Democracies

Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, Triptych No Nukes  1982

This is one of a group of six unique prints in Tate’s collection from Chila Kumari Burman’s Riot Series (Tate T14090–T14095), each of which is individually titled. They were made in 1981 and 1982 with the master printmaker Stanley Jones (born 1933) in the Printmaking Department at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where Burman was a student at the time. The Printmaking Department had established a reputation for experimenting with a range of techniques and this can be seen in this series. After a variety of trials, Burman and Jones decided to work with a combination of processes in each print – etching and silkscreen, etching and aquatint or etching and lithograph. The tensions generated by the combination and overlaying of two material techniques embodied the violence embedded within the subject matter of the work, echoing the theme of conflict as well as affecting the final appearance of the prints. The historian Lynda Nead has written about Burman’s process of layering images:

Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, Militant Women  1981

This is one of six prints from Burman’s Riot Series, which combine etching, lithography and aquatint. The art historian Lynda Nead (born 1957) writes of Burman’s process of layering images: ‘Firstly, there is the idea of layering: of surfaces being built up, one upon another, creating dense walls of ink, paint, line and meaning. And secondly, there is the theme of fragmentation: of the image being broken up and subsequently reconstituted in order to shift stereotypes and to create radical forms of meaning.’

Gallery label, November 2023

Lubaina Himid CBE RA, The Carrot Piece  1985

The Carrot Piece shows a white man failing to tempt a black woman with a carrot. Her arms are already full with everything she needs. Himid says that when the work was made, cultural institutions ‘needed to be seen’ to be integrating black people into their programmes and ‘we as black women understood how we were being patronised ... to be cajoled and distracted by silly games and pointless offers. We understood, but we knew what sustained us… and what we really needed to make a positive cultural contribution: self-belief, inherited wisdom, education and love.’

Gallery label, July 2017

Richard Hamilton, The state  1993

Hamilton’s image of a patrolling British soldier expresses the unease of the army’s equivocal position in Northern Ireland. Brandishing a weapon, yet moving protectively backwards, he is both on the offensive and defensive. The rural Irish landscape and city streets behind him pose equal threats. Hamilton has incorporated real fabric into the soldier’s fatigues, merging pictorial representation and reality. The construction of images through costume and artifice has been a consistent concern in Hamilton's works.

Gallery label, November 2006

Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, Cut - Foot - Pupil- Uprisings  1981

This is one of a group of six unique prints in Tate’s collection from Chila Kumari Burman’s Riot Series (Tate T14090–T14095), each of which is individually titled. They were made in 1981 and 1982 with the master printmaker Stanley Jones (born 1933) in the Printmaking Department at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where Burman was a student at the time. The Printmaking Department had established a reputation for experimenting with a range of techniques and this can be seen in this series. After a variety of trials, Burman and Jones decided to work with a combination of processes in each print – etching and silkscreen, etching and aquatint or etching and lithograph. The tensions generated by the combination and overlaying of two material techniques embodied the violence embedded within the subject matter of the work, echoing the theme of conflict as well as affecting the final appearance of the prints. The historian Lynda Nead has written about Burman’s process of layering images:

Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, Red Riots on Indian Paper  1981

This is one of a group of six unique prints in Tate’s collection from Chila Kumari Burman’s Riot Series (Tate T14090–T14095), each of which is individually titled. They were made in 1981 and 1982 with the master printmaker Stanley Jones (born 1933) in the Printmaking Department at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where Burman was a student at the time. The Printmaking Department had established a reputation for experimenting with a range of techniques and this can be seen in this series. After a variety of trials, Burman and Jones decided to work with a combination of processes in each print – etching and silkscreen, etching and aquatint or etching and lithograph. The tensions generated by the combination and overlaying of two material techniques embodied the violence embedded within the subject matter of the work, echoing the theme of conflict as well as affecting the final appearance of the prints. The historian Lynda Nead has written about Burman’s process of layering images:

Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, Three Mug Shots in a Row  1982

This is one of a group of six unique prints in Tate’s collection from Chila Kumari Burman’s Riot Series (Tate T14090–T14095), each of which is individually titled. They were made in 1981 and 1982 with the master printmaker Stanley Jones (born 1933) in the Printmaking Department at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where Burman was a student at the time. The Printmaking Department had established a reputation for experimenting with a range of techniques and this can be seen in this series. After a variety of trials, Burman and Jones decided to work with a combination of processes in each print – etching and silkscreen, etching and aquatint or etching and lithograph. The tensions generated by the combination and overlaying of two material techniques embodied the violence embedded within the subject matter of the work, echoing the theme of conflict as well as affecting the final appearance of the prints. The historian Lynda Nead has written about Burman’s process of layering images:

Zoe Leonard, I want a president  1992/2018

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Fountain)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Boy on tip toes)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (People saluting)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Balloons escaping)  2010

Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books  1983

The Parthenon of Books 1983 is the documentary record of a project by Marta Minujín in which she reconstructed the classical Greek temple of the Parthenon from the Acropolis in Athens out of books. In its current form the work consists of five black and white photographs showing various stages of the construction of the temple and a video recording the event and public reaction to it. The photographs are unique prints.

