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by Jay Bernard (Author)
Take a six-mile walk across London with critically acclaimed, award-winning poet Jay Bernard, exploring some of the secrets of the statues and monuments of the city they love.
Bookended by visits to Henry Tate's mausoleum and the tomb of Lord Mayor Henry Tulse, in this book, the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Surge goes for a six-mile walk across London--"this city I love"--to think about the meaning of complicity. We live in the legacy of colonialism. It permeates the very fabric of the social structures in which we exist. It visibly haunts the streets of London, anchored by statues and monuments that commemorate a violent imperial past. What does it mean, then, to love this city that was once the heart of an empire? Punctuated by works in Britain's national collection of art, Complicity is an insightful meditation on how art can help us reckon with a dark history and an uncertain future. Includes Color ImagesAuthor Biography
London-based Jay Bernard is an artist whose work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer, and rooted in the archives. They were named the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year (2020) and are the recipient of the Ted Hughes Award (2017) for Surge: Side A, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981. The film Something Said (2017), an exploration of Black British history, has screened in the UK and internationally, including at Aesthetica and Leeds International Film Festival, where it won best experimental and best queer short respectively, and CinemAfrica. Their body of work also includes Crystals of this Social Substance (Serpentine Pavilion, 2021), Poet Slash Artist (Manchester International Festival, 2021), and Joint (Southbank Centre 2022).
