Artists

Keith Piper

Press release

I grew up in a moment in which the Red Flag was a sign of hope. A romantic desire for a new equitable age beyond the edifice of crumbling Empires and a capitalism staggering under the weight of its own contradictions. Those contradictions reinvented in new forms. Those old Empires morphed into new ones. And over the decades, that promise, (already in retrospect frayed during my optimistic youth) has faded into the distance. The red flag has reasserted its original and older coda, that of a warning sign, the marker of a boundary not be crossed, a declaration of 'no quarter'. Keith Piper, May 2026 This June 2026 Niru Ratnam will present a major exhibition titled 'Red Flags' by the leading British artist Keith Piper. A founding member of the BLK Art Group along with Eddie Chambers, Donald Rodney and Marlene Smith amongst others, Piper emerged in the early 1980s as part of generation of radical young Black British artists who confronted racism, social inequalities, colonial legacies and exclusions from cultural institutions. For Piper, strategies for articulating the political structure of 'blackness' included using storytelling, early digital technologies, alluding to protest banners, referencing science fiction and decolonising canonical structures such as the museum. These different approaches across different media all however have a common thread which the writer Jean Fisher described as "the search for a renarration of the black subject." This has been done through a research-lead approach responding firstly to the era of Thatcherism, police brutality and the struggle against Apartheid in the 1980s and then subsequently the ongoing presence of discrimination, racism and far-right ideology through to the present day.