Racial Artefacts, National Memories: Institutions of Art Rewrite the Nation’sRacial Legacies

In December 2021, the British Ministry for Arts banned the export of a recently sold work of art. Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches (c.1650, artist unknown) depicts two women, one white and one Black, seated shoulder to shoulder, wearing the popular beauty patches of the day. The Ministry’s position is that the work of art can offer unique insight on race in seventeenth-century England. This was one of several works ‐ all depicting subjects of colour or a moment of colonial encounter ‐ that have recently been debated and saved from export by the Ministry. How can this national clamour to preserve and own racial difference bring into sharper relief the complexity of the contemporary relationship between race, state institutions and capitalism? To answer this question, these bans ‐ which were enacted against the backdrop of both Brexit and global protests challenging racial violence and, specifically, anti-Blackness ‐ must be understood within the larger context of art world acquisitions and returns, which are experiencing explicit confrontations with their histories of colonial, racial violence. Artefacts looted during colonisation are being returned; museums in the global North are increasingly understood to be sites of ongoing racial violence; conversations about the stark whiteness of ancient sculptures are expanding. Taken together, these art industry developments, are an example of the ways in which nation-states usurp historical narratives in furtherance of a guaranteed futurity, rewriting historical racial formations and its records to shore up their teleology of post-colonial progress, collecting objects of race whilst retrenching their commitment to expulsion, violence, and border policing. Nations’ recreations of historical archives sanitise their legacies to better accommodate the contemporary sociopolitical moment and, importantly, provide a glimpse into the particularities of present-day racial formations and indeed, co-mingling of race and value. These moves, furthermore, reveal the arts industry’s indebtedness to racial capitalism, as institutions within the industry seek repair in a bid to preserve their own sustainability, relying on specific scripts of anti-racist practice that foreground property exchanges, preserving the industry’s colonial models of circulation, visibility and profit.