Alice Procter’s Uncomfortable Art Tours in London hit a colonial nerve
The Australian art historian known as The Exhibitionist fills in the blanks of Britain’s less glorious past on her tours of museums such as Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum
Family history I was born in Sydney. I’m sixth-generation Australian. My museum origin-story is that when I was about one year old, my parents brought me to London on holiday.
My parents are lawyers, both excellent storytellers, and they brought me along with them to the British Museum. Dad probably wishes he was a classicist and he took me around the Parthenon part and told me the story. Apparently I was completely obsessed, even then, with these sculptures and who these people were and what they were doing.
When I was two, we moved to Hong Kong, where my brother was born and I went to Kellett School. We were there for five years, during the handover. Obviously, I didn’t know what I was living through then but as an Australian, growing up in Hong Kong, now living in the UK, I’m super aware of the way everything around me has been shaped by the history of the British Empire. That’s something my parents were keen to impart in me from quite a young age.
Seven up We moved to London (in 2002) when I was seven and, suddenly, museums were everywhere, which wasn’t something I’d been used to in Hong Kong.
My memories of Hong Kong are of a city that was living its museum story in its architecture, its buildings and its street names.
I started studying history at school but I’d get frustrated if you were just expected to read about things rather than going and looking at stuff.
Eventually, my teachers sat me down and said maybe you should be an art historian. So I did an art history degree at University College London. I loved it but, even at university level, there’s so much silence around the history of empire and we never addressed it. You can talk to British students and they won’t have heard of the East India Company or the opium wars.