You have not been given the words to describe how multiple yourselves are

2019, Sin Wai Kin

Jane

2006, Raqib Shaw

Shaw has copied Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII, and playfully embellished it with dramatic explosions and animal features. What may appear as a desecration is regarded by Shaw as a homage that emphasises how this historical figure has been supplanted by her iconic portrait. ‘Henry and Holbein have been dead for centuries and so will we pass away, but the symbols remain’, he has said.

Gallery label, September 2008

Noora’s Room

2020, Farah Al Qasimi

Gallery label, April 2025

Vivian’s Garden

2017, Rosalind Nashashibi

Vivian’s Garden 2017 is a thirty-minute colour film with sound that depicts the relationship between two Swiss /Austrian émigré artists who are mother and daughter – Elisabeth Wild (born 1922) and Vivian Suter (born 1949). The film was shot and is set in the connected houses the two women share in a jungle garden in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that seems to be a site of both refuge and fear. The home and garden are places of terror as well as healing, and the film outlines how, for example, a recent problem with a criminal neighbour caused the pair to be under curfew and threats, while catastrophic floods, kidnappers and fear of intruders are ever-present. On the other hand, they lead an idyllic life, making art in beautiful surroundings, living simply, being taken care of and taking care of each other.

Sikán

1991, Belkis Ayón

Sikán 1991 is a four-part collagraphic print on paper originally conceived in 1991 and printed in 1992 in an edition of four of which this copy is number four. The four sheets abut and combine to make one image depicting a three-quarter-length portrait of a female figure seated on a black throne. The figure represents Princess Sikán who is the central protagonist in a story that is used as the basis for the ‘La sociedad secreta Abakuá’ (the Abakuá Secret Society), an all-male, Afro-Cuban belief-system that came to Cuba through the African slave trade and developed to become one of the four main religious-cultural groups of the country. Ayón’s depictions of Abakuan topics are interwoven with her own personal identifications and allegorically represent the struggles of female existence within the patriarchal society of her native Cuba. The origins of the rituals practiced by the Abakuá can be found in the story of Princess Sikán but as the Abakuá have few traditions of figurative representation, Ayón was free to create her own visual language. An important part of this was placing the female figure of Sikán as a central part of the history and in doing so subtly challenging the all-male focus of the group. This was important for Ayón who modelled the silhouette and eyes of Sikán on her own body stating that: ‘ I see myself as Sikán … an observer, an intermediary and a revealer ... Sikán is a transgressor, and as such I see her, and I see myself.’ (Ayón, quoted in Mandri 2006, p.104.)This print is a companion piece to another that depicts Sikán’s boyfriend Mokongo using a similar four-part format (Mokongo 1991, printed 1992 [Tate T15906]). In the Abakuá story, Sikan discovers and then divulges to Mokongo a secret that she hears from a sacred fish, which leads to a war between tribes and eventually she is sacrificed for her transgression. Ayón represents Sikán with a fishbowl in her lap and a white serpent slithering over her left shoulder, sitting in front of a backdrop crowned by a large white fish. In Mokongo the snake-like form is draped across the leg of the figure. Although the snake could refer to the mystic powers of a diviner who keeps watch over Sikán, Ayón is also playing upon Christian iconography of Eve and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, and another female figure also blamed for a transgression. Sikán is also the central figure in Ayón’s six-sheet print The Supper 1991 (Tate T15985), another work that places the female figure at the centre of an image that combines Abakuá culture and Christian iconography.Ayón often used different versions of the stories associated with Abakuá and wrote that it was not necessary for the viewer to have any knowledge of the subject. The artist herself was an atheist and had no familial connections to Abakuá practices, but found in them themes for a wider exploration of spirituality, politics and culture. She stated:

bystander #23

2016, printed 2020, Mari Katayama

bystander #23 is a performative self-portrait made by the artist from the wider series bystander, which comprises twenty-four works in total. bystander #14 is also in Tate’s collection (Tate P82669). In these photographs Katayama is wearing a soft sculpture of her own design comprised of stuffed textile arms in various flesh colours. Some represent Katayama’s own hands and arms, others those of villagers in the community in which she made the work. All are stitched with small pearls and decorated with white lace. In bystander #23 Katayama is shown close up, seated on soft furnishings. The sculpture is draped around her shoulders and torso, and her legs are bare. In bystander #14 Katayama appears to wear this sculpture as a skirt, as she lays on the beach. A large soft sculpture of her legs is just behind her and the sea is in the background.

The Moon Has Ascended Between Us

1976, Obiora Udechukwu

Les Bijoux I

2002, Maud Sulter

In these performative self-portraits, Sulter re-imagines herself as Jeanne Duval (c.1820–c.1862). Duval was a Black actress and dancer, and the lover and muse of 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Sulter produced a large amount of research on Duval. She was particularly interested in the lack of knowledge surrounding her, as with so many Black women throughout history. She said: ‘My ongoing visual fascination with Jeanne Duval began in 1988 with a visceral response to a Nadar photograph captioned Unknown Woman. There she stared at me willing me to give her a name, an identity, a voice. So for over a decade I have been image-making with her in mind.’ Sulter’s work uncovers forgotten histories of Black women and their frequent exoticisation. She also explores the enduring cultural connections between Europe and West Africa.

