Chila Kumari Burman depicts Margaret Thatcher as John Bull, the stout personification of Great Britain, omnipresent in political cartoons dating from the early eighteenth century. Thatcher delivers the infamous remarks she made while opposition leader in 1978, a year before she became Prime Minister. Echoing Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968, Thatcher claimed in an interview that the British feared being ‘swamped by people of a different culture’, and as a result would be ‘rather hostile to those coming in’. To complement this portrait, Burman collages a series of reproductions of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan passports with images of both political protests and immigrants arriving in the United Kingdom.
[above text taken from 'History Repeats Itself' exhibition 17/02/18 - 07/10/18]
Collection of Jane Beckett, on long-term loan to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.