Reinforcing power dynamics

Across major UK museums new exclusions are being made, through the binary staging of white, patriarchal discourse as national culture and decolonising and queer strategies as temporary or partial interventions. In making this treatment hyper-visible, it is hoped it will end.

Enlightenment Gallery

The first display room in the British Museum is the Enlightenment Gallery. Its decor and content suggest we have returned to the past. But the room is a newly created fiction of filled cabinets and statues focussed on Sir Hans Sloane. Opened in 2003. this immobile display replaces prior temporary exhibitions and the room’s original role as a working library.

Though, the the Enlightenment Gallery points to Sloane’s iniquitous role in the slave trade,  the room serves as a repository and homage to his collection. Small, treasured items with yellowed labels bear his name.

Curiosity engendered by the display content, is thwarted by its performative nature. The cabinets are locked, the books are on loan from Parliament, and we have no access to the balcony. It is as if we are entering a mausoleum to Sloane.

I expand on this theme in the educational video: British Museum Detour II Critical Knowledge Sir Hans Sloane (select HD for clear images), created for the UKRI funded project GlobalGRACE.

Ladi Kwali’s pots are on display at Tate Modern in Nigerian Modernism until May 2026. Their inclusion offers an exciting opportunity to see Kwali’s work in the context of the Natural Synthesis movement. One of these pots was loaned from the British Museum, where it has been exhibited in the African Galleries since 2000. The top drawing is of this pot. The drawing below is of a pot made by Kwali or one of the other women potters at the Abuja Pottery Centre (now the Dr. Ladi Kwali Pottery Centre), also in the BM’s display.

Though Ladi Kwali’s pot is attributed to her in the Tate display and on the British Museum website, her name is not mentioned in the BM exhibition space. This de-authoring, unnaming, makes it difficult to make connections between her work and that of other artists, including the ceramicist Magdalene Odundo who she trained to hand coil.

When drawing the pots, I was gifted the opportunity to see them in the round and get close to the sgraffito. It would be fantastic to see these pots and other modernist ceramics permanently on display in art museums.

My educational video Labels discusses Kwali’s pot at the BM (Click on HD to see the images clearly).  The video is also available in: Experiments in Cultures of Equality GLobalGRACE, in the UK Specialist Class: British Museum Detour section (select HD).

British History

In 2013, Tate Britain switched from showing British art as national art practice, to using the British collection to tell the history of the nation. Using British art as a pedagogical tool for telling British history has many challenges. Most significantly it means paintings commissioned by elite, white, men are the main vehicle for relaying British culture. In the gallery hetero-familial inheritance, the aristocracy, male politicians, industrialists and the male gaze, are positioned as bearers of British history post-Brexit. 

In my article British History at Tate Britain Post-Brexit (2025) I use text and image to look at the consequences of Tate’s use of rich, white, men as the main prism for viewing the nation. Below are three of the themes.

In the centre gallery, a bust of Henry Tate, the Tate Gallery’s founder, has been positioned next to his famous commission Luke Field’s The Doctor (1891). As mirrors of each other, the two men are cast as benevolent, bearded, patriarchs.

One of Tate Britain’s rooms has been arranged as a reproduction of the Georgian display. The painting Lydia (c.1777), centre bottom, is an image of a topless sex-worker commissioned by Richard Grosvenor, 1st Earl Grosvenor. With no explanatory label, the young model seems vulnerable.

Eleven* revisionist contmporary works sit amongst the 572 paintings in Tate Britain’s historic section, including Sonia Barrett’s Chair No. 35 (2013). These works flag the relevance of  journeying through history,  but are too few to have the needed impact. 

* The number of contemporary works reduced to seven in 2025.