Oriel JCR voted yesterday for a motion which mandates the JCR to demand the removal of Oriel’s Cecil Rhodes statue. The motion passed with 125 votes for, 26 votes against, and 3 abstentions.
The motion means the JCR resolves to “explicitly demand the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue on the High Street façade of Oriel College,” recommending that the statue be moved to a museum and be properly contextualised.
The Oriel JCR President is mandated to write to Oriel College’s governing body condemning their inaction, asking for an explanation of the decision to keep the statue, and requesting them to reconsider. All JCR Presidents will be invited to countersign the letter.
The motion states that the JCR believes: “Oriel College has failed to fulfil its promise to provide clear historical context and draw attention to the colonial and racist history attached to Cecil Rhodes.
“The continued homage paid to Cecil Rhodes throughout the college, particularly in the form of his statue, poses a fundamental contradiction to principles of inclusion within our college community.
“Regardless of historical and educational value, the current location of Rhodes’ statue glorifies Cecil Rhodes, affords him inappropriate honour and prestige, and undermines the anti-racist principles that Oriel College professes to hold.”
In January 2016, when there were previously widespread Rhodes Must Fall protests, a Cherwell survey suggested that only 15% of Oriel students wanted to remove the statue. Over 80% of votes cast on this JCR motion were for the removal of Rhodes’ statue.
Kate Whittington, the Oriel JCR President, told Cherwell: “On Wednesday, the JCR held an emergency open meeting in order to discuss a motion demanding the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue. It was a two hour meeting which happily was a time of productive and respectful discussion. Today we received the results of the motion which passed by a large majority and had one of our best turnouts this year for voting.”
Oriel College told Cherwell: “As an academic institution, Oriel welcomes respectful discourse and stimulating debate within our community. We know that many of our students will have opinions on the statue and on the wider discussion about structural and institutional racism. We want to hear those views and are actively listening to the debate. A great deal of work is being undertaken at the moment and an update will be given to students when there is news to share with them.”
NextUp, a digital comedy streaming service, has teamed up with Jericho Comedy Club to present an online comedy festival on 13th and 14th June. The festival will be streamed on Twitch and YouTube and with a live audience of 140 over video chat platform Zoom. Money raised from the event will go to Oxfordshire Mind, a local mental health charity dedicated to offering health and support to individuals struggling with mental health issues.
Jericho Comedy has more than 11 shows scheduled over the two days. The festival begins at 2 p.m., with streamed shows through NextUp, live podcast recordings, talk shows, game shows and live stand-up shows.
The lineup for the festival begins with a live podcast recording of ‘Daddy Look at Me’ with Rosie Jones, Helen Bauer and guest Stephen Bailey at 2 p.m. Following at 3:30 p.m. is a drugs talk show with Jacob Hawley, who hosts BBC Sounds hit podcast ‘On Drugs’, wherein Hawley will take a look at the drug legalisation debate. The rest of the day and into Sunday will include shows and acts such as a live musical gala, Comedy Club 4 Kidz, Dragprov Digital, and more.
Money raised from the event will go to Oxfordshire Mind, a local mental health charity dedicated to offering health and support to individuals struggling with mental health issues.
Harry Househam, one of the founders of Jericho Comedy, told Cherwell: “We’ve been working as volunteer community fundraisers for Oxfordshire Mind for the last 4 years, we started Jericho Comedy originally as ‘college comedy nights’ in college bars whilst I was a student at St. Hugh’s, when we sat down and tried to find a connection between Oxford students and the comedy community the most prevailing theme in that venn diagram was mental health. It was a cause important to us based on our own experience and people we know, but it also seemed like one close to the hearts of the comedy community, Oxford students and the people of Oxford as a city. Our list of charities was a list of one, we’ve been working with Mind ever since. They’re incredibly supportive of us, last year they gave us an award for outstanding commitment in fundraising and every year they support us to run a massive comedy gala at the Oxford Playhouse to over 1,200 people in a day. We love working with Oxfordshire Mind, and we’ve been lucky to see first hand where some of that money goes. Some of the services they offer are literally life saving, and we couldn’t be prouder to help fundraise for them.”
Over a thousand people, of every college, faculty, and ethnicity, gathered on Tuesday to peacefully protest the statue of 19th century colonialist Cecil Rhodes mounted on the façade of Oriel College.
An Oriel student, Esther Agbolade questioned, “how can I go to a college like this?” She described her experience living within Oriel grounds, looking out her window and “making eye contact” with the statue. An online petition with some 150,000 signatures, describes it as synonymous with “colonialism, racism and patriarchy”. “You cannot expect me as a black student to endorse a statue like that up there” says Agbolade, “if you like history put it in a museum”. She added that the maintenance of the statue was proof that “you really don’t care about black students”.
