Exhibition: War Inna Babylon - The Community's Struggle for Truths and Rights

 

Institute of Contemporary Arts: 6 July – 26 September 2021

 

Photograph: Robert Croma

 

While War Inna Babylon was originally scheduled to open in May 2020 – the delay due to Covid-19 – has inadvertently made this the most timely exhibition it could possibly be.

 

In light of events over the past year, that have shown how little value is placed on Black lives – the Covid-19 Public Health England Review, BLM demonstrations, the Sewell washout, the increased use of police violence, and stop and search procedures against members of the Black community – we view this as the perfect time to focus on grassroots activism in Black frontline communities across the UK; which have been at the forefront of resisting state oppression and creating unfounded change for racial justice since the 1970s.

– Stafford Scott, co-Founder of Tottenham Rights

 

The Institute of Contemporary Arts reopens on July 6th with War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights, an exhibition curated by London-based racial advocacy and community organisation, Tottenham Rights, Kamara Scott and Rianna Jade Parker.

 

Ten years on from the UK-wide riots sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan, this exhibition shines a light on the vast range of collective actions, resistance and grassroots activism undertaken by Black communities across the U.K in response to over seven decades of societal and institutional racism. 

 

Using the ‘symbolic location’ of Tottenham, a neighbourhood that has received much attention in recent years due to its history of racial conflicts and heavy-handed policing; this exhibition combines archival material, documentary photography, film and state-of-the art 3D technology to ‘act as a window to the past and as a mirror for our present-day social climate’.  

 

War Inna Babylon will chronicle the impact of various forms of state violence and institutional racism targeted at Britain’s Black communities since the mass arrival-upon-invitation of West Indian migrants in the late 1940s. 

 

The exhibition will include original tributes from victims’ families, case studies of the controversial 'sus’ (suspected person) laws and the Gangs’ Matrix and highlights legal developments that have resulted from Black justice campaigns.  

 

War Inna Babylon will also present a new investigation into the killing of Mark Duggan by Forensic Architecture

 

The exhibition, the first of its kind to accurately assess the conditions of Black lives across Britain, will be accompanied by an extensive public programme presented both in Tottenham and at the ICA that will include film screenings, community educational groups, talks, cultural events, performances, and a digital presentation focusing on the interrelation between artificial intelligence (AI) and racism. 

Tickets will be available later in June.

https://www.ica.art/exhibitions/war-inna-babylon

 

"An opportunity for historians to engage with activists"

History Acts 07: 

Black Lives Matter

Thursday 6 July 2017 11am to 12.30pm
Modern British Studies Conference 2017
University of Birmingham, Arts Building, B15 2TT

Free, no need to book.

History Acts <http://www.historyacts.org/?p=93> workshops are led by activists, who give a short talk or presentation about their work. Historians working on a relevant topic will then respond, before opening it up to group discussion.

Contact:
Steffan Blayney sblayn01@mail.bbk.ac.uk  or Guy Beckett gbecke01@mail.bbk.ac.uk for more information.

Our Panel

Malachi Thomas is one of the organisers of Black Lives Matter protests in Nottingham. In November 2016 he was convicted of unlawfully obstructing a highway having used foam-filled “lock-on devices” to link himself to other activists before lying across tram lines outside Nottingham’s Theatre Royal during a “national day of action” in August.

Tippa Naphtali is the founder of 4WardEver UK and the cousin of custody death victim, Mikey Powell, from Birmingham. Established June 2006, 4WardEver provides a one-stop-resource for case profiles, news and event details, useful resources, statistics, appeals, and more in relation to deaths and abuses whilst in custody; including the death penalty, other injustices and human rights abuses in the UK and internationally.

Dr Christienna Fryar is starting as a lecturer of the history of slavery and unfree labour at the University of Liverpool this July. Previously, she spent four years as an assistant professor of history at SUNY Buffalo State. She is completing her first book, The Measure of Empire: Disaster and British Imperialism in Postemancipation Jamaica, which explores how imperial disaster politics belied contemporary popular narratives of Jamaica’s ruin in the eight decades after emancipation. Her work focuses on the history of emancipation as the history of Britain, the British Empire, and the British Commonwealth since 1800.

Dr Kennetta Perry specializes in Atlantic World history with a particular emphasis on transnational race politics, empire, migration and movements for citizenship among people of African descent in Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. Her book, London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines how a largely Afro-Caribbean population of Black Britons advocated for citizenship rights and transformed the political landscape in Britain in the decades following World War II.

www.raphael-samuel.org.uk/events/history-acts-07-black-lives-matter/   www.historyacts.org/?p=93