Steve McQueen’s Year 3 as anti-Brexit art: Factualizing Global London’s interculturalism through classroom photographs at the Tate Britain

Abstract

Citizenship, migration and urban belonging in mega-cities are infrequently discussed in relation to young members of society. When visually staged to reflect a rescaling of multicultural membership and optimism for the future, the classroom and its young learners become a testing ground for interculturalism. In Steve McQueen’s Year 3 photography installation at the Tate Britain in 2019, London school classrooms and its 7 and 8-year-old pupils raised the possibility that London’s kaleidoscopic and flourishing interculturalism offer greater conviviality and tolerance through multiethnic proximity in this learning milieu. Here primary schools in the capital seen in over 3,000 classroom photographs affixed to the marble walls of the Duveen Galleries offer what we call the “intercultural image.” The intercultural image promotes wholeness, urban bondedness and superdiversity through increased interpersonal communication. The result of McQueen’s Year 3 is a diverse portrait and allegory of an intensely changing social demographic that gave further credence to the moniker “Global London,” thus challenging at the time the Brexit narrative of anti-immigration and isolationism purported by conservative wings of the British media.

Introduction

The invention of photography during the 19th century forever changed the modern world and how we view and document our school classrooms. Inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s early development of the daguerreotype image of a Paris street in 1838 would immortalize this moment and, in the process, create a staid realism. The first photographic images of school classrooms came soon after, capturing students through still portraits frozen on collodion glass plates. This was made possible in part by the development of large printing practices that allowed the reproducibility of still images to be portable and thus this process became an attractive new service to promote group portraiture. By the 1840s, educational institutions, especially schools and universities, began to commission class portraits. Hirsch and Spitzer (2019) explore this early history of school photography, finding that:

Professional photographers, perceiving their potentially more widespread commercial appeal, began to promote and feature them within their repertoire of offerings. School photos could now be sold and archived not only for exhibition as sources of institutional history and pride but also as mementos of individual and group achievement for all portrayed students and for their families. (pp. 46–47)

Hirsch and Spitzer (2019) historicize this commercial history of photography and trace it to marginalized ethic groups who were forced into assimilationist poses for the camera to fulfil various social and educational functions. A sober assemblage of Anglo-European tradition for most children, whether treated fairly or not, each joined “a cohort and a generation sharing communal and a larger national environment and historical moment” (p. 26). Acknowledging social exclusion and discrimination perverting certain childhoods, other school photos captured more innocent mementos of completed (or attempted) completion of study and a student’s formative year captured in school time. Since the 1840s, individual images of schools and particularly classrooms in public and private education traditions still invite intellectual scrutiny today. We fast-forward and call attention here to classroom photos in the hands of one socially conscious artist, which through his compelling work, gives new discursive power to photographed children. British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen invited school children to take part in assembling both their individualization as participants in classroom photos for a large-scale art exhibition he was commissioned for, as well as their deindividualization understood via a rapidly changing urban community of same-aged young pupils in London. Here comparisons of their portraits to thousands of others highlight the production and presentation of deconstructing classroom photography not only for casual viewers but sociologists, media theorists, educationalists and art historians. In the process, McQueen redefines and expands the formal and ritualistic school photo found in mega-cities everywhere (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Artist Steve McQueen and his Year 3 (2019) photography installation: Tate Britain.

We see an opportunity to explore children as global Londoners in McQueen’s school photo exhibition entitled Year 3. Held at the Tate Britain in 2019, McQueen was given permission to capture London classroom portraits over a 1-year period. For this seminal installation he invited every Year 3 pupil in greater London—age 7 and 8 years old—to have their photograph taken by a team of specially trained photographers. The Tate Britain stated that this included “children from state primaries, independent schools, faith schools, special schools, pupil referral units and home-educated pupils” (Tate Museum, 2019). The photos themselves bear no reference to the names of the pupils, the schools, and the photographers themselves not only to protect these vulnerable youth, but also for the viewer to contemplate the images themselves as a vast collection of both utilitarian objects and transmitters of cultural memory. That young people have new agency (Streelasky 2020) in participating in art making and through these photos, taken as cohort-specific and thus seen in “proper posture,” their images can engender an understanding not only of their educational journey, but also a lived experience of interculturalism in the world’s most superdiverse city. Both are vital points to contemplate, as we negate the pedestrian archival purposes located in such depictions outside of the museum space. But we also remain cognizant to different regimes of visibility under obligatory participation: here, the photographic image can be “undermined, contested and destabilised through acts of dissembling, resistance and counter-strategies that drew on the conventions of honorific portraiture” (Baylis, 2018).

