Zietgeist

The Place Is Here exhibition is an invitation to time travel back to the 1980s, the ‘critical decade’ when ‘Black British art’ as a movement emerged. The uncanny experience of viewing the exhibition is that while it focuses on a tumultuous historical period of racial strife, it also appears to speak to the present over 30 years later. It’s as if the artworks are the ones that are travelling in time. This essay examines this temporal displacement through the aesthetics and ethico-politics of 1980s Black British art in terms of the ongoing crisis of race, nation and global capitalism from the vantage point of the present. This is done by undertaking conceptual, somewhat speculative ‘close readings’ of three artworks in the exhibition by noted diasporic South Asian artists: Said Adrus’s Zeitgeist (1982-3), Chila Kumari Burman’s Convenience, Not Love (1986-7) and Pratibha Parmar’s Sari Red (1988).