Aditya Iyer

My review of “The African Kingdom of Gold,” Barnaby Phillips's latest book where he explores how British colonial forces plundered the Asante people and expertly traces the stolen artifacts’ afterlives in museum storage.

The first show on the subject in the UK offers an ambitious, if uneven, look at how artists forged a postcolonial identity

An exhibition showcases the sophisticated cultural language developed in the Indian subcontinent from around 1560 to 1660 across the reign of three emperors.

Rather than his military prowess or finely crafted weapons, it was Sikhism that sustained Ranjit Singh’s empire.

A show hones in on the tension between colonial European ideas and local styles of architecture as India and Ghana gained independence.

As part of our Sustainability in Art essay series, London-based journalist Aditya Iyer critically examines the role of digitization in art.

Locke's stunning, sensuous spectacle of pattern and color, just like the grand tradition of Caribbean carnivals, hints at sinister elements that undergird the whole endeavor.

The documentary/fiction hybrid film 499 uses a fictional character to speak to real-life contemporary colonized people.

But it is also dangerous because it distracts us from understanding how Patel as Home Secretary upholds structural racism in Britain.

Exiled from India, anticolonial activist M. N. Roy charted a revolutionary course that took him everywhere from Mexico City to Moscow. Today, his life is a reminder of how global the struggle for freedom continues to be.

For all its bluntness, "Exterminate All the Brutes" never once utters the words “rape” or “capitalism.”

The British government's new “free speech champion,” Oliver Dowden, has threatened museums with funding cuts if they remove controversial statues.

Aditya Iyer speaks with The Black Curriculum, Fill in The Blanks UK and The Free Black University about the ongoing movement to decolonise UK education

Oxford University professor Dan Hicks on why Western museums must urgently return colonial-era objects.

“Empire and Collecting,” a new self-guided tour, reflects an attempt to help visitors understand the colonial origins of the collection.

Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) was an Indian scholar, merchant, and politician who was a founding member of the Indian National Congress. Born to a Parsi family in Navsarai in the then-Bombay Presidency (now modern-day Gujarat), Naoroji’s major

At Oxford University, the Black Lives Matter movement has renewed protests over sanitized public narratives surrounding the violent legacy of British imperialism.

Protesters’ removal of Edward Colston’s statue didn’t attack history; instead it corrected how we write it.

A new, first-of-its-kind exhibition in London spotlights painters associated with with Kampani Qalam, the Urdu name for the rich, hybrid art style associated with commissions for the East India Company.

The British Museum's Inspired by the East asks its audience to rehabilitate Orientalist art without ever focusing on what made it problematic in the first place.