The support for the movement was by no means limited to black students, with a diverse crowd in attendance to show their support for Rhodes Must Fall. One speaker stated, “Colonialism isn’t just Britain’s past, it’s Oxford’s present”.
The crowd chanted “take it down” and “decolonise”, accompanied with speeches of impassioned support from a wide variety of groups – and an 8 minute 46 seconds silent sit down in solidarity with George Floyd, as “that’s how long they knelt on his neck”.
A recent statement from the Oriel College governing body said it “abhors racism and discrimination in all its forms” and is “deeply committed to equality within our community at Oriel, the University of Oxford and the wider world”.
Rebecca Surender (The University’s Advocate and PVC for Equality & Diversity) distanced the institution of Oxford from the college of Oriel, reiterating when asked for a statement that “Oriel College is an independent and autonomous organisation (from the University) and will make its own decisions regarding this issue”.
Oriel, as of yet, have not released a statement following the protest.
Susan Brown, leader of Oxford City Council, had invited Oriel to apply for permission to remove the statue before the protest began. She said, “The question of statues and their historical context is not a simple matter, but sometimes acts of symbolism are important”.
Speaking with former Access Outreach Officer at Oxford, Dr. Elizabeth Sandis, she expressed her distaste to such claims of the complexity of this debate. “People talk about how nuanced these monuments are and how important it is to understand history in all its perspectives” citing the inscription bellow the statue (“E: LARGA :MVNIFICENTIA CAECILII. : RHODES”,By means of the abundant munificence of Cecil Rhodes) ,”that’s not a very complex nuanced statement is it?”
“Statues are a reflection of the history that the present wants to represent”, states a protestor and Oxford History student at Trinity College. “We have seen statues of Hitler taken down, of Stalin, of Saddam Hussein, because people have determined that those symbols should not represent our present”.
Dr. Sandis said she “found it very difficult to be promoting one set of values, whilst showing people round” the university “with a completely different point of view” displayed in the “iconography everywhere”. Despite what she calls the institution’s “autonomy”, she concludes “we are not providing a welcoming environment” and she can “totally understand why people don’t want to be here, why should they?”
As reported by The Guardian in 2016, Chancellor Patten stated at the time, “If people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit which Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes… then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere”.
With this Oriel said that due to, “overwhelming support” the “debate has underlined that the continuing presence of these historical artefacts is an important reminder of the complexity of history and of the legacies of colonialism still felt today.”
Both Oriel and the Chancellor have been contacted for a revision or maintenance of these sentiments but declined to send a response.
According to the government’s scientific guidelines, protests are according to Dr. John Swartzberg “really the worst thing you can do from a pandemic standpoint”. One protester said: “This is an undeniably difficult circumstance for all, but ultimately you cannot tell an oppressed group how they should express their grievances. People here are being responsible and taking precautions”.
Members of the protest moved through the crowd distributing masks for those without and offering hand sanitiser. Although it may have been attempted, a two-metre guideline was not maintained.
“It’s difficult to enforce social distancing, but at the end of the day we’re not going to stop peaceful protests” says Police Constable Brock. He also commented on Rhodes Must Fall protest itself, stating, “I don’t know the politics behind it all, and all that sort of stuff”. However, PC Brock was very willing to listen to the many voices of the community addressing him with their explanations. He even proceeded to take the knee himself raising his fist in the air in support of the Black Lives Matter organisation and thanked “everyone here” for “the way this has been done”.
Protestors left placards on the ground or placed against Oriel’s building upon the completion of the entirely peaceful protest.
The book currently on top of my ever-growing ‘To Read’ pile
is David Wallace-Well’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth. Based on his
2017 essay of the same name, this book packs a punch and delivers a grave
warning to us all in no uncertain terms: we cannot keep ignoring the climate
crisis we face.
That is not to say that the book is profoundly ‘preachy’,
telling us what we should and shouldn’t do in order to fend off climate
catastrophe. In fact, no clear solutions are recommended, although
Wallace-Wells acknowledges that we do have all the necessary resources to go
about improving the situation still available to us. Rather, the author is
informative and writes with sometimes jarring clarity about the effects our current
behaviour will have – and is already having – on the planet’s climate.
My use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ here is not accidental.
Wallace-Wells makes it clear that we are, or should be, all in this together – although
there is no cause here for a High School Musical-type celebration.
In fact, triumph is rare in this book. The narrative is no
longer one of ‘we are doing well, we can push through the crisis’, one that
seems to rear its head following each new climate summit or agreement. The mood
is rather one of solemn realisation and struggle.
This mood pervades to the point that there is a sense of being
overwhelmed each time you open the book. There are facts upon facts thrown at
you about a whole host of troubles, from ‘Hunger’ and ‘Drowning’ to ‘Wildfire’,
just to sample a few chapter titles from the first half of the book. Immediately
on page 4, we are hit with the revelation that ‘more than half the carbon
exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in
just the past three decades’. Such a bombardment of despair is enough to make
you want to put down the book and ignore it – yet that is exactly what we must
not do, and Wallace-Wells makes this point in no uncertain terms.
