In Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, the artists chance their arm at English self-conception
Tattered, tired, just about salvageable, ignoring the faint stains in the chamber pot. This is England, as conjured in Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane’s set of collaborative multimedia works. Both artists have previously used research-based approaches to critique Middle Eastern cultures and colonial histories; here, they examine ‘the myth of England as a nation’. The colossal critical purview stretches the show thin, but with English nationalism rife it’s a crucial subject to broach. Al-Maria and Ourahmane’s allusive works conjure a variety of down-and-out Englishnesses, but these are not convincing exegetes and their ambition doesn’t extend to proposals for reform or repair.
The artists invoke an England dressed in folkloric, medieval(ish) historical costume. In the ceiling-hung stained-glass installation A Blessing and A Betrayal (2024), the panes are crowded with gothic blackletter and mock marginalia. A Blessing’s AI-generated ‘scriptural’ verse produces a visionary dream for the biblical Esau, passed over by God in favour of his nation-founding brother Jacob in Genesis 28. Framing Device I and II (2024) display the National Gallery’s archival frames and wall text for the late-fourteenth-century Wilton Diptych, a portable altarpiece depicting Richard II with angels bearing St George’s Cross.
The National Gallery’s curatorial text glosses the absent work’s symbolism. But the artists aren’t particularly interested in the history of English self-fashioning. Instead, they’re after the present-day processes which delimit national histories.
Elsewhere we find the literally, prosaically English: Fly Tip (2024) is furniture salvaged by the artists from Bristol’s skips, vacuum-packed in crimp-sealed silver-foil pouches. Discernible inside the plastic: a mattress and loveseat. The work’s label indicates that dirt and hair are also concealed within. As emblems of Englishness, they exaggerate a culture of ‘sweeping things under the rug’. The artists pair these salvaged things with the inherited, intimating their equivalence: Job Lot (1750–1799/2024), which contains an inheritance of 240 chamber pots, neighbours Curtains (2024), a lush, mauve pair of velvet drapes retrieved from a Belgravia skip. It’s a faintly pejorative connection. And perhaps we deserve it – for the mind-numbing merriness of low-budget terrestrial TV programmes involving nostalgia, antique trinkets and minor celebrities, at least.
The artists do take aim at the economic structures that shape English self-conception. Terra Nullius (2024) is an advert taken out in an issue of the politically conservative Spectator magazine: ‘Seeking English landowners burdened by carrying costs to participate in an endeavour of artistic significance.’ The work’s seductive euphemisms, and its title – meaning ‘nobody’s land’ – suggest a desire to catfish the English landowning class for redistributive purposes. As the gallery assistant tells me when I ring the listed number, the artists are looking for someone to give them some land for free.
Suddenly, the show seems more like an acquisitive project than a fully-fanged critique. In Grey Unpleasant Land Al-Maria and Ourahmane act as the artist-radicals against a regressive tradition, but alternative versions of English identity and history, crowded as it is with utopian thinkers and social reformers, are disappointingly absent.
Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, through 19 January
From the November 2024 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
