UAL Decolonising Arts Institute

The UAL Decolonising Arts Institute builds on the AHRC Black Artists and Modernism research project, which focused on artists of African and Asian heritage in the UK’s public art collections.

We will continue the work of the project by exploring how we come to know – or forget – certain artists, artworks and histories.

We will focus on these important questions

• What does it mean to decolonise the arts?
• How do we decolonise the curriculum and the university from within?
• How can we work to dismantle and transform what we know and what we do?

We want to

• Recognise local and global movements to decolonise
• Explore postcolonial, decolonial and intersectional thinking and practice
• Collaborate with individuals, collectives and organisations across the arts and education
• Gather strengths, amplify voices, and listen differently

We approach decolonisation with Arundhati Roy’s broad understanding of colonisation in mind:

"Whose colonisation of whom are we talking about?

Some countries have colonised other countries, some cultures have colonised other cultures, some races and castes have colonised and enslaved others, some languages have colonised other languages, some religions have eviscerated others, some ideologies have wiped out others, some genders have dominated and oppressed others.

The categories are infinite, the hierarchies complicated and intersecting, the project of domination ongoing."

(Arundhati Roy, 2017)