When writing about extreme flooding across the world, for
example, he mentions the devastating floods in Kerala in 2018, stating: ‘The
floods hardly made a mark in the United States and Europe, where consumers of
news have been trained over decades to see disasters like these as… both
“natural” and distant’. As a matter of course, we ignore what we hope is
distant, but the author presents us with hard evidence that this is a practice
we must stop. Ignorance will not combat the climate crisis, after all.
You could easily claim that a book like this is
demotivating, and on first glance you might be right. If things are so dire, why
should we even worry at all? Wallace-Wells makes it clear that although dire,
almost all of what he predicts for the future is subject to change. A lot of
what he says is based on estimates, or trends newly observed in the last few
decades. If humans change their habits, so will the impacts change. Once again,
we have the tools, if not the drive or political atmosphere, to make a change
for the better, but the onus is on us and it will be hard.
Basing a book on predictions of what will happen in the
future, especially when it is founded on ever-changing human activity, means it
is hard to be certain that any of these things will actually take place. It has
led some to refute the author’s claims, suggesting they are more hyperbolic
than realistic. I cannot claim to know all of the data behind what is written –
however, the book cites an array of references which illustrate its point.
Does Wallace-Wells run the risk of alienating people with
hyperbole and an overwhelming of negativity? Possibly. But is it not best to
act as if the worst predictions are to be made real, rather than sit in
blissful ignorance? I would say so.
Mark O’Connell of the Guardian says of The Uninhabitable Earth
that to read it is to “understand the collapse of the distinction between
alarmism and plain realism” with regard to the climate crisis. By that, I think
he means that there is no more time for warning – and the author certainly does
make this starkly clear. We must focus on this problem, and the only time for
action is now.
Almost twenty years after his first retrospective Warhol in 2002, Andy Warhol is now showing at the Tate Modern. The prolific artist is best known as the leading figure for Pop Art, the art movement that explored the relationship between commercialism, celebrity culture and art-making. And now, online gallery-goers and iPlayer watchers can admire Andy Warhol’s work from the comfort of their laptops.
Curators Gregor Muir and Fiontán Moran add more than just ‘Andy’ to the exhibition. The exhibition includes work never before seen in the UK, as well as twenty-five works from his Ladies and Gentlemen series: portraits of Black and Latinx drag queens and trans women which are shown for the first time in thirty years. Muir and Moran treat Warhol’s work confidently, knowing all too well that, from the soup cans to the screen prints, “Everyone owns Warhol… Warhol became and still is a big brand.” Through his work and biography, they show us the Andy behind the Andy Warhol.
The exhibition opens with Warhol’s childhood biography. Born in 1928 as Andrew Warhola, he grew up in Pittsburgh with Slovakian parents, attending Catholic church and taking art classes at the local museum. Moving to New York at the age of twenty-one, he become a commercial illustrator, notably dropping the ‘a’ from his surname and introducing us to the Andy Warhol, the artist. Works from his first exhibitions – line drawings of young men – are the first nod to Warhol’s queer identity, showcased in the exhibition.
Sleep, the second room in the gallery, projects a five-hour video of poet John Giorno, an ex-lover of Warhol, sleeping. Giorno on video becomes a kind of futuristic painting, recalling the behind-the-scenes of a life drawing class. Andy Warhol’s genius is turning the mundane into art. We see boxes of soap turned into sculpture. Silver clouds and silver, helium-filled balloons fill room 5 – they are, as he once described them, “paintings that float”. Warhol’s playfulness is as ripe as the sombre notes in the show. This is most notably so in room 7, The Shooting, where his work is shown in the factory in Union Square. Here, Valerie Solanas, a writer who had worked with Warhol before, shot him, damaging his internal organs.
Naturally, the exhibition draws on the colourful pop art era and Warhol’s relationship with celebrity, but we are also shown his engagement with other sources, such as the powerful prints of Da Vinci’s Last Supper and his work with music and film through Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a recreation of his multimedia shows of the same name. We seamlessly move from silk-screen prints of Elvis Presley, to prints of skulls, to the Ladies and Gentlemen series – a personal favourite. Warhol’s brush strokes on top of screen prints bring a 3D element to his works; their smiles are bright; you get the sense that you are watching these women and drag queens yourself, posing live at a photo shoot.
Andy Warhol at the Tate beautifully explores the interacting themes and experiences of celebrity, religion, queerness and death which all played a part in the work of Warhol. Key to his appeal is how he makes everyone and everything he touches celebrated, novel and remembered. We see this more than ever in this retrospective.