Another trope we interrogate in this essay is McQueen’s reminder to this at-the-time very young future generation of Londoners—and other children and adults who came to view Year 3—to be wary of the Brexit narrative dominating the British mediascape in the late 2010s. The Theresa May (2016–2019) and Boris Johnson (2019–2022) governments, in succession, had great successes in interlacing anti-Europe ideas and sentiments as an intricate set of relationships between the realms of media, culture, and identity (Black 2016). No doubt this exhibition can be considered a form of anti-Brexit art. Moreover, Year 3 moves away from the conservative messaging of isolation—that England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were exposed to in televised Parliamentary debates, national news, newspaper articles, think-tank white papers, public canvasing, social media—all under successive Tory political leadership. Fearmongering in tabloid newspapers, or “red tops” as they are colloquially referred to in the U.K., relentlessly pushed “Romaphobia” (Breazu and McGarry, 2024) about Romani groups’ invading quaint towns to vague threats from “enemies of the people” (Rone, 2023) connected to the 2015 European migrant crisis. Compounded with the 2016 Referendum and its fallout, racism toward minority ethnic Londoners is still prevalent (Phillips, 2023). This Brexit mediatic package was touted to supposedly display the benefits of “splendid isolation” (Maccaferri, 2019). In actuality, this was the decoupling of economic and cultural arrangements with Europe that was put into law. This exhibition opposes the global broker to all nations by these two Tory governments. Instead, McQueen’s school photos show the U.K. as a receiver of populations from across the world. Battling the turf rhetoric of a post-Brexit world by committed remainers living in London, including McQueen, Year 3 denotes not a “Global Britain” (Haugevik and Svendsen, 2023) but the importance still of the moniker “Global London” (Sassen, 2005, 2017; Wang and Lamb, 2024). We regard this megacity as relocalizing and delocalizing space for young and old Londoners to thus “build and preserve relational identity and ‘we-ness.’” (Somers, 2017) We see this “we-ness” expanding into art practices as much as it has been previously theorized in British and London-based global cinemas (Guha, 2015; Wagner and Lack, 2023). To be active and multicultural producers of images of superdiversity, London illustrates the complex relations between migrants, representation and rapid urbanization. In McQueen’s Global London, optimistically speaking, children raise the possibility that the capital’s density and its hundreds of ethnicities offer greater contact through proximity and conviviality with one another. Here primary schools in the capital offer what we call the intercultural image. For us, the intercultural image promotes wholeness, urban bondedness and scale through increased interpersonal communication and the resulting relationships that form across diverse social demographics.

In addition to our analysis of McQueen’s Tate Britain exhibition, we provide some context to his multimedia metier and specifically his fictional and documentary work that both have prominent aesthetic links and social concerns to his artwork that makes him a singular and undisputed master of multidisciplinary art (Kim and Moran 2020). This focus on personal reflections on Black British culture to more universal themes in his Hollywood corpus acknowledges a strand in his work that reflect global interconnectedness, while lately he defies the “apparent conventionality of school pictures” (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2019: 7) in non-conventional London.

