Monuments
Autumn 2021
New research uncovers the underlying messages behind monumental sculpture.
In this season we explore the relationship between monuments, gender and sexuality; re-examine monuments in the light of colonial memory; and consider artists’ responses to monumentality.
About this season
The issue of monuments has become ever topical in the current global climate. In 2019 we began planning our Monuments research season, prompted by the research of Henry Moore Institute Post-Doctoral Research Fellows Dr Rebecca Senior and Dr Elizabeth Johnson, both of whom are working on different aspects of this topic. Since we first planned the season, monuments have become headline news all over the world. Our rescheduled online Monuments season includes further contributions to reflect new responses to the subject since the season was conceived in 2019.
The twenty-first century has seen direct action taken against monuments across the world, as diversely motivated as the 2001 destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban, the #rhodesmustfall protest movement initiated at the University of Cape Town in 2015, and the numerous campaigns to remove Confederate monuments in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville massacre.
Most recently, the toppling of monuments connected to slavery in the wake of mass anti-racism and Black Lives Matter protests across the UK and internationally in 2020 has raised questions of who we commemorate and how, opening up conversations in different communities and contexts all over the world.
As part of the Henry Moore Institute’s ongoing commitment to championing diversity in sculpture across our programmes, our online Monuments research season aims to reflect the wide-ranging and interdisciplinary nature of these debates, and provide a platform for a range of new research and thinking on the subject.
Commemorative Space: Artist Reflections on Monumentality in Leeds
Online publication launch in collaboration with Corridor8, Wednesday 1 September 2021
Commemorative Space explores what monuments mean to artists living in cities today.
Edited by Rebecca Senior, designed by Ashleigh Armitage and featuring commissioned works by Leeds-based artists Emii Alrai, Simeon Barclay, Samra Mayanja, Jill McKnight and James Thompson, it foregrounds artistic practice as a powerful mechanism for engaging with the complexities of monumentality in commemorative landscapes.
For this online publication launch, editor Rebecca Senior and artists Emii Alrai, Samra Mayanja, Jill McKnight and James Thompson reflect on their positions on monumentality and contributions to the publication.
About the speakers
Emii Alrai
Emii Alrai
Emii Alrai is an artist based in Leeds. Alrai’s practice is informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity and post-colonial museum practices of collecting and displaying objects.
Focusing on the ancient mythologies from the Middle East alongside personal oral histories of Iraq, Alrai weaves together narratives by forging artefacts and visualising residues of cultural collision. Drawing references from objects in museum collections, ancient writing from the Middle East and cultural memories, her work questions the value and origins of artefacts, as well as navigating the experience of diaspora.
Samra Mayanja
Samra Mayanja
Samra Mayanja is an artist and writer whose central concern is what moves us and what it is to be moved. Her work spans writing, drawing, performance and film and is an effort to commune disparate voices; to generate around and beyond what’s inconceivable, lost or arrives in tatters.
Jill McKnight
Jill McKnight
Jill McKnight is an artist based in Leeds who works with sculpture and writing. Central to their practice is exploring their working-class, feminist and artistic lineages to tell stories that would otherwise be lost or overlooked.
McKnight was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2020) and selected as a Yorkshire Sculpture International Associate Artist (2019).
James Thompson
James Thompson
James Thompson is a Leeds-based artist who works across sculpture, moving image and performance. His work deals with the perception of space and its interpretation, using pre-existing spatial situations as the starting point recorded and re-interpreted to construct new multi-dimensional experiences of reality.
Rebecca Senior
Rebecca Senior
Rebecca Senior is a Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow working on sculpture and 18th and 19th-century visual cultures in Britain. She has a particular interest in allegory, monuments and histories of British imperialism, which is the subject of her research at the Institute.
Working in collaboration with the University of Nottingham, her post-doctoral project is titled ‘Allegories of Violence: Histories of the British Empire and Monumental Sculpture’. It explores the various manifestations of allegorical sculpture on monuments erected in honour of Britain’s imperial campaigns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on how allegory occupied a unique space as a sanitiser of violence in visual histories.
