Art Historian Damian Skinner presents his lecture London Calling: Settler and Indigenous Artists, Artistic Decolonisation, and the British Artworld.

In the years following WWII, a generation of artists moved from England’s colonies to London to pursue their artistic practices as modernists. Indian, African and Caribbean artists challenged the hierarchies of colonialism and modernism by becoming practitioners rather than the subjects of modernism. This moment, named New Commonwealth Internationalism, also involved artists from the ‘white dominions’ and settler-colonial societies of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Their legacy complicates the way both British and New Zealand art history of this period can be written, and the ways in which artistic modernism was caught up in the wave of decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century.

In association with Victoria University of Wellington.