Factualizing London’s interculturalism, some examples

Despite Brexit’s real disruption to shared sentiments of togetherness in Global London, much visual evidence can put to the test notions of conviviality, inclusion, and respect for diversity when Year 3 was opened to the public. Its micro-utopias of sociability are then presented in these primary school classrooms as a visual metaphor for a global society at large. In McQueen’s classroom photos we can imagine formative identities being made and remade daily on a level more succinct with multilingual and polycultural encounters. It also reminds us that for many centuries, “London is internationally recognized as a city which has provided a sanctuary for communities and individuals fleeing conflict and discrimination since the 17^th century,” writes Dina Mehmedbegovic (2012). Once passed as a referendum, Brexit complicated this sanctuary idealism for London and the rest of the United Kingdom. Like McQueen, we do not claim to speak for these non-adult subjects as sitters for this photographic installation, rather we believe that Year 3 conveys a utopic impulse for the intermingling of intercultural habitation still sustained and flourishing after the U.K. left the European Union. We further notions that art and particularly McQueen’s work can be a “collective reimagining of cultural citizenship, home-place, and belonging” to take a cue from Pieterse (2021: 5). We also acknowledge such a view is not immune to the antagonisms of art’s commodification; to xenophobic attitudes by alt-right and some endorsers of Brexit in the United Kingdom; and on-going debates about London’s highly integrated schools under Brexit and worldwide deglobalization trends.

One empirical method to factualize London’s interculturalism is to sift through big data immigration demographics that pertain to how immigrants are processed into the county and specifically Global London. Landing cards retrieved from Heathrow airport Immigration Officers in the capital are archived by the Home Office. This becomes a central way for the United Kingdom to verify and keep track of its higher proportion of legal entries at its borders. Hidden in these statistics are stories about those who sought unimpeded access to this new nation beyond their birth nationality. Mobility is key to a host nation’s flourishing multiethnic communities, but in contrast to that ideal is the reality that countries must also reckon with illegal entrants, exilic and statelessness applicants, as well as peripatetic visitors all of whom can be rejected. The latter associations placed on portions of non-national individuals and communities looking for better lives remain just that, a desire but sadly one that is often an unattainable outcome. Thus, when those who attempt to cross borders to request residence are routinely rejected, the notion of mobile citizenship is called into question.

This social phenomenon of impeded mobility is also refracted by popular media representations that established tropes of this type. Within the contemporary period of globalization, artists and filmmakers have created what TJ Demos (2013) calls the “migrant image.” Demos’ (2013) migrant image demonstrates the ways in which marginal groups who travel abroad, referred to as exilic, nomads, and refugees have had their mobilization efforts transformed into images (p. xv). Consequently, marginal groups often have little or no agency in how they are represented by the mainstream media of their host nations, yet capitals like London remain the exception. For example, The Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film and Video Collective created Black British and diaspora film and video art during profound unrest in Thatcher’s England (1979–1990) regarding issues of immigration and discrimination against ethnic minorities. These collectives profoundly influenced McQueen and his earlier work dealing with Black British notions of race and class (Austin 2023). Yet when the “migrant image” of those in London morphs into what Hall ([1989] 1996) famously claimed are first generation immigrant children who experience “multicultural drift”, Hall’s metaphor of drift conjures the undulating waves of globalization: Images of people hailing from the Global South, where the literal sea vessels that carried new arrivals onto the shores of the U.K. are well documented.

