MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

The Other Story, curated by the artist and theorist Rasheed Araeen at the Hayward Gallery, was the first major survey of the works of artists of Asian, African and Caribbean origin in Britain made in the post-war decades. Having taken place during the era of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, the exhibition is considered a significant attempt at the ‘de-imperialisation’ of the ‘master narrative‘ of modern art history. In his introduction to the catalogue, Araeen addresses the issue of the privilege of the Western subject, which was achieved “by arbitrary removal of other cultures from the dynamics of historical continuity”. The Other Story brought together the artworks of 24 Afro-Asian artists on the principle of their relationship with what is understood as Modernism in visual arts. Despite some success of the so-called ‘Commonwealth‘ generation of artists in the 1960s, by the end of the 1980s they were still denied their place in the mainstream historical narrative – “they remained the Other, in the sense that their Otherness was constantly evoked as part of the discussion of their work”. Attacked by some art critics at the time, the exhibition came to be considered as a key step towards the revision of Western-orientated history of Modernism.