From Empire to Commonwealth: Britain at the Venice Biennale, 1948 - present
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: History of Art
Abstract
Uniquely amongst global mega-exhibitions, the Venice Art Biennale, with its national pavilions, offers an insight not
only into how nations represent themselves through art at specific historical moments, but also into how cultural
productions respond to shifting global relationships and configurations. Following a hiatus during the second world
war, the Biennale resumed in 1948 against the political backdrop of a drastically transformed Europe, and of rapid,
ongoing decolonisation. In that year, Herbert Read described Henry Moore's sculptures in the British Pavilion as
expressing a "common world-language of form", a statement which economically summarised the impulse to forge a
universal art language that could extend beyond the national boundaries implied by the Biennale's exhibitory logic
and speak to the new world order and to Britain's post-imperial reality. Yet it was also a statement freighted with a
lingering colonial assumption that Western modernism was the natural vehicle of artistic universalism. Drawing out
the complexities of Britain's colonial legacies and their cultural manifestations, this project will explore the British
Pavilion as a site of national self-definition (and redefinition), and also as a space which speaks across the Giardini,
Venice, and the globe, in dialogue with new artistic voices from Commonwealth nations. As Britain, post-Brexit, once
again reconfigures its global position (and its relationship with the Commonwealth), the project will offer a timely
reconsideration of the Pavilion's articulations of Britishness in both its inward and outward-looking forms. It will also
address a surprising vacuum in the scholarship; while there have been a small number of studies of the Venice
Biennale more generally (most notably Jahec on the exhibition's visual politics during the Cold War) and a short
edition-by-edition guide to the British Pavilion published by the British Council, there has to date been no analysis of
the Pavilion's cultural politics.
only into how nations represent themselves through art at specific historical moments, but also into how cultural
productions respond to shifting global relationships and configurations. Following a hiatus during the second world
war, the Biennale resumed in 1948 against the political backdrop of a drastically transformed Europe, and of rapid,
ongoing decolonisation. In that year, Herbert Read described Henry Moore's sculptures in the British Pavilion as
expressing a "common world-language of form", a statement which economically summarised the impulse to forge a
universal art language that could extend beyond the national boundaries implied by the Biennale's exhibitory logic
and speak to the new world order and to Britain's post-imperial reality. Yet it was also a statement freighted with a
lingering colonial assumption that Western modernism was the natural vehicle of artistic universalism. Drawing out
the complexities of Britain's colonial legacies and their cultural manifestations, this project will explore the British
Pavilion as a site of national self-definition (and redefinition), and also as a space which speaks across the Giardini,
Venice, and the globe, in dialogue with new artistic voices from Commonwealth nations. As Britain, post-Brexit, once
again reconfigures its global position (and its relationship with the Commonwealth), the project will offer a timely
reconsideration of the Pavilion's articulations of Britishness in both its inward and outward-looking forms. It will also
address a surprising vacuum in the scholarship; while there have been a small number of studies of the Venice
Biennale more generally (most notably Jahec on the exhibition's visual politics during the Cold War) and a short
edition-by-edition guide to the British Pavilion published by the British Council, there has to date been no analysis of
the Pavilion's cultural politics.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Rosemarie Dias (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Claudia Di Tosto (Student) |