Counter-Ceremonial: Contemporary Artists and Queen Victoria Monuments

As the embodiment of empire, Victoria became a symbol of allegiance and resistance, love and loathing. This is nowhere more apparent than in the many monuments memorializing her across the United Kingdom and around the world. At a moment when public sculpture has become increasingly controversial, as witnessed by the removal of Confederate monuments in the American South or the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, monuments to Victoria are also coming under scrutiny. While many statues have been damaged or defaced from Bristol to Bangkok, and from Montreal to Delhi — important interventions in themselves — more interesting reactions have come from artists. Around the globe, art projects have worked with Victoria monuments in order to find a way of engaging with their troubled history, offering a critical reframing that can break the often unproductive arguments about removal or retention. This article juxtaposes works by Tatsurou Bashi, Sophie Ernst, Hew Locke, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gary Kirkham, and Hadley+Maxwell, exploring the artists’ engagement with the material form of the monuments and the connections between Victoria’s self-made image and its unmaking in the works discussed.