Art at Tate Liverpool
The UK can be a cold place, both in climate as well as in its colonial roots. Museums are another point of contention in the UK, because many of them hold artifacts taken from around the world. A silver lining, if any, are the free art museums. So far we’ve found art made by artists either from other colonized areas around the world, or who traveled to capture images of those areas. Here are a few of them we saw at Tate Liverpool.
“Liquid a Place” (2021)
Torkwase Dyson handcrafted huge, black structures and placed them in a large dark space on the first floor of Tate Liverpool. Dyson’s abstract works “grapple with the ways in which space is perceived, imagined and negotiated particularly by black and brown bodies.” “Liquid a Place” definitely displays this, with these huge statues of what seam like heavy slabs of the darkest marble. They definitely convey the weight of colonization for me, and the artist description of them echoing “the curve of a ship’s hull” got me the most. Tate Liverpool sits in what was once one of Europe’s busiest ports serving the Transatlantic Slave Trade!
“Untitled (London Bridge)” (2017)
Kerry James Marshall is known for his colorful paintings depicting Black people in dark shades. He counters “Western pictorial tradition” and brings forward Black figures in it. This work shows a Black figure wearing a British royal guard uniform, holding a sandwich board advertising a fish and chips restaurant named after a freedman, prominent writer, and British slavery abolitionist Olaudah Equiano. The irony of this art, is that it does not show a place in England. It is a scene in Arizona, where a “London Bridge” was made to attract American tourism.
“Untitled (Ghardaia)” (2009)
Kader Attia was born in France to Algerian parents, and later grew up in Algeria. Believe it or not, this artwork is made out of food! Specifically, couscous, a staple in Algeria as well as the rest of North Africa. Near the exhibit is a photo of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who applied modernist architecture during the French colonial period in Algeria near the mid 1900s. In this artwork Attia seems to shape buildings in the modernist style, depicting the ancient hilltop city of Ghardaia in Algeria. The buildings are molded in couscous, and cracks and crumbling areas in the buildings could be seen as weathering from both the city’s old age and French colonization.
“Carrot Piece” (1985)
Lubaina Himid was one of the pioneers of the UK’s Black Art movement in the 1980s. “Carrot Piece” shows a white figure hovering a carrot over a Black woman carrying her own plentiful batch of food and items. The white figure is on a unicycle and wears light make up, conveying ridiculousness or crude entertainment, as if a clown. These are cut-out wooden paintings that are life-sized and was made for, as Himid wrote in her description, “…the moment when you slowly realise that you have learned something quite useful about yourself which proves to be a whole lot better than anything ever offered to you for free.”
“Condition Report” (2000)
Glenn Ligon’s artwork here might be familiar to those who have seen pictures of the Civil Rights Movement in the United states during the 60s and 70s. They mirror the protest signs carried by striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, protesting the unequal treatment they got compared to white colleagues (photo below by Richard L. Copley).
“Letters from Home” (2004)
The late Zarina Hashmi was an Indian-American artist born in India, whose family was displaced by the 1947 partition of India after British colonial rule. While her sister Rani moved to Pakistan, Zarina eventually traveled the world, staying in touch with her sister everywhere she went. “Letters from Home” use these letters from Rani as a basis for the art, as they are written in Urdu and printed along with depictions of blue prints and maps of the places Zarina had lived through the years.
“A Palestinian Mother in Her Destroyed House, Sabra Camp.” (1982)
Don McCullin is a British photographer who covered the Lebanese Civil War during his visits in 1976 and 1982. Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon after the establishment of Israel in 1948 in what was once a part of Palestine. The war in Lebanon led to massacres of Muslim neighborhoods including Palestinians in the Sabra refugee camp.
Some thought and reflection
The obvious themes with the art I’ve shared here are of colonization, racism, islamophobia, among others. Particularly by the UK. I grew up in the United States, but wasn’t exposed to these issues in the US until I got older. I then moved to the Philippines and got to see first hand the effects of Spanish and American colonialism (i.e labor exportation, environment extraction, car-centric urban planning, electoral counterinsurgency, preservation of oligarch rule, climate change-induced storms…).
And it wouldn’t be until we moved to the United Kingdom that I would take a closer look at the UK’s impact on the world, particularly in India and even Palestine.
In India for example, it took sometime for Britain to take control, as India at the time was already flourishing in trade. After British partioning of India in 1947 and accentuating existing Muslim and Hindu divisions with a physical border, blood was shed in the newly-Independent India. Today, conflicts continue between both nuclear-capable nations.
In what is left of Palestine, we are confronted today in the news with another legacy of partition left by the United Kingdom: the colonization of Palestine by Israel. The UK’s foreign secretary in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration, which favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Soon after, Jewish migrants began to enter Palestine, and protests and conflict grew between Palestinian and Jewish communities. Conflict and violence continued as the UN voted yes to partitioning Palestine into two states in 1947, creating the state of Israel. By 1948, after a clash with neighboring Arab states, Israel expanded to 77% of Palestine displacing more Palestinians.
Moving forward as an artist
Sometimes I feel hopeless when I see issues and violence like this in the news. What can I do? What power do I have to help? If I have the bandwidth, I do some research on the issue, or talk to someone about it. With all the other things I grapple with in my own life, sometimes I just cry it out. If there is anything I do know, I have to somehow express it. Sometimes through a post like this, or maybe even create art about it.
I’m reminded of a quote I read at Tate Liverpool, by the artist Torkwase Dyson who created those large, black, statues I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
“Visit the water in your body, think alongside it, imagine alongside it, refract alongside it, and refuse alongside it.” -Torkwase Dyson
Even just reminding ourselves and those close to us, that we refuse these attacks, the violence, and the intimidation. To allow us to feel, and feel for those enduring these issues, is a step forward. Joining or supporting a local or global non-profit working to alleviate these problems is even better.
Because to ignore them will definitely not get anyone, anywhere. Others argue that in ignoring these issues, we allow them to happen.