Flooded by Mail : how George Floyd (remember?) landed at the Tate ; with a response by Judith Blume

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Authors: Rembert Hüser
Cited by: 0

Abstract

The 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to the closure of the Tate Britain restaurant in London, which had advertised its 55-foot-long racist mural from the 1920s as “the most amusing room in Europe.” Suddenly it was obvious. Flooded by Mail introduces strategies of antihegemonic amateur collecting and examines why the killing of a Black man by U.S. police in public implicates us in Europe. A number of objects found online are useful for this task: the trial minting of a coin commemorating the collapse of the Cologne City Archive that never entered circulation, a board game from a 1932 German film, stock photos and generic copperplate engravings from the same family over centuries, Köllnflocken trading cards, postcards from a wall in Morocco, a procession in Cologne and a possessed harbor in Spain, and a 1970s conceptualist installation with postcards of rough seas along the British coast.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Art Politics and Modernism Race History and American Society Libraries and Information Services

Publication details

Publication date
10 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Book