Gallery label, October 2022

The Affair

1987–8, Bhajan Hunjan

Hunjan notes that her work is ‘about my experiences, women, and in particular Asian women’. She often depicts the subjects of her paintings partially screened behind wood, metal or foliage. For the artist, these compositions signify the degrees of physical and mental enclosure felt by South Asian women in the UK who struggle to express themselves while conforming to social expectations and cultural conventions. Alongside her art practice and role organising exhibitions, Hunjan worked with a South Asian women’s refuge in Reading and ran community art groups and workshops for school children. She discussed this work in Spare Rib, stating, ‘I’m there as a role model for someone who might want to express themselves just a little, I can’t resolve anything, but I can sow a seed.’

Gallery label, November 2023

Self-Portrait with Badges

1961, Peter Blake

In traditional portraits, props and clothing often communicate the interests and status of the sitter. Peter Blake plays with this convention in this self-portrait. His jeans, denim jacket (rare in Britain at the time), badges and magazine featuring Elvis Presley all demonstrate his fascination with North American culture. Blake’s work often involves collage and imagery borrowed from popular culture. At this time this connected him with younger painters at the Royal College of Art, where he had studied. This included Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Frank Bowling and David Hockney, all featured in this gallery.

Gallery label, September 2023

Self-Portrait

1979, Paul Dash

Self-Portrait 1979 is a small-scale portrait in oil paint on hardboard that depicts the artist’s head and bust, his left hand holding a paint brush poised over a palette. The bespectacled subject stares directly out at the viewer wearing a blue sweater over a red collared shirt, a green and black cravat, a medallion and an iridescent yellow cap, set against a dark green and black patterned background edged in dark brown panels.

My Grandmother Pitseolak Drawing

2001–2, Annie Pootoogook

Self Portrait as My Sister Jane Wearing

2003, Gillian Wearing CBE

Wearing’s photographs explore how public and private identities of ordinary people are self-fashioned and documented. In her portraits and self-portraits she blurs the line between reality and fiction. For her series Album 2003, Wearing reconstructed old family snapshots using silicone masks fabricated with the help of experts from Madame Tussauds. By putting a version of someone else’s face on hers she is metaphorically ‘seizing’ their identity. Here Wearing wears a dress her sister wore in the 1980s. The only bits of Wearing that can be seen are her eyes and teeth.

Gallery label, July 2017

Members’ Club, Whitechapel, London

1950s, printed 2012, Bandele ‘Tex’ Ajetunmobi

This is one of a group of black and white photographs in Tate’s collection by Bandele Ajetunmobi – widely known as ‘Tex’ – in which he documented immigrant communities in the East End of London in the 1950s and 1960s, often focusing on the multi-racial nature of the area. The two photographs entitled Members’ Club, Whitechapel, London (Tate P14368 and P14370) date from the 1950s and are early documents of a multi-cultural London in the post-war years, at a time when a growing number of men and women were immigrating to Britain from the former colonies. They depict a musician and a mixed ethnicity couple in a club in the Whitechapel area, where many immigrants from the Caribbean settled. These types of venues were shaped by and for black people, but from the start were also frequented by white people. As the art historian Kobena Mercer has noted, in Britain ‘the nightlife surrounding black music was always a cross-cultural affair’ (Mercer 2012, p.15).

Baroda

c.1970, Jyoti Bhatt

This is one of a group of black and white photographs in Tate’s collection by the Indian printmaker, painter and photographer Jyoti Bhatt (see Tate P14296–P14300 and P81231–P81235). They trace Bhatt’s photographic practice from an early stage and represent the development of a style which combined keen observation with inventive formal experimentation. From 1950 to 1959 Bhatt trained as a painter and muralist at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) in Baroda (now Vadodara) in Gujarat – a major centre for modern and contemporary artistic practice in India. In 1956 he saw the seminal exhibition of photography Family of Man, toured by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and curated by photographer Edward Steichen (1879–1973), in Ahmedabad and began to experiment with photography himself the next year. Throughout his career, and alongside an extensive practice as a printmaker and painter, Bhatt sustained his engagement with both the formal and material aspects of photography, which he learned through experimenting with technique and compositional elements. His early images, such as Feroz Katpitia as Salvador Dalí, Baroda c.1959 (Tate P81232), relate to the modernist Bauhaus experiments of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) and led to the development of his mature style which featured double exposures and diptychs involving portraiture, nature and abstract subjects.

