Look Again: Complicity

Look Again is a new series of short books from Tate Publishing, opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today. Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known, best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national collection, and asks us to look again.

Bookended by visits to Henry Tate’s mausoleum and the tomb of Lord Mayor Henry Tulse, the author of critically acclaimed poetry collection Surge goes for a six-mile walk across London, ‘this city I love’, to think about the meaning of complicity. We live in the legacy of colonialism. It permeates the very fabric of the social structures in which we exist. It visibly haunts the streets of London, anchored by statues and monuments that commemorate a violent imperial past.

What does it mean, then, to love this city that was once the heart of an Empire? Punctuated by works in Britain’s national collection of art, Look Again: Complicity is an insightful meditation on how art can help us reckon with a dark history and an uncertain future.