England is often referred to as grey, but to use both grey and unpleasant as qualifications for it one must have had a particularly bleak experience of the nation. Without referring directly to violence or colonialism, the two artists Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane indeed paint quite an unlikable picture of their current base.

Their joint exhibition Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island in Bristol is the result of a collaborative process. Both recent immigrants to the United Kingdom, with roots in different parts of the Arab world (Egypt and Qatar for Al-Maria, Algeria for Ourahmane), the show focuses on examining the myth of England as a nation, according to the artists.

They produced the show over two years, engaging in conversation with curator Robert Leckie (the former Spike Island director, now at Gasworks) to display the way they see Britain’s legacy as a nation. To do so, the artists worked on a range of mixed media, mostly collected, disused or dissimulated objects, ranging from historical features to legal acts and pieces of furniture. They were inspired by the themes of ownership and class. And the result seems to act more as a performance than as a collection of repurposed objects. When outside the premise of an art centre, one might see these as objects of value, designated by time and tradition as relevant and even precious; here, they appear to make a mockery of themselves. Spike Island’s space offers its three main rooms and some corridors, where the artists decided to display their artworks, taking up walls but also more unusual spots, like the ceiling and pipework.

At the entrance of the gallery, Terra Nullius (2024) consists of a pile of The Spectator magazines featuring an advertisement seeking “English landowners”, published in September 2024. The ad was placed by the artists, who wished to speak with some English landowners; it asked them to give small amounts of land to…nobody. The title, in Latin, means ‘territory without a master’ or ‘nobody’s land’. The term is used in public law to describe a space that can be inhabited but does not belong to any state. 

The artwork Curtain (2024) is made of a typical cloth of drape, in red velvet, hung on a wall of the gallery. This curtain was acquired by a close acquaintance of the two artists, who found it in a bin outside a mews house in Belgravia, London, in 2020, during the estate clearance of a property. The house belonged to the infamous Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who was also convicted herself. Even if it remains unverifiable that the curtains belonged to her, the duo felt that it could serve as a visual metaphor of the moral decay of England’s ruling classes. Were the drapes concealing immorality?

On the opposite wall, on the skirting board, is the artwork chosen for the exhibition poster: Lionheart (2016-2024), a small hand-painted heraldic, representing a triumphant red lion on a bright yellow background, though the stained glass is now shattered. The artists carry forward the metaphor of the brokenness of the ruling classes, the vacuity of self-proclaimed power in the face of time.

In this context, two pieces appear central to the exhibition: Job Lot (late 1700s/2024) and Silver Service (1774/2024), displayed as a diptych in the main room of the gallery. The first is the most visually arresting. Made of a collection of 240 chamber pots displayed on the floor of the main gallery room, the installation lies in the vast white room, provoking a strange feeling of both inadequacy and unease. The whole series represents more than the sum of its parts, as the visual accumulation of these classical, worthless and outdated flowery pots renders the purpose of collecting them utterly ridiculous. 

These pots once belonged to pub owners in Liverpool, who collected them from auctions, markets and car boot sales, to decorate the pub ceiling. Their son, Graham Randles, inherited them, making headlines in local papers, including one cover featured in the Spike Island display.  

Here, they are interesting for what they represent: an attachment to the past and a symbol of a voluminous inheritance, even if pathetically vacuous. 

The second part is made of two heavy wooden trunks, dissimulating another inheritance, attributed to a certain Sir William Bellingham. The trunks, sealed and covered in inscriptions on their lids, accompanied by legal acts pinned on the nearest wall, are supposed to contain a 250-year-old collection of silver. 

These were recently retrieved by the artists from the vault of a NatWest bank branch in Stockport after Al-Maria was made aware of them through a friend with ties to the Bellingham family. Further in the gallery, the objects chosen for the artworks evoke a sense of the heaviness of inheritance, property and materiality. In the eastern part of the gallery, for instance, the largest installation, Fly Tip (2024), presents a series of old objects, illegally dumped around Bristol because they contained harmful pollutants. But here they are vacuum-sealed in purpose-built aluminium bags.

Bristol’s Spike Island has quite an impressive legacy of exhibitions challenging the self-proclaimed greatness of Britain, from the 2017 Lubaina Himid show Navigation Charts to Veronica Ryan’s 2022 major exhibition Along a Spectrum. Grey Unpleasant Land feels like a continuation, addressing an England looking to its past as glorified to better exclude newcomers and emerging ideas.

This show is more sparse, revealing the immaculate whiteness and emptiness of the art space. This seems fitting for the themes explored by the artists, highlighting the heaviness and coldness of physical objects, while warmth and emotion remains absent. An unpleasant feeling indeed.  

‘Grey Unpleasant Land’ is on view till January 19, 2025, at Spike Island, Bristol, UK.