Three Graces

2021, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Dance to the End of Love

2011, Akram Zaatari

Dance to the End of Love 2011 is a video installation by the Lebanese filmmaker and photographer Akram Zaatari comprising four projections with sound and lasting twenty-two minutes. It is made up of found YouTube footage of Arab youths that have filmed themselves and uploaded their films on the internet. Referring to this work and other related video pieces, Zaatari has noted that ‘all of these films were produced on the eve of what is today referred to as the “Arab Uprising” [or Arab Spring]’ (quoted in MUSAC/MUAC 2011, p.73). Seen from this perspective, the work explores the potential of the internet, and specifically of social media platforms such as YouTube, as spaces that are both intimate and public, as well as the production and sharing of individual experience in parallel with major political and social events.

Chiddy Doing Rene’s Hair

2019, printed 2021, Rene Matić

Untitled from the series Reflections of the Black Experience

1986, printed 2010, Sunil Gupta

Gupta was an active figure in the cultural politics of London in the 1980s, notably through the British Black Arts movement and Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers). In his photographs he explores the identity of people who are marginalised due to their race, sexuality or country of origin. Coronet Cinema, Notting Hill Gate is an autobiographical image. It shows a couple (Gupta and his white lover) posing outside a cinema advertising the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette, the story of a romance between a south Asian man and a white man.

Gallery label, September 2018

Notting Hill Couple

1967, Charlie Phillips OBE

Razorbill

2020, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Razorbill 2020 is a small-scale oil painting of a single female figure with closely cropped hair. Her mouth is open as though caught mid-speech or song. Her upper body is clothed in near black, with a feathered ruffle at the collar. Her right forearm and left elbow rest on a tabletop. The motif of the carnivalesque ruff is one that reappears in Yiadom-Boakye’s work from 2009 onwards, in a number of paintings titled with bird names such as Les Corbeaux 2018, Greenfinch 2012 and Skylark 2010. Razorbill is closely related to these in its tones but is markedly different in its shift towards the looser brushwork and warmer palette that characterises Yiadom-Boakye’s work of 2020.

The Sitter

2002, Barbara Walker MBE RA

Sitter 2002 is an oil painting depicting a young girl wearing a white shirt sitting on the floor having her hair braided by a woman in a red dress seated on a cream-coloured sofa behind her. The painting is composed as a cropped view of the two female figures, where the focus is on the sitter’s pensive face and we only see the shoulders, hands and knees of the woman seated behind her. Most of the background is taken up by the sofa. The artist’s niece Zipporah modelled for the painting, and the artist herself was the model for the woman. Painted in a restricted palette of warm, contrasting tones of red, white, orange, cream, navy and brown, the composition and highlights on the sitter’s face at its centre draw the viewer’s focus right into the scene. The folds of the woman’s red dress and the creases of the sofa are also points of interest that evoke the soft, comfortable interior of the living room.

Leigh Bowery

1991, Lucian Freud

Performer, club promoter and fashion designer Leigh Bowery (1961–1994) was a key figure in London’s club scene in the post-punk years. He created extraordinary costumes for himself. His cheeks were pierced so he could attach fake smiling lips to his face with large safety pins. Bowery posed regularly for Lucian Freud over four years. In this intimate portrait he is naked and vulnerable, towards the end of his life. Bowery said of Freud: ‘I love the psychological aspect of his work... His work is full of tension. Like me he is interested in the underbelly of things.’

Gallery label, September 2024

Self-Portrait

c.1639, William Dobson

This youthful self-portrait, probably painted in the mid- to late 1630s, is one of William Dobson’s earliest attributable pictures. Relatively small in scale, and probably intended as a private presentation rather than a public one, for the period it is remarkable for its lack of self-consciousness and honesty. Painted quickly, rough in texture, using thick impasto and with rapid transitions from light to dark, Dobson presents himself with messy, unruly hair, very far from the carefully judged elegance of self-portraits by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), to whom Dobson is often compared.

Untitled

1987, Claudette Johnson MBE

Untitled depicts three different views of Brenda Agard (1961-2012), Claudette Johnson’s close friend and fellow artist. Johnson worked on this pastel drawing for three months, building layers of pigment and blending them with her fingers. Instead of drawing from life, Johnson used a row of photographic test strips as a visual reference. Johnson describes her work as existing outside the realm of portraiture: ‘I’m not interested in portraiture or its tradition. I’m interested in giving space to Blackwomen presence.’

Gallery label, January 2025

Study for a Portrait

1952, Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon painted directly onto the raw, unprimed side of the canvas and here emphasised the texture further by rubbing sand into the paint. He often based his paintings on a variety of photographic images. One source for the figure here may be a film still from Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) in which an elderly nurse wearing cracked glasses opens her mouth in a silent scream. Bacon was fascinated by the expressive power of the mouth.

Gallery label, May 2020

Self-Portrait

1902, Gwen John

Gwen John was successful in exhibiting and selling her work in both London and Paris, but as a woman in an industry still largely dominated by men, she had to work hard for recognition. John made this self-portrait at the beginning of her career, after training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her expression of quiet determination communicates John’s desire to establish herself as an artist on her own terms. This work has become a defining image of the increased presence and confidence of women in the 20th-century art world.

Gallery label, January 2025