Take Tate Modern’s tour of their Andy Warhol exhibition on their website and watch ‘Museums in Quarantine: Warhol’ on BBC iPlayer.
Stone, unmoved Let me talk to you Stone, cold Let me cross your threshold Stone, hard Let me see you breathe
The curtains open And so does the heart’s treasure trove When the morning sun beams And the reflection in the mirror is unique – We’re alive and beyond comparison
Stone, why do you frown so? It’s your own insistence that you should never know Anything other than being a stone
Stone, why, you don’t stand for anything And you lie for nothing Gambling with everything
Your form is familiar, stone Far from unknown I think I saw you in a history book With all the blood you took And a smile on your face But you do love, don’t you, the human race?
When I threw you against the wall you didn’t break When tears strolled from my cheek to yours you didn’t quake Cold in winter, warm in summer Not a singer nor a hummer You sneeze when you’re well and work when you’re sick You gaze longingly at hell and power’s a kick Stone Stone Stone Occupying every throne
Stone, you discuss me Stone, you disgust me Stones don’t fly, they’re tethered to the ground Every time you’re looked for, nowhere to be found
But time has changed, I no longer feel the same. You had your chance, we must take aim. To tear open the bulging breast And wrench free the stone from inside the chest. To toss it into the furnace where now It may know the heat of social love and bow Its head in Shame.
“It is a divine precedent/you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!”
A silvery brand sways from my neck, and whispers truths grown old; still I find myself running with my legs pressed shut, led by a ghostly smile printed on my small oblivion, the way to new Jerusalem. The poet’s choice chimes sweeter than cowardice, so let me clutch at fragile nothings, not slip sudden down insincere glass I’d drink a thousand mediocre perhapses, trace paradise with crooked floorboards and woeful stains. Ask me again, how my hunt progresses, as long as I know you feast on the paltry spoils – so will we walk unremarkable streets, and love them? These are dusk-addled plans, arresting only in their foolishness. Food for fuckwits, enchanting missteps –
So the masks are sloughed off, and my heart stretches a shining ladder, reaches – – does the body bind me here, in old wallpaper and new longing? Or do I dwell in fabricated grace? Hypocrisy creeps, as the night seals itself up over coarse red rooves and the rooks tear open old yearning, grown stale. Did I stare too long above the traitorous tracks, as you, beautiful place, flew away? If I had turned my head and seen my infancy approach, Would you have come back to me? and if I seek you now, in the quagmire, God knows you will have changed.
How ridiculous we are. Fuck it, swallow these sobs like rum; I’ve faith in somewhere, and cast my visions – lurid in the sky, and violent, fragile as a clandestine glass; stronger than its contents. Still the sun breaks, bleeds away, devours my conjecture; I don’t know if life will disappoint us, and I clutch tight the infant dream and as Ingrid, I grow sick on wondering
Upon descending at Oxford railway station with my dad at the start of Freshers’ Week and waiting almost fifteen minutes in the queue for a taxi, an old white driver finally pulled up. When it was our turn to get in, I had already opened the door, he said to me with the most reassuring voice and a smile, “sorry, love, I can’t take you in,”and drove off a few metres down the road without explanation. I nodded politely, not putting much thought into it but only five minutes later, a white family standing nearby, with the same amount of luggage, appeared to hail a taxi and the same driver came out of his car and welcomed them with open arms.
“I think the driver was being racist to us,” my dad said in a hushed voice. He too had studied in the UK for his undergraduate degree on a scholarship nearly 30 years ago, and I imagine he was a lot more familiar with the more subtle forms of racism that people of colour and foreigners would face. I begin to imagine how much has (or has not) changed within the past three decades. At the time I was too stunned to even process what happened, but it took a while to slowly come to terms that I got refused for a taxi merely because I was wearing a hijab. For this, I will remember my first day at Oxford until the day I die.
During the Spring Vac when I finally returned home, I was excited to show my mum the official college photo from matriculation, with everyone all lined up and dressed in sub fusc. Her immediate reaction was not something I expected, although I had secretly thought of the same thing when I first saw the photo. “Wow, you can very easily count the number of POC in here,” she said, a mixture of worry and shock on her face. I did not know how to respond. Granted, a white parent would nevertheless be unlikely to realise this when looking at a matriculation photo – and that, in itself, is racial privilege.
While I have never personally had insults hurled at me or anything aggressive of the like, the racism I experience on a constant basis appears in much more subtle forms. Microaggressions, like more overt expressions of discrimination, can have significant long-lasting psychological effects, and sometimes take us longer to realise because we often doubt the validity of our experiences. To an extent, we even make excuses for the subtle racism we continue to face, thinking that people are allowed to get away with it merely because they don’t know any better.