Possessed by an unflagging optimism, McQueen’s Year 3 intercultural imagining in Global London’s primary school classrooms shows the complexities of societies rapidly changing due to immigration, global media and interreliance (Schröder et al., 2023). The increased presence of ethnic groups—comingling and interacting beyond co-existence in countries and cities—replaces “multiculturalist conceptions of natural distinctiveness and cultural fixity” (Modood, 1998) for interculturalist notions of interdependency and interconnectedness. We see intercultures as “situationally emergent and co-constructed phenomena that rely both on relatively definable cultural norms and models as well as situationally evolving features” (Kecskes, 2014: 14). Culture, most would agree, is never static and extends beyond political discourse and hegemonies of control accounted for in commercial and social media. Within Global London’s unrivalled status as a superdiverse city, despite its imperialist past, this place does exemplify a multifaceted world of identity found in communities young and old (Wagner and Lack 2023). McQueen’s interculturalism has a buoyance and sanguineness in contrast to his earlier documentary work. Polemical work like his 17-minute film Gravesend (The Renaissance Society, 2007) whose visual and poetic structure evokes the “trajectory of servitude” visible in Africa “from the colonial era to today’s anomic zone of neocolonial violence” (Demos, 2013: 25). In a somber fashion, Gravesend calls attention to the demand for the mineral coltan that is more precious than diamonds for making cell phones and computer screens. 80% of the world’s supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (The Renaissance Society, 2007). Year 3’s bright outlook shines in a world where neoliberal globalization’s endless drive for profit and expendable labor in Global South contrasts the adult African male’s experience of inhumane conditions toiling in coltan mines; those lives in Gravesend are sadly placed second in value to their extractionist labor which is then compounded by issues of non-unionized labor and environmental damage that excessive mining causes. McQueen remains very much a “storyteller for a disenfranchised people” (O’Donoghue, 2021), but this focus also extends to people not just working but also moving into adulthood. Younge (2023) reports on this earlier strand of McQueen’s work as “dispatches from the diaspora” which includes Black British communities as much as the larger BAME demographic and those in-between. Younge continues important research about the ever-changing “ethnic composition” in Global London “which unravels the multivalent, interrelation and affective senses,” of the city being “landscapes of whiteness” (Watson and Saha, 2013: 3). But one cannot help but find the innocence and curiosity of 7 and 8-year-old children fascinating and how they see the world anew in McQueen’s most gentle and hopeful work yet.

In other ways, McQueen’s choices in terms of sites of work and social interaction remain central to his metier and sociocultural mindset. In this regard, we can link Gravesend to his Hollywood film, 12 Years a Slave (2013). The film is based on an historical memoir written by Solomon Nothrop who was an American of mixed race that was abducted in Washington D.C. and then enslaved for 12 years in Louisiana during the 1840s. It features plantation slave labor in the Louisiana cotton fields central to the narrative and historic conditions of the time. Earning McQueen the distinction of being the first Black British Producer to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, demonstrates that space matters to him—workspaces and learning spaces alike—whether his artwork places us in a cotton field, boardroom, prison cell or now classroom.

Other British media that have made the classroom famous are the postwar romps dubbed “British boarding school films” that were popular in the U.K. before the global popularity of the Harry Potter franchise. Those filmic genres are, of course, less dramatic than McQueen’s Year 3 photographic installation. As Andrew Roberts notes: “The Harry Potter films are the most commercially successful entries in the time-honoured British boarding school genre’ and ‘the world of such stories is reassuringly unchanging’, with ‘the Hogwarts world of midnight escapades, school sports, rival houses and a wise headmaster surrounded by Malvolio-like teachers familiar to anyone who has seen the boarding school films of the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s’” (Roberts, 2007: 47; also see Nel, 2009). Not lost in the fantasy realms of wizards and goblins, McQueen’s Year 3 is romantic in its steadfast appeals to early education’s “methodical socialization” (Durkheim, 1956; White, 2010). A structured process through which children internalize social norms and values, which are beautifully encapsulated in Year 3. In this context, multicultural values represent a vital component of methodical socialization—the deliberate process through which children learn to coexist, empathize, and cooperate across lines of cultural difference. Such early instruction fosters tolerance and prepares young learners to navigate the complexities of pluralistic societies with understanding and respect for others. The classroom, both materially and metaphorically, operates as a site where notions of belonging, difference, and coexistence are continually rehearsed and put into practice.

Viewing the British primary school classroom: On screen, in museum wings, and on streets corners and London Tube platforms

To contextualize this further, it is essential to consider global educational perspectives that similarly foreground intercultural understanding, community engagement, and the development of empathetic citizenship among young learners (de Block and Buckingham, 2007).

