Who’s Doing the Dirty Work? Tate Britain and the Rex Whistler Scandal

In 2020, renewed scrutiny fell on Rex Whistler’s 1927 mural The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats at Tate Britain, following global Black Lives Matter protests and social media outrage over its racist imagery. Though long known to the gallery, the mural’s depiction of colonial violence had been largely unaddressed due to its tucked-away location. Confronted with mounting public pressure, Tate commissioned artists to respond to the mural rather than interpret it directly or remove it—an approach shaped by the mural’s Grade I-listed status. This paper examines Tate’s shifting interpretations of the mural over the course of nearly a century before turning to Viva Voce (2024), a film installation by Keith Piper that exposes the imperial ideologies behind Whistler’s work. The paper critically assesses the ethics of Tate’s strategy, questioning whether commissioning artists to interpret contested artworks for museums empowers new narratives or deflects institutional accountability by outsourcing uncomfortable historical reckoning.

(Organised by Birkbeck University and the National Portrait Gallery, London)