Apart from getting stared at suspiciously at another event (probably because I was wearing a hijab), and having people steal curious glances at me whenever the word ‘Islam’ is mentioned in public, I am also frequently told by well-meaning people that “your English is so good!” This has happened more times than I can remember. While I understand that their statement comes from good intentions, it nevertheless reflects an unacknowledged ignorance and perhaps even a subconscious belief in the ‘backwardness of the other’. I do not expect people to know that nearly all the schools in my country had, at one point, ran a bilingual syllabus, and that we were all taught English from a very young age. But at the very least, I did think that people would no longer hold on to stereotypical fascinations of a foreigner being able to converse fluently in one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Both my grandfathers went to British-run schools in colonial Malay villages, despite not coming from well-off backgrounds, because it was just the norm of their time, and they still speak fluent English today. Having to overhear arguments in defence of Empire in casual, non-academic conversation, while knowing that my ancestors were tormented by the British administration, and that my country still suffers from the socioeconomic and racial repercussions of colonialism today, also remains an unhealed wound – but I shall leave this discussion for another day.
Dear reader, if my English was not “good”, I would not have even thought of applying to Oxford for a History degree. (Have you even seen what the admissions tests look like?). Yet, on a similar note, there have also been occasions when I asked people to repeat what they said because I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not because I didn’t understand the words they were using, but instead got brushed off and told, “sorry, I forgot English isn’t your first language,” before they hastily changed the topic of conversation. Again, perhaps genuinely well-meaning, but terribly executed, because it comes off as hugely patronising.
Other occasions also include my bank card never arriving to my pigeonhole, and having to call them multiple times for weeks on end, when apparently halfway into Michaelmas I discovered that they had already sent multiple cards which got delivered under the miscellaneous, unidentified surname inbox at the porters’ lodge, because the banks had gotten my surname wrong the whole time. While I had filled in the forms with my name and surname being exactly like the official one on my passport, most of my mail had been delivered to “Dania Aryf” instead, and because of this, I have now made the habit of checking both my own pigeonhole and the miscellaneous inbox every time, in case I miss out on anything important. I like to believe that this had never been a systematic error on their part, but rather, banks refusing to account for the fact that there are multiple names which are different to Western convention.
Sometime over the Winter Vac, I stayed with a friend in London, and my family from Malaysia also came to visit, with most of our time spent outside of Oxford. However, on the day we decided to drop by, I thought of showing them around my college, but we were brutally dismissed by the porters. I showed them my Bod Card as proof that I was a student and insisted that I only wanted to take them around the main quad because my family had never been to my college before, being fully aware that we were not allowed to enter the student accommodation. But the porters still blatantly refused even five minutes of a tour, arguing that visitors were not allowed during the vac, and I can’t help but feel that this would not have happened to a white, British family.
After getting elected as the Ethnic Minorities Officer for my college JCR, there were moments when I did contemplate whether the roles of equalities officers were merely an add-on for the sake of performative political correctness. I feared of being the only POC on the committee, and did not want to be seen as a “token minority”. But other instances in Oxford also include the unsettling thought of things so ingrained into our student culture – such as crewdates – and while I have nothing against them, the idea of having them in a curry house nevertheless seems a lot like cultural appropriation to me. I would even go as far as arguing that it normalises and even encourages being rowdy in public as socially acceptable as long as it takes place in an “exotic restaurant.” I have also overheard casual conversations about a white and black actress being compared and hearing one of them joke that “it’s not my fault that she [white actress] has better skincare,” which was genuinely shocking. But alas, these are only a few out of many other microaggressions that I can think of from the top of my head.
While the university likes to portray itself as diverse and accepting, recent events regarding the Union and the Christ Church JCR (to name only a few from a never-ending list), not to mention Rhodes’ prominent position on the High Street, have made many realise that this continues to remain otherwise. Oxford’s recent statement that it “opposes racism on all forms” is hugely vague and disappointing, yet nevertheless characteristic and even somewhat expected of the university. Its failure to engage with the issues of anti-blackness surrounding current affairs (both outside and within the university) is ultimately telling. And even if the university claims to improve policies and promote change, the impact of these systemic changes can never fully be experienced until there is radical reform within the culture of racist elitism among its community, and by more aggressively improving access to students from Black and diverse backgrounds.
Until we all collectively work against Oxford’s access problem, learn to call out complicity and ignorance, alongside normalising these difficult, uncomfortable conversations, I am afraid that my experience will remain merely one of many similar stories from students of colour.
Upon first entering the gallery I was struck by the sheer scale of Unzueta’s sculptural centrepiece – a huge felt chain, draping down from the roof like some sort of ancient industrial relic, dwarfing everything else around it. Upon moving closer, it became clear that this must have been a painstaking piece to create, as a hovering text-bubble pops into existence to inform me that it is no less than 9 meters long, constructed out of ethically sourced materials, and created entirely by hand. This exhibition of course, like so many right now, is exclusively presented in virtual reality.