According to Oxfam (2015), international school and classroom-based partnerships play a vital role in helping children recognize their contributions as citizens of the global community, and enable children to develop deeper understandings of their global peers’ everyday lives. Through these international partnerships, children are provided with opportunities to appreciate the similarities between people everywhere and value diversity, understand the global context of their local lives, and develop skills that will enable them to address and combat injustice, stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. (p. 146)

Not only did such a message resonate in the cavernous halls of Duveen Galleries in the Tate Britain but on billboards across the city, constituting a public art event that even the most ardent conservatives could not avoid in 2019. The scale of this undertaking is remarkable: the press release for the Tate Britain claimed that McQueen’s class photos were “displayed on 600 billboards posted at roadsides, railways, and underground stations across Global London’s thirty-three boroughs” and that “it was estimated that almost one in every 10 people in the city would see at least one of the group portraits.” ¹ McQueen’s foray into billboard art continues a widening practice of appropriating billboards from their original commercial function of turning the public landscape of the city for pedestrians and the highway for motorists into an inescapable advertising spectacle. Instead, billboard artists seek to co-opt these largescale canvases to create an artistic and critical discourse directly with communities and passerbys and commuters who exist within their presence. Organizations such as The Billboard Poetry Project and The Detroit Billboard Project have utilized billboards to integrate artistic expression with social education as a community endeavor. Earlier, more polemical appropriations of prime real estate electronic billboards in Times Square saw Jenny Holzer’s anti-neoliberal messages about rampant consumption, with her iconic series, Truism (1977–1979). Banal sayings like “Abuse of Power Should Come As No Surprise,” “Money Creates Taste,” and “People Are Nuts If They Think They Control Their Lives” in central Manhattan were displayed as texts on electronic signboards to surging crowds that largely were oblivious to these messages (Petersen, 2005). McQueen, though less polemical, forces viewers across Global London to reflect, even fleetingly, on the power of classroom photos as evidence of a hyper-diverse city.

McQueen and the Tate Britain’s action to place photographic images on billboards outdoors and indoors within the context of shared public spaces also counters the traditional and enclosed cultural arena of white cube spaces that can detach its art collections from their real-world associations. Nevertheless, as we know and perhaps underappreciate, the museum has been central to the social, ethical, and political formation of the citizenry of modernizing nation-states. At the same time, museum practices have played a fundamental role in fabricating, maintaining, and disseminating many of the essentialist and historicist fictions which comprise the social realties of the modern world (Preziosi, 2006). The Tate Britain is actively decolonizing content and stretching the boundaries of art exhibited, despite its regal spaces and stuffiness historically to the so-called progressiveness of its sibling institution the Tate Modern and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).

As a kind of contemporary Janusz Korczak, a public figure known as “socialist, paediatrician, and one of the world’s first child rights advocates” (Kapur, 2023), McQueen through his exhibition empowers children to think about their representation and advocate their often muted, less listened to voices and ideas. Increasingly, as a significant population within London and as part of a wider global community, children are also global citizens. This is part of a wider element Jonathan Josefsson and John Wall see as “children and youth [that] are impacted by and participants in the full range of contemporary processes of globalization” (Josefsson and Wall, 2020). Their voices and experiences are particularly relevant in our contemporary age of greying populations in developed countries such as South Korea, Japan, and China in East Asia, for example, and USA, Canada, Australia and several European nations. They face a growing decrease of their demographics due to a generation of global disenfranchised youth who cannot attain the same economic security and independence as their parents and therefore forgo having and raising their own children altogether. Year 3 promotes, unabashedly, a stronger sense of a whole community, in terms of “societal cohesion and national citizenship” (Meer and Modood, 2011). This establishes London’s globality in yet another way, in conjunction with media such as film and its claims of Global London (Wagner and Lack, 2023). A mega-city via these thousands of young multilingual, cosmopolitan, polyvalent youth in photos thus represents a superdiversity perhaps better than any other city in comparative terms. In the words of Tate organizers of Year 3, McQueen’s exhibition “offers us a glimpse of the capital’s future, a hopeful portrait of a generation to come.”

