Keith Piper

This June 2026 Niru Ratnam will present a major exhibition by the leading British artist Keith Piper. A founding figure in the emergence of Black British art in the early 1980s, Piper has developed a practice over four decades that examines how histories are constructed, how identities are framed, and how systems of power whether cultural, political or technological, shape lived experience. Piper came to prominence as a founding member of the BLK Art Group, a network of young Black British art students based in the West Midlands who organised exhibitions, conferences and debates in response to widespread racism in both society and political structures in the early 1980s. The group catalyse what would later be recognised as the Black British Arts movement or more simply, the Black Art movement, creating new visibility for artists of colour and generating critical discourse around their work. The exhibition at Niru Ratnam which range from key works made by Piper in the 1980s through to recent works. Piper’s work from the 1980s exemplify his strategy of combining image, text and historical reference to expose the mechanisms through which narratives of race, empire and belonging are constructed. As he increasingly moved into installation, collage and early digital media, Piper continued to refine this analytical approach. His practice frequently draws on archival fragments and layered references, using juxtaposition and accumulation to reveal the politics embedded within images and objects. The work repeatedly asks who is seen and who is obscured, whose knowledge is legitimised and whose is marginalised, and how visual culture participates in shaping these hierarchies. Rather than a retrospective, the exhibition presents Piper’s work as an ongoing investigation 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. Across four decades, his practice remains both historically attentive and forward-looking, insisting on art’s capacity to challenge dominant narratives and reframe how the past and present are understood.