Nevertheless, the exhibition experience was far from ruined. The initial room and sight of the chain was still awe-inspiring, and while rotating the camera at the base of the sculpture didn’t quite have the same feel to it, I still managed to get a good sense of perspective. The amount of physical labour I imagine it took to create this monolithic piece, on-site, was enough to make my lockdown-addled muscles cringe. This, I think, is the reaction Unzueta wanted.
From the felt sculptures of the first room to the huge site-specific murals scattered throughout the gallery space, Tools for Life has an emphasis on physicality and labour which shadows the exhibition from start to finish. Throughout, Unzueta actively invites us to recognise the physical nuances in her work which point to her labour-intensive process’. She sensitively considers the politics of production with her sustainably sourced materials, and unwavering physical reminders of the craft and human labour which goes into producing even the most mundane looking objects.
This is all supplemented by a stroke of conceptual genius. Unzueta created a series of outfits, inspired by the traditional clothes of industrial workers, and modelled them, in true artistic fashion, as ‘living sculptures.’ On the opening night of the exhibition, the gallery staff wore these specially tailored outfits while on their shift, bringing the ‘sculptures’ to life, animating all of the issues Unzueta deals with right before the visitor’s eyes. This was perhaps my favourite aspect of the exhibition. It at once highlights the gallery staff’s own labour, as well as the site of Modern art Oxford as a post-industrial space. The staff, for one night, had their efforts publicly recognised, all while becoming spectres of Modern art Oxford’s own industrial past as we are encouraged to see workers, not staff, wandering around on the night. Unzueta reminds us that Oxford, past and present was built on labouring bodies and working people.
However, moving through the exhibition, past the industrial sculptures, and the workers’ outfits, I couldn’t help but feel that this powerful reminder was starting to become… lost. The images of industry, of workers, and the poignant reminders of omnipresent labour gave way to a final room full of abstract drawings, which derived their aesthetics rather obviously from biological forms and repeating geometric shapes. A far cry from the focus on industry which drove the exhibition thus far.
While these drawings were certainly more beautiful than the industrial-looking works, bringing to mind such artists as Rennie Mackintosh and Hilma af Klint, for all their beauty they lacked the message, the political sentiments, which gave the exhibition vitality. The focus dramatically shifted from the labouring bodies of industry to that purely of the artist. However, what was lost in political engagement was made up for by pure beauty alone. This final room was filled with perfect pastel abstractions, floating above wooden blocks, and washed with natural colours. While seemingly having no aesthetic message aside from their own attractiveness, their unique names at least gave them some character. Each drawing’s title was constructed out of the months, years, and cities Unzueta created the drawings in – allowing us insight into just how time-intensive these pieces were. This alone, redeemed my interest a more than a little. Unzueta’s surrender to simplicity, time, and natural materials sets it apart from the mass-produced and increasingly complex commodities found on the likes of Amazon, Asos, or Tesco. Unzueta reinforces the value of simplicity. A valuable insight, although not quite as striking as her earlier sentiments.
While these works were certainly not as powerful as the rest of the exhibition, and (call me cynical) seemed to have commodification in mind, overall I am really glad they were included. If nothing else, they gave me something truly stunning to look at. It didn’t distract from the exhibition’s narrative on labour, so why criticise it? Artist’s labour should be rewarded too, and without ‘sellable’ artwork politically inclined artists such as Unzueta wouldn’t be able to survive. During a time when the country has recently ground to a halt, and some people are just now beginning to return to work, Unzueta’s art seems more relevant than ever. Whether intentional or not, it still manages to form an important commentary on recognising labour and the intrinsic human effort which goes into all forms of production, and on recognising the input of everyone working difficult and thankless jobs just to keep things running. I would certainly encourage everyone with a computer to ‘visit’ this exhibition, it really is quite eye-opening.
“Like smoke
blown to heaven on the wings of the wind, our country, our conquered country,
perishes. Its palaces are overrun by the fierce flames and the murderous spear.”
These words, from The Trojan Women, found a new
home in the British Museum’s exhibition on Troy. Translated from Greek into
Arabic and produced by a cast of Syrian refugees, the tale was retold as Queens
of Syria. Pushed to the brink by their circumstances, these women are
forced to rebuild their lives and repossess the narrative. The exhibition aimed
to highlight the brutality of Trojan War, and its legacy in popular culture. Queens
of Syria seemed perfect. The British Museum tried to use it to draw focus to
the horrors of war. Instead, that focus was firmly placed on them. The director
of the piece, Zoe Lafferty, published an open letter condemning the
exhibition’s sponsor before it even opened. The British Museum was once again
under fire for their infamous partnership with British Petroleum.
