Simone Leigh won the top prizes at this year's Venice Biennale. Sonia Boyce, who represented the U.K. with a multimedia installation dedicated to five Black female musicians, accepted the Golden Lion for best national participation in the event.

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t 5.36 pm on Tuesday in the historic Kyiv district of Pecherskyi, an imposing Soviet-era bronze monument symbolising the friendship between Russia and Ukraine was accidentally decapitated and then deliberately dismantled to the applause of hundreds of people.

As local officials explained, when one country invades and bombs another, killing its people, their friendship is over.

The 40-year-old statue, depicting a Ukrainian and a Russian worker on a plinth, was pulled down on the order of local authorities in Kyiv. It is one of the first steps of a plan to demolish about 60 monuments and to rename dozens of streets associated with the Soviet Union, Russia and Russian figures, including the writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, as a result of the war between the two countries.

Serhii Myrhorodskyi, 86, an architect from Kyiv, watched excitedly as the head of the Russian worker accidentally broke off from its body and tumbled to the ground during the removal. He did not appear bothered, despite the fact it was he who had designed the monument, erected in 1982 as a gift from the Soviet regime to the Ukrainian government.

"It is the right thing to do," he told the Guardian. "There is no friendship with Russia and there will not be any friendship for a long time while Putin and his gang are in this world. After they drop dead, maybe in 30 years, something will change.

"The presence of the monument that represents a friendship with Russia is a sin. Removing it is the only right decision. And we could use that bronze of which the monument is made. We could melt it down and sculpt a new monument dedicated to Ukraine the motherland, which would symbolise the unity of all Ukrainian lands."

"As for my emotions," he added, "I am just happy to see that people are glad this whole thing is being taken away."

As the monument began to fall, the crowd chanted: "Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, glory to the nation of Ukraine."

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, who presided over the dismantling, said the removal of Russian symbols from the city was now under way. "You don't kill your brother. You don't rape your sister. You don't destroy your friend's country. That's why, today, we have dismantled this monument, once created as a sign of friendship between Ukraine and Russia," he said.

Other cities in Ukraine have in recent days begun to rename streets associated with Russian figures or to dismantle monuments related to the Soviet Union.

The city of Ternopil, in western Ukraine, has renamed a street dedicated to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and removed a Soviet tank and aircraft. The aircraft is to be replaced with a "heroes of Ukraine" monument.

Fontanka, a village near Odesa, decided to turn a street dedicated to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky into Boris Johnson Street, after the UK promised to send a £100m weapons package to Ukraine.

And the mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov, said streets named after Russian towns would be rededicated to Ukrainian cities and symbols: Abkhazia Street became Irpin, while the street of the 30th Irkutsk Division is now called Ukrainian Soldiers.

Officials in Kyiv are to approve a law to rename 60 streets, meaning Russian writers and Ukrainians who wrote in Russian - or even assumed a Russian identity - are among those who may be written out of public life in the city. A metro station named after Tolstoy is on the list.

"The war changed everything and things have accelerated the times," Alina Mykhailova, one of the two Kyiv city deputies who put forward the law, wrote on Facebook. "Finally, there is an understanding that [our] colonial heritage must be destroyed."

Mykhailova and her colleague Ksenia Semenova campaigned for the removal of the People's Friendship monument that was dismantled on Tuesday. There had been plans to remove the statue under Ukraine's decommunisation laws passed in 2015, but at the time they received pushback from other members of the Kyiv city council, Mykhailova wrote.

The Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity were suppressed by tsarist Russia and its Soviet successor. Russian was considered the language of high culture and official business, and many Ukrainians, particularly peasants who moved to the big cities after the second world war, adopted Russian to distance themselves from their rural origins.

Perhaps more controversially, the de-Russification list includes Ukrainian-born writers such as Mikhail - or Mykhailo, in Ukrainian - Bulgakov, who was born in Ukraine, wrote about Kyiv, but had derogatory views about the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity. His statue sits next to his former house on one of Kyiv's most famous streets, which is now the Bulgakov Museum and is popular with tourists.

"Only idiots could do this because Leo Tolstoy is a world-famous writer, not just Russian or Ukrainian," said Ihor Serhiivych, a Kyiv resident, inside Leo Tolstoy Square metro station.

"There are lots of [ethnic] Russians who live in Kyiv and they are probably doing more right now to protect Ukraine than those western Ukrainians who think of themselves as the elite," Serhiivych said. He said there was a gulf in understanding between those Ukrainians who lived for a significant period under Soviet and tsarist rule and those in western Ukraine who did not.

"If it was a Putin statue I would understand, but you have to differentiate between enemies and world-famous literature."

Another person at the station, Valetyna Hryhoryvycha, said: "I think people need to think about it a bit more. I don't see how they relate to what's happening now. It is part of our history."

Ivan Andreiev, who works near Bulgakov Museum, said: "I'm for the removal of the friendship monument because there can't be friendship between enemies. But I think it's a fake that they're planning on taking down Bulgakov's monument. What Russian or Ukrainian would vote for such a thing? It's just history."

While Ukrainian authorities are working hard to disassemble the Russian monuments in their country, Moscow is doing the opposite in Ukrainian territories it has occupied, restoring statues and symbols of the Soviet era.

Two weeks ago in the seaside town of Henichesk, in the Kherson region, which is occupied by the Russian troops, a familiar figure returned to the main square. A statue of the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, sporting his familiar goatee and moustache, was back on his pedestal, erected by Russian soldiers.

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Friends no longer, Ukraine removes Russian statues and street names

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t 5.36 pm on Tuesday in the historic Kyiv district of Pecherskyi, an imposing Soviet-era bronze monument symbolising the friendship between Russia and Ukraine was accidentally decapitated and then deliberately dismantled to the applause of hundreds of people. As local officials explained, when one country invades and bombs another, killing its people, their friendship is over.