While London’s cinematic collection of films made by or about foreigners that live in its metropolis is substantial, a brief sampling here is useful. For example: Everywhere and Nowhere (Huda, 2011) is a multicultural British film that focuses on a young British Pakistani who is torn between traditions and his talent as a London-based DJ. Brick Lane (Gavron, 2007) brings together a rural Bangladesh young woman and a middle-aged, educated man for an arranged marriage in East London in the aftermath of racial tensions brought on by the War on Terror. A decade earlier, Foreign Moon (Zhang, 1996) depicts the hardships of three Chinese migrants who make their way to London. These Global London films also complement McQueen’s ultimate expression of superdiversity that is not fully cognizant of many of the population’s precarious existence. Faltering under an unforgiving neoliberal economy has made Global London one of the most expensive cities to live in and the playground for the ultra-wealthy. These films, if taken together provide a fuller (but incomplete) picture of cross-cultural integration. Furthermore, for Daniel Borselli “McQueen did not intend to seek for himself as an artist a role of evangelising benefactor, but rather to invoke, agitate and ultimately confront the political class that was supposed to solve the structural problems to which Year 3, for its part, offered visibility.” This undertaking of making visible such structural problems is a crucial aspect of McQueen’s artistic and social enterprises which we will now examine.

Collectively, these practices affirm Year 3 as an intervention that reimagines the politics of representation within both public and institutional spaces (Ring 2020). McQueen’s decision to transpose children’s portraits from the enclosed gallery of the Tate Britain to the open streets of Global London was not merely a logistical or aesthetic gesture; it was a deeply civic one. On billboards, bus stops, and train stations, the faces of thousands of Year 3 pupils, diverse in ethnicity, religion, and background, suddenly became part of the city’s visual language and landscape. Passersby encountered these portraits not as distant art objects, but as living presences woven into their daily routes. Consider, for instance, the experience of a commuter in Brixton, who glances up from her phone and finds herself smiling at the bright, unguarded faces of children gazing back at her. Or a teacher in Tower Hamlets who recognizes the school uniform of his own students among the thousands of faces in the project. These small, human moments, intimate yet collective, transformed McQueen’s installation into a kind of emotional cartography. The city became a map of shared recognition and belonging, tracing how childhood, identity, and urban life interlace across Global London’s intercultural terrain. Through this act of redistribution, from the museum’s sanctified walls to the raw openness of the metropolis, McQueen invited the public to rethink spectatorship and public citizenry itself. Viewing became participation; observation turned into empathy. The portraits, while silent, spoke powerfully about who gets to be visible, and where. In this way, Year 3 expanded art’s social function beyond contemplation toward connection, inscribing the innocence and multiplicity of childhood directly into the city’s consciousness. McQueen, in effect, redrew the cultural map of Global London, one child’s face at a time.

Steve McQueen’s cartography of childhood

Looking to forms of extremity related to other school photo subjects such as the starving Jewish children in the Lodz ghetto, Japanese children imprisoned in California concentration camps during World War II, and segregated native Americans in Virginia, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer historicize how school photos function to document social life and agents of transformation in a grim manner unlike McQueen. Though less contextualized, McQueen’s school photo installation offers an institutional and larger national, indeed an urban matrix in which an entire cohort in a city “plays a key ideological role” in addition to soft skills that “teach children to read and write that provide them elements of a national literary and scientific culture and, especially, of its versions of history” (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2019: 27). More socioculturally concerned, McQueen’s Year 3 embodies a complex visual index about intergroup relationships among children. Commissioning nearly 3175 schools to take part in this enterprise with 76,146 pupils photographed by Tate professional photographers, what emerges is a cornucopia of young Londoners full of so many varied facial expressions, body types, skins tones and hair styles together with a mindboggling number of saxony school colors from the garish neon pinks and butter yellows to regal golds and ecclesiastic purples, and everything in-between.

Cartography makes visual not only physical geography from a bird’s point-of-view in the form of maps but can also reflect or model a social reality or phenomenon through spatial information. Harmon (2004), in the introduction to her compilation book of various subjective external and internal mappings You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, points out “there are maps that find their essence in some other goal than just taking us from point A to point B. They are a vehicle for the imagination” (p. 10). Maps also are not static entities but are portraits of topographies at a specific time and place that even with their “objective” encapsulations of national boundaries, forests, oceans, continents, demographics, time zones, mountains, populations, volumes, depths and scales, will inevitably become outdated over the passage of time. Therefore, a map is a snapshot in time of a human perspective of scale that exists beyond personal or even socially consensual perception.

