EXHIBITION

24 April – 29 June 2025

Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester

The Empire’s Old Clothes is Mistry’s first solo exhibition, at Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester, and is centred around a short non-linear film which challenges the insidious myths and propaganda around the ‘British Empire’, drawing on influences, aesthetics and politics from Indian and Afro-Futurism, queer culture, and experiences of ableism and racism in post-Empire Brexit-Britain. The work is at once a provocation and an invitation to re-think and re-write ‘histories’, to demand change and define what it really means to take action against racism.

The Empire’s Old Clothes was originally commissioned in 2022 by Unlimited and Disability Arts Online (DAO) in response to the Queen’s Honours List. It was brought about specifically because Unlimited’s Senior Producer was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire), which she accepted – a controversial decision. The work was briefly presented at The Southbank Centre in September 2022 but rapidly cancelled from the programme within hours of the death of Queen Elizabeth.

Priya has recently returned from Johannesburg, where she has been working on a new International Commission in collaboration with South Africa Photographer Tsoku Maela. This work is at once a response to the censorship enacted by the Southbank and at the same time carves out a space exclusively for black and brown joy via the themes of Afro and Indo Futurism. It is this that provides the context for the programme of engagement and public events across the Empire’s Old Clothes programme.