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. With an emphasis on self-organisation this informal group also tackled mainstream art world exclusion by writing texts putting together exhibitions and staging conferences including the First National Black Art Convention which was instrumental in expanding the collective to involve artists such as Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce.
This larger, sometimes shifting collective of artists articulated what would become known as the Black Art movement, more through their activities rather than any single formal manifesto. It was a period of intense debates about race and ethnicity; Margaret Thatcher had talked about the UK being ‘swamped’ with immigrants in the run-up to her being elected Prime Minister in 1979 and there were significant civil disturbances in areas that included Brixton, Handsworth and Tottenham as young Black British citizens clashed with police.
Piper took part in many of the exhibitions of the group, from early shows such as ‘Black Art an’ Done’ (Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 1981) and ‘The Pan-Afrikan Connection’ (Africa Centre, 1982) through to the institutional survey shows of Black Art that took place later in the decade. His first solo show, ‘Past Imperfect, Future Tense’ took place at the Black Art Gallery, Finsbury Park, London in 1984. The title alluded to a series of concerns that have stayed with Piper since; the way that histories are written and interpreted and the ways in which we might re-interpret those narratives from imagined futures.
From these early exhibitions onwards Piper’s work has used archival fragments, juxtapositions and layered references, working across media that included wall-based works on unstretched canvas, installation, collage and early digital media to think together personal and collective histories that had been distorted, marginalised or silenced through racist state or social structures. From the outset his work was deliberately multi-layered rather than more overtly didactic, arguably to reflect his belief that Black Art could not be reduced through ethnic specificity: “I see ‘black’ as political rather than an ethnic term.”
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.” (Artforum, May 1989). 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. The most recent manifestation of this that Piper’s work addresses is the recent ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, a disingenuous campaign to show patriotism through the use of Union Jacks flags and St George Cross flags that masked the return of organised far-right xenophobia, a phenomenon that lead to Piper’s choice of title for the show.
The exhibition at Niru Ratnam will include works made by Piper in the 1980s, including two works that were displayed in his first solo exhibition at the Black Art Gallery and two works from the early BLK Art Group shows. These are displayed alongside works from throughout Piper’s career up until the present day, including a major series ‘Pulp Fictions’ that were exhibited in his institutional solo show ‘Jet Black Futures’ at The New Art Gallery Walsall in 2017. Rather than a retrospective, the exhibition presents Piper’s work over four decades as ongoing investigations into the relationship between image, history and power. Works from different periods are brought into dialogue in the exhibition, revealing a practice that continually returns to questions of history and representation while adapting its visual language to new technological and political conditions. His practice remains both historically acute whilst suggesting speculative futures, insisting on art’s capacity to challenge dominant narratives and reframe how the past and present are understood.