Monuments, Sexuality, and Contested Spaces
Online lecture by Dr Martin Zebracki, Wednesday 8 September 2021
How can public spaces be memorialised through art, and what critical role may sexuality play in this to promote (more) inclusive spaces? At the heart of this lecture lies a concern with the effacing of sexual minority groups. Drawing from insights gained in the multi-site AHRC-funded research project Queer Memorials with case studies based in the USA, the Netherlands and Poland, the focus of this talk is on a salient case of failure: Tęcza, Polish for ‘rainbow’.
Unveiled in Warsaw’s city centre in 2012, this 26m-wide, rainbow-coloured arch by the artist Julita Wójcik was introduced as a symbol of joy, peace and connection. However, the artwork’s largely perceived LGBT+ symbolism met heated opposition from an amalgamation of ethno-nationalist, far-right, and religiously conservative parties.*
The hostility against Tęcza, or a deemed ‘importation’ of Western LGBT+ rights and values, was accompanied by repeated arson attacks, leading to its destruction and removal in 2015. The social reproduction of Tęcza, spanning immaterial, imagined and digital ‘afterlives’ and mediated through social media platforms, presents a post-material narrative after the work’s physical destruction.
The debate about Tęcza continues to mark the increasingly precarious position of LGBT+ people within a growing conservative national climate. This talk tracks the erratic journey of public engagement with Tęcza and discusses how the politics over (anti-)LGBT+ memorialisation turned this public artwork into a dissonant, or ‘que(e)rying’, monument.
* LGBT+ is an acronym for people who are (self-)identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or any other non-heterosexual sexuality, including non-binary, asexual, pansexual, queer, or questioning.
About the speaker
Dr Martin Zebracki
Dr Martin Zebracki
Dr Martin Zebracki is an Associate Professor of Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds. His research straddles the areas of public art, sexuality, digital culture, and social inclusivity and has been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Urban Studies, and Social & Cultural Geography.
Zebracki is joint editor of the Routledge anthologies Public Art Encounters (with Joni M. Palmer; 2018) and The Everyday Practice of Public Art (with Cameron Cartiere; 2016), and he is Editorial Board Member of Public Art Dialogue. Moreover, Zebracki is the Principal Investigator of Queer Memorials: International Comparative Perspectives on Sexual Diversity and Social Inclusivity, supported by a grant awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
‘I Should Have Been Born a Man’: The Displacement and Replacement of Women Sculptors within Contemporary Sculptural Debates
Online lecture by Dr Klairi Angelou, Wednesday, 15 September 2021
This lecture focuses on the marginalisation of women in the context of modern Greek public sculpture, highlighting the way women have been memorialised within the Greek narrative.
Any examination of Greek public sculpture has long been connected to the ancient Greek past, and any understandings of gender have long been omitted. Angelou challenges the existing narrative, seeking a more nuanced approach through a wide variety of sources – ranging from unpublished documents and archival resources, as well as information derived from interviews with some of the sculptors discussed. In doing so, she reveals how (predominantly male) art historians and art critics fixated on the gender of Greek women sculptors at the expense of seriously engaging with their work.
What qualities were regarded as ‘female’ and were celebrated in Greek monuments? Placing the whole debate in the post #MeToo era, Angelou discusses what changes need to be made in order to make women (sculptors) more visible in public sculpture.
About the speaker
Dr Klairi Angelou
Dr Klairi Angelou
Dr Klairi Angelou, currently the Editorial Assistant at Sculpture Journal, has lectured widely on modern Greek sculpture, advocating for its re-examination in relation to contemporary art historical debates.
She has recently curated the highly acclaimed exhibition of Ioanna Spiteri-Veropoulou’s work at the Teloglion Foundation of Art in Thessaloniki, Greece, the first retrospective exhibition of the sculptor’s work in a long while providing a new reading of the artist’s work and bringing to light overlooked aspects of her work.
