Mother Tongue: The Kitchen Residency | whatsthebigmistry

Empire's Old Clothes by whatsthebigmistry. Image: Simon Alleyne

Multidisciplinary artist Priya Mistry (whatsthebigmistry) is collaborating with Primary and it’s local community between February – June 2025. Together they will work on a socially engaged project Mother Tongue: The Kitchen Residency exploring and evoking Black & Brown joy, focusing on acts of decolonisation, celebration, communing and much more. This is part of a multi-city programme of activity and events.

Central to the programme is Mistry’s first solo exhibition at Attenborough Arts Centre (Leicester) from 24 April – 29 June 2025. This will showcase The Empire’s Old Clothes (EOC), a short non-linear film which challenges the insidious myths and propaganda around the ‘British Empire' and draws on influences, aesthetics and politics from Indian and Afro-Futurism, queer culture, and experiences of ableism and racism in post-Empire Brexit-Britain.

EOC 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 (Order of the British Empire), which she accepted - a controversial and awkward 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.

This programme of 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.

This project is supported by Arts Council England, Unlimited and Disability Arts Online and shared in partnership with Attenborough Arts Centre, Primary, Backlit Gallery and Chisenhale Dance Space.