About the project
Through IWM's archives, this project explored diverse or buried stories that have impacted independence movements throughout the West’s colonial territories. It was part of a collaborative knowledge exchange and strategic partnership between IWM and University of the Arts London’s London College of Communication.
Critically investigating how images produced within the context of Cold War politics have framed and shaped the making of Allies and constructed ‘Others’, this project took the Cold War as a dominant narrative. The project forensically examined the ideological perspectives that influenced and shaped the majority world’s move to independence and explores how East/West relationships post-Second World War concerning the pre-post-colonial eras have shaped our world, and continue to impact the globe today.
Branching over geographies from Egypt and Kenya to Malaysia and Zimbabwe, Sudan and Belize to Bangladesh and the Falkland Islands, the project examined not only photographs but posters, artwork, pamphlets, diaries, and other printed ephemera, casting a broad net over the ‘visual’ of visual culture. The result is an in-depth and multi-faceted engagement with the colonial archive, the decentring of imperial narratives, and the shaping of new ways of thinking about ‘othering’, the ‘other’, and ‘otherness’, within the Cold War.
This project began in January 2024 and is due to complete in July 2026.
Outputs
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Studio Mitsi MoulsonCold War and ‘Other Narratives’ Exhibition
Working with students on the MA for Design in Art Direction, this exhibition installed at Dilston Grove, Southwark Park Galleries, saw students engage with IWM materials working in groups to construct their own design pieces that spoke to the project’s core aims.
Work produced included:
- sonic counter-archive - a faux-concrete-cast turntable centred on Belizean oral histories
- a sculptural meditation on the weight of the untold - reams of photographic paper hang above laterally inverted photos and questions
- a theatre questioning who controls the global stage - a Victorian style slide theatre utilising stylised wooden cut-outs taken from IWM photos
- a forest that hides colonial rebels - an interactive sculpture that responds to the viewers proximity, reflecting on Malaysia’s so-called ‘Demon Forest’
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Studio Mitsi MoulsonMapping the colonial camera installation
As part of the Dilston Grove exhibition, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Jack Bowman also produced their own installation.
Mapping the colonial camera is a meditation on Britain’s patterns of visualising, controlling, and exploiting colonial subjects. This global picture is often framed from metropole to periphery but this work suggests another way of seeing these processes: as messy and violent overlapping exchanges, parallels, and echoes, interlinking the myriad forms of colonial control across time and space.
The work comprises of a collage of photographs from IWM’s archive, laid across a map of the world, interconnected by various overlapping red metal wires.
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‘The Archive as an Emotional Body’, PARSE.
This article in the internationally renowned and innovative peer-reviewed arts journal PARSE. builds on the process of the project, positing that the archive is an ‘emotional body’. That is, it is an entity that responds emotionally to circumstances and attempts to disrupt its usual modes of operation.
The article discusses what happened during this project when the archive produced emotional responses, akin to fight or flight responses, closing up at certain points and opening up at others.
The article is forthcoming, expected publication October 2026.
Contributors
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Professor Mark Sealy, OBE
Mark Sealy is Professor of Photography-Rights and Representation at UAL and Director of Autograph (ABP). Sealy earned his PhD in photography and cultural violence from Durham University and has curated numerous major international exhibitions. He has been appointed as Artistic Director of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg and recently released his third book that critically engages with photography and race A Lens on Liberation.
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Dr Jack Bowman
Jack Bowman is a historian of anti-colonial visual culture and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UAL and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick. Their forthcoming book Writing against Empire unpacks the malleable networks of anti-colonial publishing in 1930s and 1940s London, and they have written upon the editorial career of V. K. Krishna Menon and the journal International African Opinion. They have also been the academic adviser on the IWM North Big Picture Show.
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Helen Mavin
Helen Mavin is Head of Photographs at IWM and is responsible for the care and strategic development of IWM’s substantial photographic collection. She has contributed to several major exhibitions and was Co-Investigator for the recent AHRC-funded ‘Provisional Semantics’ project which explored how museums and heritage organisations can develop ethical, equitable and transparent readings of the objects they hold.
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Craig Murray
Craig Murray is a Senior Curator at IWM. Based primarily at IWM Duxford, he is a member of the Cold War and late twentieth century conflict team with a specialist interest in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was the curator of the exhibition ‘Northern Ireland: Living with the Troubles’ at IWM London and IWM North.
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Lucy Sanderson
Lucy Sanderson is a multidisciplinary designer, Special Lecturer for Design in Art Direction at LCC and founder of Studio Lucy Sanderson. Studio Lucy Sanderson is a multidisciplinary design and research studio committed to promoting equality in environments through creative and research projects and Sanderson has previously worked with Kings College London, The Migration Museum, Royal College of Art, Tate Modern, and The Feminist Library, amongst many other collaborations.
Exploring the IWM Collections
Several of the geographies centred in the project have significant portions of their holdings digitised in IWM’s catalogue. Below are some key areas from which the project drew, highlighting the breadth of IWM’s holdings of ‘other narratives’.
If you are interested in viewing IWM's collections in person, visit the Research Room page for more information.
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HU 128614The Malayan 'Emergency'
The Malayan 'Emergency' (1948 to 1960) was a conflict between the British colonial authorities and the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).
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IWM MAU 489The Kenya 'Emergency'
The Kenya 'Emergency' (1952 to 1960) was a war between colonial authorities and Mau Mau, a movement primarily composed of Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru communities.
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IWM CT 126‘Rhodesian Bush War’, Zimbabwe
Conflict in and around the country that would become Zimbabwe centred around who had the right to form its government, who controlled the economy, and for whose benefit that economy was organised.
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IWM (MH 23513)‘Suez Crisis’, Egypt
The Suez Crisis in 1956 saw Britain along with France and Israel invaded Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal.
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IWM FKD 2952The Falklands ‘Conflict’, Falkland Islands
The Falklands Conflict (April to June 1982) was a short undeclared war between Argentina and Britain.