Future curatorial projects include the examination of Greek and international artists who have been so far marginalised and overlooked. More broadly her research interests include, but are not limited to, how issues of gender and national identity influence the creation and reception of artists’ work, as well as the use of the past in modern cultural practices.
When Unity Trumps Liberty: The Politics of Monumental Statues in India
Online lecture by Dr Kajri Jain, Wednesday 29 September 2021
In 2018 India broke the record for the world’s tallest statue with Statue of Unity, a figure of the country’s first Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel. At 597 foot tall, the statue is twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it there were already two other even taller colossi in progress: statues of the Maratha king Shivaji (696 foot) and the god Ram (725 foot). Since the 1990s, in tandem with India’s economic liberalisation, monumental statues, secular and sacred, have become a central feature of Indian politics.
In this talk, art historian Kajri Jain discusses the emergence of this distinctive genre and the ways in which its efficacies are both similar and different to those of politically charged monuments elsewhere.
About the speaker
Dr Kajri Jain
Dr Kajri Jain
Dr Kajri Jain is Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on images at the interface between religion, politics, art, and vernacular business cultures in India; she also writes on contemporary art.
Jain’s recent monograph, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021), traces the emergence of monumental iconic sculptures in post-liberalisation India; the earlier Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) is about printed icons. Her writing has appeared in Art History, Third Text, Current Anthropology, The Immanent Frame, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, and New Cultural Histories of India.
Britain’s #BLM Statue
Podcast series by Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, September 2021 – January 2022
There has been a lot of talk, to put it mildly, about Britain’s statues and slavery. But what about Britain’s statues and anti-slavery? It turns out, that, while statues of slavers are among the statues Britain shows off, statues of anti-slavery activists are, in curious contrast, some of the statues Britain hides.
To take us into Black History Month in the UK, Dr Coleman asks what, exactly, in its anti-slavery statues, Britain is hiding.
Episode 1: Statues They Hide
Episode 2: Back to Plaque?
Further information about the Birmingham 2007 Children’s March can be found on Birmingham City Council’s website (via archive.org) at A Shared History, A Shared Future: March for Justice and Family Discovery Day and in MarcusBelben’s YouTube video, Breaking the Chains Birmingham – A Shared History, A Shared Future: March for Justice.
Dedication: Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman would like to dedicate these episodes to the memory of the late Charles W. Mills (1951-2021), Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Episode 3: Sturge Before Scarman part 1 – Peace and Police
Episode 3: Sturge Before Scarman part 2 – Britain Against Police
On 30 January 1981, ten months before the Scarman Report into the ‘Brixton Disorders’ was published, the Final Report of the Working Party into Community/Police Relations in Lambeth was published – and promoted at a press conference. By remembering neglected connections between 1981 and 1839, Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, argues that the central claim, of that Final Report, was shared by Joseph Sturge, and was the reason Sturge’s statue – Britain’s BLM Statue – was put up.
Dedication: Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman would like to dedicate these episodes “To the siblinghood of my fellow Black Queer/Trans Men, like me living and thriving with HIV, in this, the 40th year of a pandemic that began in 1981. For more information about our siblinghood, visit the House of Rainbow; for more information on the pandemic we survived, listen to We Were Always Here.”
About the speaker
Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman
Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman is an independent scholar-activist, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, and Public Engagement Co-ordinator for Citizens Researching Together at the University of Bristol. They are the incoming Project Director of 81 Acts of Exuberant Defiance. Born and based in Birmingham, they are writing a book about our collective memory of the colonial and anti-colonial arguments by which Birmingham built and attempted to abolish British Empire, called The House By the Rivers of Blood.
You can find out more about how they came to write this book on the Reluctant Sites of Memory blog, or listen to them talk about some of the book’s themes in De Montford University’s YouTube video, Scholar Activism in the UK – Questions of Ethics and Practice.