The vexed entanglements of art and imperial legacies may have become the subject of debate in the past decades, but are we any closer to grasping the issues at stake? Racism, violence, marginalisation and exclusion are still very much present in how empire is represented, thought and talked about. Third Text has always had a commitment to investigating these critical issues.
In this special online forum we invited in-depth discussion of the Tate Britain exhibition ‘Artist and Empire’, 25 November 2015 – 10 April 2016. The exhibition can be read variously in relation to Tate’s own economic genealogy in the slave trade and its previous links to British Petroleum, as the third in a series of exhibitions concerned with notions of imperialism and the postcolony (‘The Lure of the East’, 2008; ‘Migrations’, 2012) and as a barometer of public policy and the arts today. There were, of course, many other ways of conceptualising and engaging with this show, its faultlines and the issues that it raised or failed to address. We aimed to stimulate dialogues and debates from a wide range of thinkers, including artists, curators, critics and art historians.
The series of articles published here reflect particular views on the theme of the exhibition and its all-important positioning of artistic discourse on empire in Britain today. These critical interventions can be read alongside the diverse positions that were voiced at the Tate’s ‘Artist and Empire: New Dynamics’ conference (24–26 November 2015)