British Petroleum (BP) is
a multi-billion-dollar company specialising in the extraction and refinement of
oil and natural gas. Founded in 1908 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the company
rapidly expanded from its base in Persia, subsuming smaller oil companies that
previously held monopolies in former Ottoman polities with the help of the
British government. In 1935 Persia became Iran, and Anglo-Persian became
Anglo-Iranian. The name changed, but their stranglehold over the nation’s oil
continued. By the end of the Second World War the company’s growth rate
completely outstripped Iran’s. Nationalist sentiment was blossoming
throughout the Middle East, and Iranian nationalism soon took hold in the form
of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.
Mossadegh was appointed as
Prime Minister by the Shah in 1951. While Iran hadn’t been formally colonised,
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) held complete control over the oil-based
economy, and was Iranian in name only. Mossadegh considered it an unwelcome symbol
of Britain’s iron grip over Iran’s economy; one of his first actions in office
was its nationalisation. Britain’s revenge was swift, forcing other oil
companies to implement an oil embargo on Iran and lodging complaints with both
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Security Council. The ICJ
found it had no jurisdiction over the case, and the Security Council refused to
act. Regardless, the UK’s actions on BP’s behalf plunged Iran into a recession
that soon manifested in political unrest. With a helping hand from the CIA’s
‘Operation Ajax’ and MI6’s ‘Operation Boot’, Mossadegh fell from power in 1953
in a coup d’état. AIOC was now firmly entrenched in Iran, owning 40% of shares
in the coalition of foreign oil companies that now controlled Iran’s refineries.
So, why the history
lesson? For the answer, check the BP website. Their own rundown of BP’s
illustrious history tells the same story in very different terms. It describes
the process of “evacuating staff and their families” in 1951, presenting BP as
an innocent victim of Iran’s nationalisation. “Mobs in the street demanded the
Prime Minister’s resignation”, it claims, ignoring that these ‘mobs’ were
actually CIA thugs. It proudly notes that “the Iranian economy was in ruins”,
suggesting that this ‘organic’ loss of revenue was at the root of their
decision to “accept a new partnership proposal.” This revisionism is
essentially propaganda that aims to make the company’s history more palatable
to potential share-holders and investors. The website, however, is only the tip
of the iceberg of a PR strategy that has seen BP sponsor some of the most
prestigious cultural institutions in the United Kingdom.
“BP,” says its website, “believes that access to arts and culture helps to build a more inspired and creative society.” As such, they have been building links with cultural institutions across the UK for the past 50 years. In 2016 this long-term “strategy” manifested in a five-year investment of £7.5 million shared between the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The latter severed its ties to BP in 2019. The British Museum runs an annual ‘BP exhibition’, with recent titles including I am Ashurbanipal and Indigenous Australia. This money ostensibly allows exhibitions that might not be able to attract funding to go ahead, enabling the British public to engage with art and culture. BP uses this sponsorship to paint a picture of an engaged, socially-responsible company with a corporate strategy that extends beyond profit into cultural development. However, as their beneficiaries would undoubtedly remind them, art is subjective. Not everyone agrees with BP’s self-portrait.
This artistic disagreement has manifested in real-life protests. The 13-foot Trojan Horse that creaked into the courtyard of the British Museum on the 9th February was a reminder to the institution of the danger of trusting gifts. An icon of deception, many activists consider it a more accurate portrayal of BP’s patronage. The statue served as the figurehead of a 3-day “BP Must Fall” protest that saw 1600 activists occupy the British Museum, which is no stranger to protests. This one, the latest planned by activists from ‘BP or not BP’, was far bigger than previous actions.
Formed in response to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) partnership with BP in 2012, ‘BP or not BP’ is a protest organisation that aims to sever ties between British cultural organisations and oil companies. It has been responsible for 59 actions, including a ‘stolen goods tour’ of the British Museum led by Aboriginal activist Rodney Kelly and a ‘living statue’ protest at a private function for BP members. The February protest saw lectures on decolonisation, an “unsanctioned art exhibition” called Momentum, and an occupation of the museum’s courtyard. All this took place in the shadow of the Trojan Horse, which contained activists who slept in its body to prevent it from being removed during the night.
This kind of action has worked in the past. The RSC terminated its contract with BP two years early, largely as a result of the group’s actions. The Science Museum cut ties with Shell in 2015; Tate Modern did the same to BP in 2017. Protesters from ‘Liberate Tate’ also forced the gallery to reveal that BP’s funding provided less than 0.5% of their annual income, undermining the argument that BP’s money was somehow ‘necessary’ for the continuation of these artistic projects. BP’s website claims that it has “enabled over 4.2 million visitors to attend a festival, an exhibition, display or activity” at the British Museum since 1996. While this may sound like an impressive contribution, it is a drop in the ocean for an institution that receives an average of 6.3 million visitors per year. The 2016 BP sponsorship deal only accounts for around 0.3% of the British Museum’s annual income. Activists see this as an unfair exchange: BP gets to boost its public image in exchange for almost negligible contributions to these institutions.
