EMPIRE LINES

Patrícia Martins Marcos maps out Portugal’s designs for imperial civilisation in the 18th century, through Carlos Julião’s Four Ports Panorama. From urban slaves to street peddlers, the Four Ports Panorama charts the diverse peoples of the Portuguese Empire on a universal path to civilisation, via clothing and Catholicism. Administrators and military men like Carlos Julião used the visual language...

Dr. Mallika Leuzinger pictures post-colonial Indian perspectives, through Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy’s European photographs published in the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1959 and 1960. In 1959, the Indian twin sisters Debalina Majumdar and Manobina Roy embarked on a six month tour across London, Paris, and Geneva. Keen amateur photographers, and members of the transnational United Provin...

Dr. Talinn Grigor sets light to the interimperial identities in 19th century Parsi architecture, through the Vatcha Adaran Zoroastrian Fire Temple, Bombay. Building Bombay was at the forefront of the religious, philanthropic, and political agenda of the Parsis, India’s Persian Zoroastrian ethnoreligious minority. Thousands of buildings like the Vatcha Adaran were commissioned in the ‘Persian Reviv...

Dr. Aleksandra Stamenkovic constructs the struggle to unify post-imperial South Slavic identities, through Josip Seissel’s Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937. The collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the First World War birthed a new European state – the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. National pavilions at international exhibitions, or Expos, became vital platforms to projec...

Dr. Alison Miller depicts the domestic and feminine faces of 19th century Japanese imperialism, in Kobayashi Kiyochika’s Illustration of the Empress Visiting a Field Hospital (in Hiroshima). The public-facing imperial family was a modern invention to Meiji Japan (1868-1912). Paparazzid in popular woodblock prints, Empress Shōken appeared in battlefields and blossom groves, symbolising Japan’s shif...

Retrospect Journal is joined by Audio Producer Jelena Sofronijevic to unpack their ongoing series, EMPIRE LINES. EMPIRE LINES uncovers the unexpected, often two-way flows of Empires through art. From the radical anti-capitalist cartoons of 1920s Southern Africa, to Eastern-inspired azulejos in seventeenth-century Portugal, interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artefacts of imperial...

Historian Gérard Besson uncovers the colonial foundations of Caribbean cosmopolitanism, through the Magnificent Seven (Port of Spain), in Trinidad. Seven magnificent buildings, each unique in design and craftsmanship, overlook Trinidad’s annual Caribbean Carnival along the Queen’s Park Savannah. Amongst them, a Moorish-inspired Corsican manor, a Scottish castle, a New England country house, an Arc...

Dr. Glaire Anderson traces artistic and intellectual interpretations of sovereignty within Islam, through two 10th century bronzes bearing the inscription, al-mulk. Bronzes bearing the Arabic word for sovereignty, al-mulk, were popular luxuries traded across the medieval Islamic territories. But these two objects - a large basin, and a small bowl – were both discovered far from home at opposite en...

Art critic Laura Gascoigne portrays the connections between British colonial and cultural opportunism, through George Chinnery’s 1840s Self-Portrait, of the Artist in Macau. George Chinnery (1774-1852) was no oil painting. Escaping piling debts and parental duties, he pursued lucrative portrait markets in India and on the China coast. The Bengali and Macanese landscapes tucked within his final sel...

Dr. Angus Lockyer detonates bids to define imperial Japan’s historical and artistic identities, through Niiro Chunosuke’s 1930s replica of the Kudara Kannon. 6000 miles from home, in the British Museum, stands one of two replicas of a Japanese national treasure. But most visitors pass her by, in search of samurai armour, elegant pottery, and woodblock prints. Though carved in Japan, the original a...

Ben Reiss exposes Britain’s colonial gaze, contrasting Edward Atkinson Hornel’s photography and painting, Ceylonese Tea Pickers. Edward Atkinson (E.A.) Hornel’s Ceylonese Tea Pickers boldly depicts Tamil women working in their ‘natural’ Sri Lankan landscape. But looking at the painting through the lens of Hornel’s original study photographs exposes the distance between the artist’s fantasies and r...

Dr. Céline Ventura Teixeira shines light on the fusion of Eastern motifs and European iconography, in a set of azulejos – or decorative tiles - produced for a church altar in 17th century imperial Portugal. Azulejos – or decorative tiles – were the crowning glory of Portugal’s church altars. Known as ‘ceramic carpets’, they borrowed motifs from Indo-Persian and Oriental textiles, which flooded Lis...

Dr. Paulina Banas unravels the purported Persian roots of 17th century Polish identities, through the Czartoryski Polonaise Carpet. Imported from the Safavid Persian Empire, Polonaise carpets were highly prized across the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – so much so that they were often mistaken as Polish-made. But beyond symbols of wealth, these textiles served a particular purpose for the Polish...

Dr. Henry Dee uncovers the global footprint of radical black activism in 1920s South Africa, through the cartoons of James Christie Scott. James Christie Scott’s cartoons illuminate black experiences of 1920s colonial capitalism. Commissioned by South Africa’s first major black trade union, his works subvert contemporary ideas of race, and imagine transformative moments of emancipation. ‘Scotty’ i...

Akemi Luisa Herráez Vossbrink depicts relations between imperial Spain and the Americas, through Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings, The Tribes of Israel. From Seville’s most acclaimed religious artist, Francisco de Zurbarán’s portrait series The Tribes of Israel (1640s) depicts the Old Testament patriarch Jacob and his twelve sons. The only such painting series to be found in Europe, de Zurbarán’s...

Dr. Laura Fernández-González explores the circulation of visual trends between imperial Lisbon and India, through the design for the Bengali Colcha with Triumphal Arch of the Flemish. Numerous Indian colchas, or wall hangings, were made for the orientalist markets of imperial Portugal. But this unique Bengali Colcha depicts a triumphal arch – the same temporary arch designed and erected in Lisbon...

Dr. Alex Bremner navigates London as the powerhouse of British technological imperialism, by looking at Electra House. Home to the Eastern Telegraph Company, London’s Electra House became the centre of Britain’s global telecommunications empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The regulated mesh of its architecture similarly ensnared global geographies, submitting it to the whims of commercia...

Dr. Emile Chabal navigates the contemporary echoes – and explosions – of French colonialism, through Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine. Through the dangerous escapades of the young Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, La Haine explicitly depicts life in the French banlieue (‘suburbs’, or ‘projects’) - from aggressive altercations with the police and everyday racism, to social marginality and spatial exclus...

Journalist Megan Kenyon explores imperial relations between Britain and Ireland, through George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 play, John Bull’s Other Island. Ireland was England’s first colony, and the first colonial state to become independent from imperial rule. Yet, with its cutting depiction of Anglo-Irish relations, John Bull’s Other Island famously made the observing English King Edward VII break off...

Dr. Peter Clericuzio observes complex imperial hierarchies between Mali and France, through the Great Mosque(s) of Djenné.  Population 32,000, Djenné is a small city in Mali, itself one of Africa's less famous countries. Yet, the (third) Great Mosque of Djenné attracted international attention in the twentieth century, extolled as a symbol of the power and diversity of the global French Empir...