Decolonizing May ’68: The Art of Protest in Post-Imperial London and Paris

A chance encounter on the steps of the Slade School of Fine Art in London brought together the fates of artists Vivan Sundaram (b. India, 1943-2022) and Jean-Loup Msika (b. Tunisia, 1943) in a fast friendship that saw Sundaram inviting Msika to stay with him at his commune on 154 Barnsbury Road in London. Sundaram, who was studying at the Slade, was in the midst of a series of paintings responding to May ’68, and Msika, who had been studying at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, had just been expelled from France for activities connected with the Atelier Populaire des Beaux Arts. Finding common ground in art and politics, Sundaram brought Msika to the Camden Poster Workshop, where Msika taught workshops, and where the two artists made anti-Apartheid posters that they pasted in Trafalgar Square in midnight guerrilla actions.

Taking the friendship between Sundaram and Msika as a starting point, this paper focuses on the articulation of a transnational anti-colonial and anti-racist culture of visual protest that emerged across post-Imperial London and Paris during the “long ’68.” It looks at the Camden Poster Workshop and the Atelier Populaire along with other examples, and considers how these movements were connected and catalyzed through the activities of artists from the decolonizing world who spent time in both capitals.

By linking the two cities and two empires to each other, and to larger networks of decolonial practice, this paper brings granularity to claims about the “global 1968” and makes a case for the centrality of decolonization to its history. Rather than considering these cities as separate, yet parallel eruptions of political and cultural activity, I examine the histories of artists circulating between the two capitals, and consider the ways in which the transversal and networked geographies produced by these movements created discourses of intersecting structural critique and an aesthetics of visual protest, as embodied by the Atelier populaire poster “3 continents 1 révolution.”