Steve McQueen’s fascination with cartography comprises an essential component of his artistic vision which traverses various mediums from photography, film, installations, billboards, and critical writings. For example, his historical anthology Small Axe series comprises of five films broadcasted on the BBC in 2020 that together represent a fractured cinematic chronicle of the Black immigrant experience of the West Indies population based in Notting Hill, London and other areas of the United Kingdom from 1968 to 1974. The series also depicts three traumatic events that the West Indies communities experienced: the 1971 trial of the “Mangrove Nine”, The Brixton Uprising in 1981, and the still unsolved New Cross fire of 1981 which he also explores in greater detail with his three-part documentary series Uprising (2021) that was released a year after. Olusoga (2020) notes that the series “raises difficult questions not just about the history of British racism. It also stands as an indictment of the UK film and television industry and its failure to value Black stories and harness Black talent” (p. 148). The Small Axe Series constitutes a cinematic artifact of an immigrant experience rarely shown in British mainstream media or elsewhere. We argue that it is a form of cinematic cartography. While cartography literally can mean the process of making a map in mathematical terms, mapping can also mean “an operation that associates each element of a given set (the domain with one or more elements of a second set (the range)”. For example, Lover’s Rock (2020) in the series was inspired by his Aunt Molly’s personal experiences growing up in East London in the 1980s who attended “blues parties” Saturday nights in Ladbroke Grove (Lokke 2025). The film primarily features a celebratory one-night soiree that portrays the joy but also the necessity of a discriminated community to create an intimate and shared space of their own making. This social space attempts to exist beyond the scrutiny of the authorities and the larger population denying them their freedom of expression. McQueen expresses in the Criterion Collection audio commentary of the film that part of his desire to make the film was to take the first step to map out the different reggae sound systems that existed during the seventies and eighties in London and elsewhere to demonstrate its influence, variety, and homegrown DIY culture. As such, he is putting a metaphorical marker on the cultural map and audio history of Black London in this period.

In contrast to Small Axe, McQueen’s recent documentary Occupied City (2023) is literally a cinematic atlas based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1040-1945 by his wife Bianca Stigter, in which McQueen shows images of contemporary Amsterdam before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic juxtaposed against narration delivered by Melanie Hyams about the city’s occupation under Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945 resulting in the extermination of much of its Jewish population by the Nazis and their collaborators. Her narration recounts the past events of the oppression and horrors of the occupation but also sites of resistance that occurred at each address of the city featured on screen. This juxtaposition between sound that recounts the city’s past with imagery of the city’s present competes for the viewer’s attention over time. Rapold (2023) points out that “rather than a facile sense of people today obliviously living on graveyards, what comes across is the fragility of mundane daily routines and the crushing feeling of absence that comes to lurk everywhere” (p. 159). His 36-hour version of the film covers the entire contents of the book with over 2100 addresses and was projected silently on a façade of the Rijksmuuseum in Amsterdam from September 2025 until January 2026 while also screened in the museum’s auditorium on selected days (Rijksmuseum, 2025).

Year 3 as an installation provides another form of cartography by mapping out deep social structures through the surface structure of the collection of the classroom photographic portrait. The average age of the children featured in McQueen’s Year 3 range from 7 to 8 years of age. Asked in an interview by the American curator Hamza Walker why he chose this age group, McQueen responded that “this age is a stage of limbo. Until then children lead a utopian life to some extent, before they start to be recognised and recognise people in terms of race, gender and class. At that point I think children are just becoming conscious of the things” (p. 104). Year 3 is not only a catalogue of a cross section of youth becoming cognizant of their social and economic status in the British educational system but also a compilation of their aspirations for their imagined futures and place in British society. In documenting McQueen’s static classroom portraits, many of the young participants were able recite their names to the camera and asked what they want to be when they grow up. Year 3 in its entirety, comprises a mosaic of youthful desire and potential of a generation about to embark upon their formative journey into society. Wallis (2025) aptly observes that children’s futures are often “determined by factors beyond their control or dictated by ability, opportunity, luck or happenstance.” Parallels can be found here with McQueen’s own personal history: “a dyslexic child, he was considered fit only for manual labour by his secondary school—a salutary reminder that a simplistic assessment of a child’s [cognitive] ability at any one point in time provides very few clues to their true potential” (p. 160). Wallis refers to the last film in Small Axe anthology Education that is a dramatization of McQueen’s experience in the British education system at the time for those students deemed mentally and/or socially unfit to participate in further education. McQueen curatorial enterprise in Year 3 selects, organizes, and provides a framework to present the myriad statements and images of the children as an intercultural composite of young individuals generously participating and offering their own images and statements to the viewing public.