They call this ‘artwashing’: a process in which companies and governments sponsor artistic and cultural endeavours in order to create a veneer of social engagement that deflects and distracts from criticism. It is one of the buzzwords of international protest against corporate sponsorship and gentrification from Los Angeles to London, but it is not their only issue. There is also a concern that companies like BP might seek to influence exhibitions with the same end goal in mind. Shell attempted this at the Science Museum in 2015, trying to put pressure on the Museum to avoid a discussion that would show Shell in a negative light. In this specific avenue, however, concerns about BP have proved unfounded. This ‘artwashing’ is simply another arm of BP’s overarching aim: public exoneration.
The size of protests
against BP’s sponsorship of the British Museum has grown at great cost to the
institution. Ahdaf Soueif resigned from the Board of Trustees in July 2019,
citing BP’s sponsorship as a key motive. Her explanation, published by the
London Review of Books, perfectly summarises what activists long suspected: “The
public relations value that the museum gives to BP is unique, but the
sum of money BP gives the museum is not unattainable elsewhere.” Even
artists whose work has been used as part of exhibition have criticised the
museum. Zoe Lafferty’s open letter questions why the British Museum
“inexplicably” continues its partnership with BP, emphasising the “impossible
position” her team was in, having already agreed to allow the use of her work.
Two months after the
February protests I spoke to Sal. H, a member of ‘BP or not BP’. BP continues
to sponsor the British museum. Asked
whether she thought their protest had been successful, she responded with a question:
“what would success look like for us as an organisation? You could say it was
divestment. You could say it was the return of all the stolen goods. What would
those gains mean? My personal angle on it is that the British Museum and its
sponsorship exists as a perfect way for us to illustrate and point out the long
legacy of colonialism and the continued oppression of people who have suffered
colonialism.” Their protests are opportunities to platform activists from
around the world. ‘BP Must Fall’ saw people from Kurdistan, West Papua, and
Mexico give talks on the colonial history of the British Museum and the impact
of BPs actions on indigenous populations across the globe. Divestment is not
the only goal: raising awareness and sparking discussion in the media are also
critical. The end result of all this is consistent, negative press for the
British Museum. The question at the heart of the debate seems simple: if being
sponsored by BP means huge protests and high-profile resignations for a minimal
return, why not just drop them?
Soueif frames the
partnership’s continuation as an attempt not to “alienate a section of the
business community.” In Sal’s opinion, however, it runs deeper than a simple
monetary relationship: it reflects the British Museum’s own status as an icon
of colonialism and exploitation. The board of directors are “very happy to
invite BP to private views and functions”, implying the existence of a
political link that would explain the relationship. Each person suggests a
different motive and without conjecture it’s impossible to give a coherent
argument for the British museum to continue the partnership. Despite this, the
relationship continues.
The entrenched nature of
BP’s sponsorship has forced ‘BP or not BP’ to get creative. The group’s main concern
is that BP is misrepresenting themselves through their sponsorship. Although
the easiest way to stop that misrepresentation is to terminate the partnership,
if the group can engage the public’s imagination then BP fails anyway. The
longer the British Museum retains BP as a partner, the larger the protests will
get. Every protest is another opportunity for activists to grab the attention
of the media and undermine BP’s narrative, preventing BP from achieving its
goal anyway.
While ‘BP or not BP’ has enjoyed successful
protests, they are still a long way from this level of public engagement. In
addition to this, protest has just become a lot more difficult. The 20th April
marked the 10-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed
11 rig workers. This would usually be marked by a huge protest, but ‘BP or not
BP?’ was forced to commemorate the tragedy with an online protest. Around 100
activists took part in their video protest, with “thousands… posting to mark
the day.” Their protest coincided with the moment oil values went negative
in the USA for the first time in history in a huge blow for the oil industry.
Some activists, however, see this as a nightmare scenario: cheaper fuel is far
more attractive than expensive, green alternatives. The pandemic has also
created more fundamental issues for the group, whose future online actions are
“up in the air” as they grapple with the key question: can you justify
campaigning against sponsorship deals while cultural institutions haemorrhage
money?
Covid-19 may have disarmed activist groups, but there is still hope for ‘BP or not BP’. Global demand for oil is plunging by millions of barrels a day due to the pandemic and BP’s contract with the British Museum expires next year. Whether the British Museum continues that partnership is a separate matter. “We’ll see,” Sal concedes, “it would look very bad if they renewed it.” BP has also committed to becoming a net-zero emissions company by 2050. Perhaps they mean it. Or perhaps this is another Trojan Horse. When I asked if she was cynical about BP’s promises, there was a hint of humour in her response. “Towards a profit-making organisation at the mercy of their stakeholders?” She grins. “Definitely.”
