business as usual: hostile environment: a REMIX

Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle presents a new working iteration of her film, business as usual: hostile environment (2020). Originally an exploration of the Windrush scandal, the film has been updated, the opening title card notes, to include ‘the horrors of Covid-19 overshadowing the everyday’. But while Covid-19 may be an exceptional crisis, the inequalities it has exposed are not. In her film, Whittle identifies the racial politics of the pandemic – exemplified by the disproportionate number of BAME deaths – and places it in a longer lineage of the UK’s history.