One of the moral low points of Keir Starmer\u2019s tenure at Downing Street was his \u201cisland of strangers\u201d speech, with its rhetorical echoes of Enoch Powell and dispiriting description of a nation fractured by difference. After widespread criticism, Starmer recanted his words, if not the sentiment behind them. Yet his choice of language was a reminder of how the idea of the stranger \u2013 representing immigration, but also wider, more inchoate anxieties about otherness and difference \u2013 holds such a potent place in Britain today.<\/p>\n
In fact, from masked anti-migrant protesters on the south coast to xenophobic riots over the summer, from politicians vowing to stop the boats to immigration polling as the No 1 concern among UK voters, it\u2019s probably true to say that fear of the stranger is the totemic issue of our times.<\/p>\n
Not long after Starmer\u2019s speech, I was appointed curator of the British Art<\/a> Show, which opens in Coventry this week. My thoughts have turned increasingly to the notion of the stranger among us as I\u2019ve worked on the exhibition. The show, developed and produced by Hayward Gallery Touring, is the largest and most significant recurring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK.<\/p>\n Founded in 1979, the exhibition takes place every five years, touring across the country to offer a snapshot of the ideas and ambitions of a rising generation of artists born or based in Britain. Previous versions have brought the likes of David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Anish Kapoor to national audiences. This year is the 10th edition and it features a lineup of critically lauded artists including Alvaro Barrington, Lindsey Mendick and recent Turner prize winners Jesse Darling and Jasleen Kaur.<\/p>\n Each new iteration prompts the same question: what does the show say about British art? Or, indeed, about Britain? In the context of the globe-spanning fairs, biennales and mega-galleries that make up today\u2019s contemporary art world, the question is possibly antique. Yet an exhibition tasked with addressing recent developments in art will inevitably reveal something about the country in which that work originates. To talk about British art, then, is also to talk about place and belonging. It is to ask who we are as individuals, as communities and as a nation.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve chosen to give the latest exhibition a subtitle: A Chorus of Strangers. The name is not a reference to Starmer\u2019s speech, but it does gesture back to another much earlier period in British history also characterised by its antipathy to outsiders.<\/p>\n Making the Strangers\u2019 Case \u2026 an 1897 depiction of Thomas More pleading for compassion at the 1517 May Day riots. Photograph: Print Collector\/Getty Images<\/p>\n On 30 April 1517, the eve of the annual May Day festival, an angry crowd of more than 1,000 people marched through London protesting at the city\u2019s immigrant population. Xenophobia was rife in Tudor England. Although foreigners, known as \u201cstrangers\u201d, made up just 6% of the city\u2019s population, they were often considered a malign presence: \u201cLibertynes, drunkards, murderers, thieves and Conspirators,\u201d in the words of one chronicler.<\/p>\n As darkness fell, the mood turned ugly. Thomas More, under-sheriff of London, appealed to the crowd to turn back. But his entreaties went unheard. The mob surged through the streets sacking the shops and houses of French, Italian and Flemish merchants and craftsmen. Only after an army was called out, leading to scores of arrests and over a dozen executions, was order returned.<\/p>\n Evil May Day, as the riot came to be known, was not quickly forgotten.<\/p>\n In 1591 a new play, Sir Thomas More, told the story of More\u2019s rise and fall, from civic leader to Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII and his subsequent beheading for refusing to accept the king as head of the Church of England. The drama was written collaboratively by several authors. Most prominent among them was William Shakespeare, who revisited More\u2019s encounter with the London mob. In Shakespeare\u2019s telling, More successfully calms the crowd by making \u201cthe Strangers\u2019 Case\u201d, a passionate call for empathy in place of the \u201cmountainish inhumanity\u201d of hatred and bigotry.<\/p>\n Shakespeare\u2019s scene still feels powerfully relevant. Not just due to the similarity between mob violence then and now, but because the Strangers\u2019 Case is a reminder of how, for hundreds of years, artists have faced times of discord by asserting the value of our shared humanity. With that past in mind, the British Art Show asks: how does art today meet the fears of otherness and difference that emerge in a period of uncertainty and change?<\/p>\n United in protest \u2026 Joy Gerrard, March for Palestine, Berlin, 2024. Photograph: courtesy of the artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery<\/p>\n Let\u2019s reflect for a moment that the idea of the stranger describes a psychological as well as a social condition. Yes, the stranger denotes a feared outsider. But as the philosopher Julia Kristeva says, we are often \u201cstrangers to ourselves\u201d, caught within the mysteries of our psyche. The stranger might be a repressed feeling or a memory that we struggle to acknowledge, its presence curdling our view of the world, turning others into projections of our own anxieties.<\/p>\n More and more, it feels as though, when we\u2019re talking about the former, the stranger as outsider, what we\u2019re actually referring to is the latter, the stranger as other, a feeling of unease and disequilibrium; a sense that the times are out of joint, and that instead of all the promises of wealth and ease that the future was supposed to bring, we find ourselves unmoored and lost. As the philosopher Marshall Berman wrote in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity: \u201cTo be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world \u2013 and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.\u201d<\/p>\n