Reinforcing power dynamics

My research finds exclusionary practices being implemented across UK museums. New exclusions include staging white, patriarchal discourse as national culture, whilst representing the decolonial and queer as temporary or partial interventions. This practice of omission is made visible through drawing.

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 semi-permanant display replaces more mobile, temporary exhibitions and the room’s original role as a working library.

Though, 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.

The cabinets are locked, the books are on loan from Parliament, and we have no access to the balcony. 
it is as if we have entered a mausoleum to Sloane.

I expand on this theme in the multimedia 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, offering an opportunity to see her 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 they opened, twenty-five years ago. The top drawing is of this pot. The drawing below is of a pot made by Kwali, or another women potter at the Abuja Pottery Centre (now the Dr. Ladi Kwali Pottery Centre), also in the BM’s display. What is significant about the BM’s display is that the makers’ names are missing.

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, or un-naming, makes it almost impossible to make connections between her work and other artists in the display, including the ceramicist Magdalene Odundo who Kwali trained to hand coil.

The pots are shown in a cabinet containing 62 other pots. You cannot see them in the round or get close to the sgraffito. 

My video: British Museum Detour III Museum Labels discusses Kwali’s pot at the BM and the loss this display engenders (Click on HD to see the images clearly).  My BM videos are 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 British painting to tell the history of the nation. This switch adds an interesting social dimension to the display. However, using historic British painting to represent British history, means paintings commissioned by elite, white, men have become the main vehicle for representing British culture.  In Tate’s representation of British history, the elite, white male gaze has therefore been increasingly privileged. As a consequence, Britain’s ancestral legacy is presented through a white, hetero, familial prism, with aristocrats, male politicians and industrialists as the main subjects of history. 

In my article British History at Tate Britain Post-Brexit (2025) I use text and image to look at how Tate’s centred use of commissions by rich, white, men  has shaped a reductive vision of British history post-Brexit. Below I allude to the article’s main 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. The other characters in the tableux are presented as the unnamed, abject poor.

The Exhibition Age reproduces the Regency period display, which it presents as white history though 54 paintings containing images of, mostly wealthy, white people. There are no images of people of colour. The display is reductive and historically anachronistic, as multiple pictures of people of colour were included in Georgian exhibitions. 

In The Exhibition Age the painting Lydia (c.1777), centre bottom, presents an image of a topless sex-worker commissioned by Richard Grosvenor, 1st Earl Grosvenor, one of the richest men in Britain. The room has no explanatory labels, which leaves the young model vulnerable to being viewed as spectacle.

Eleven* revisionist contemporary works sit amongst the 572 paintings in Tate Britain’s historic section, including Sonia Barrett’s Chair No. 35 (2013). Barrett’s work speaks to the impact of colonialism, racism and the climate emergency on the refugee crisis. Thus it highlights the role of British history in current day concerns. Though the contemporary artworks flag the importance of journeying through history,  they are too few to have the needed impact. 

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