Cildo Meireles, Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project  1970

Meireles altered a series of Coca-Cola bottles, by printing slogans such as ‘Yankees go home’ or instructions for making Molotov cocktails on them. He put them back into circulation in what he described as an act of subversive ‘mobile graffiti’, enacted under Brazil’s military dictatorship. He saw the system of recycling empty bottles as a way of enabling a political message to circulate surreptitiously. He has compared the Coca-Cola bottles to ‘messages in bottles, flung into the sea by victims of shipwrecks’.

Gallery label, February 2016

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Quin Morere  1991

Bob and Roberta Smith, All Schools Should be Art Schools  2016

All Schools Should Be Art Schools 2016 consists of twenty-eight placard signs, each of which is made of a square sheet of wood pinned to a wooden stake. Each sign is painted with a different capital letter on a blue background to fill the square. The letters have been variously painted in purple, green, cream and red and all are drawn in an angular style save for one ‘S’, the final letter of the work, which is curvilinear. The letter forms are outlined in yellow, cream or white and emphasised by drop shadows. Together they spell out the slogan and title of the work, ‘All Schools Should Be Art Schools’. The back of each board is unpainted bears a letter (corresponding to the letter painted on the front) and a number which indicates the order in which the panels should be installed.

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Girl looking)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Car on fire)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Chair balancing on stick)  Date not known

Xiao Lu, Dialogue  1989, remade 2015

Dialogue is an installation that comprises two life-size aluminium alloy telephone booths, a mirror, a pedestal, a red telephone and cement paving stones. On the left phone booth, an image of the back of a female figure holding a receiver is silkscreened over the glass, and on the right phone booth the back of a male figure is depicted. In the middle of the two phone booths is a red telephone on a white plinth, with the receiver dangling down. Behind the phone is a mirrored panel with two bullet holes referencing an action carried out by the artist when the work was displayed in the exhibition China/Avant-Garde at the National Art Gallery, Beijing in 1989. The sculpture is raised on cement paving stones, and purposely resembles the public phone booths found on the streets of China in the late 1980s.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Je Vous Salue Marat  1989

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Boy running with barrel)  2010

Chila Kumari Singh Burman MBE, If There is No Struggle, There is No Progress - Uprisings  1981

This work was made in direct response to the 1981 uprisings, as young people across England clashed with police over ongoing racial discrimination and violence. Significant protests took place across Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Nottingham. Burman highlights areas of these cities where uprisings took place. The artist includes an image of a police officer wearing a gas mask, which features in other works she made at the same time. This motif likely references the police use of CS gas grenades to disperse protestors in Toxteth, Liverpool – the first time these had been used in the UK outside of Northern Ireland.

Gallery label, November 2023

Artur Zmijewski, Democracies  2009

Aiming to blend into the crowd as much as possible, Zmijewski and his cameramen filmed a series of politically charged gatherings, including demonstrations, military parades and memorial services. Many of the events are extreme right-wing and nationalistic, reflecting what the artist sees as a general cultural shift in Europe. ‘I was less interested in the rightness or justice of the cause’, Zmijewski has said, ‘but more in this inner drive that moves people to debate, to publicly show their own needs, demands, requests, opinions – and to defend them with their own presence’.

Gallery label, November 2015

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Two women hiding)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Right arm)  2010

Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Untitled (Riots shields in the high street)  2010

Glenn Ligon, Condition Report  2000

Untitled (I Am a Man), a 1988 painting by Ligon, takes its text from signs carried by striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. The slogan ‘I Am a Man’ was a way of protesting that they were equal to their white counterparts, who were paid more for doing the same job. Here Ligon juxtaposes a reproduction of the 1988 painting with another that has been annotated by a conservator making a condition report on the work. The imperfections noted might simultaneously be read as a questioning of the self as well as recording the frailties of the object.

Gallery label, June 2010