As mentioned earlier in this article, one striking effect of Year 3 on the viewer is the display of the multitude of different skin colors of the pupils themselves both in terms of skin pigmentation and range of ethnic diversity. The Tate installation as a whole seeks to embrace the equal partnering of an ethnically diverse society beyond the categories of race as much as it is opposed to the hierarchies of color. Hall (2018) describes colorism as “the practice of measuring the human worth of light-skinned and dark-skinned populations in reference to their evolutionary status. Said status is assessed relative to their dress, their cultural practices, their physical attractiveness and their ‘superior’ race marital potential” (p. 2140). The question then is how does the viewer regard Year 3 as an expression of ethnic cultures categorized by race or that of a diverse Global London culture that supersedes racial categories? The contribution of McQueen’s work to British art and film culture, to quote the jazz singer Lucky Gordon “We brought some damn color to this country” (Olusoga, 2020: 157), is to first visualize the Black experience in Britain specifically and be recognized and accepted as an aspect of the fabric of Global London and British culture, but then to move beyond racial politics and the hierarchy of colorism to focus on people, to create intercultural images of Global London’s populace. Cumming (2019) observes that behind the symmetry of the composition of the school portraits, the school uniforms, and the rows of students aligned with their teacher, upon closer examination one notices the different facial expressions, moods, clothing and body language of each child: “This is a lovely paradox: a mass observation project. . .that allows each and every pupil to single themselves out.” This wonderful sentiment addresses the humanistic crux of this massive project, that we argue that the intercultural image embodies: a mosaic of individuals sharing the same space and experience that exceeds racial politics.

Conclusion

In a world where it is increasingly common to be dismissive of multicultural policies and the superdiversity that drives them, Year 3 challenges notions of “Little England” as an inward looking, Eurosceptic label (Maguire, 1993: 314) further pronounced after Brexit’s attempt to dethrone the globality of London. Such degradation perhaps holds up for some who live outside of Global London, that felt left behind in globalization’s gallop forward for decades, but for those in Global London, such a deglobalizing account seems more ploy; a disingenuous strategy that ignores the city’s illustrious history as leader in finance, culture, media, education and immigration initiatives. Yet, because Global London is beset by rapid influxes of diverse new populations often from less fortunate economic nations or backgrounds, these multitudes struggle to find a foothold and home in London’s cosmopolitan spaces.

We took a broad approach to a holistic picture of Global London’s learning spaces carefully pried opened by McQueen. These environs become visual motif and trope, whether it is public schools, comprehensives and free schools or primary schools, social experience germinates here for these future citizens of the world by their very participation in the project. Following this educational thread, Borselli (2022) sees McQueen’s photographic installation as a reminder of the “progressive financial cuts and the downsizing of arts teaching in compulsory education” (p. 73). An ethnographic truth to the city’s superdiversity, with its natural distinctiveness and cultural fixity, alongside views of these portraits of Year 3 classrooms we submit they are imbued with the proof of existing interculturalism. Moreover, McQueen’s Year 3 encapsulates the visual and moral complexities of Global London’s superdiverse identity. Through its composite imagery of children from multiple ethnic and social backgrounds, the project transforms the city’s young demographics into a living archive of intercultural encounters. Transcending an installation about youthful optimism, spread across Global London in 2019 on billboards and Tube stops, Year 3 underscores the enduring potential of art to cultivate civic imagination and social empathy in times of political fragmentation and cultural uncertainty. In an age of cultural globalization’s newfound obscurity, Year 3 emanates optimism, utopian sentiment and a Global London narrative heterogeneity.