The research project explores the recent history of the British Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale through the lenses of global and national art histories, exhibition history and postcolonial theory. Uniquely amongst global mega-exhibitions, the Venice 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. Drawing out the complexities of Britain’s imperial legacies and their cultural manifestations, the project will explore the Pavilion as a site of national self-definition (and redefinition), and also as a space which, within Venice’s exhibition ecosystem, operates 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.

This is a CDA co-designed by the University of Warwick and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.