Counter-Ceremonial: Contemporary Artists and Queen Victoria Monuments

As the embodiment of empire, Victoria became a symbol of allegiance and resistance, love and loathing. This is nowhere more apparent than in the many monuments memorializing her across the United Kingdom and around the world. At a moment when public sculpture has become increasingly controversial, as witnessed by the removal of Confederate monuments in the American South or the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, monuments to Victoria are also coming under scrutiny. While many statues have been damaged or defaced from Bristol to Bangkok, and from Montreal to Delhi — important interventions in themselves — more interesting reactions have come from artists. Around the globe, art projects have worked with Victoria monuments in order to find a way of engaging with their troubled history, offering a critical reframing that can break the often unproductive arguments about removal or retention. This article juxtaposes works by Tatsurou Bashi, Sophie Ernst, Hew Locke, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gary Kirkham, and Hadley+Maxwell, exploring the artists’ engagement with the material form of the monuments and the connections between Victoria’s self-made image and its unmaking in the works discussed.

On 26 January 2021, on the national holiday of Australia Day, five thousand protestors gathered at the statue of Victoria in Brisbane. The statue, located in Queens Gardens, was erected in 1906 as a sign of Queensland's loyalty to the empire and commemorating the recently dead empress who had presided over the formation of the nation. 1 The monument is a replica of the statue by Thomas Brock that is also to be found in Hove, Carlisle, Portsmouth, Belfast, and Bangalore, and so represents not only Victoria's relationship with Australia, but also Australia's relationship to the wider empire. 2 The protesters splashed the statue with red paint, before wrapping it in the Aboriginal flag, and held up a large sign reading 'Not the Queen's Land', punning on the name of the state. After speeches, the crowd marched through the streets of the city, carrying a large Aboriginal flag. For the protesters, this was not Australia Day, marking a moment of origin to be celebrated, but Invasion Day, commemorating a moment of crisis that continued to the present. While Victoria was not born at the moment of invasion in 1788, her statue symbolizes her complicity in the subsequent history of violence, attempted genocide, and theft; indeed, a history over which she presided. And while the sculpture was made after her death, as most of these imperial monuments were, they conform to an image that she created in both general terms -as the dutiful mother and grandmother of nation and empire who has given everything for her children and grandchildren -and in the specific form and iconography expressing that identity.
The protest in Brisbane, and the use of the statue of Victoria as its focus, is one of many similar events, and events that are increasingly common in the midst of the current debate about the problem of the monument in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, the question of decolonization, and the much needed challenge to Confederate statues in the American South. It is inevitable that statues of Victoria should be part of this reassessment of the public monument.
Victoria, the ardent imperialist, in fashioning the image of empress still present around the globe, turned herself into the political symbol of empire and colonialism. 3 Indeed, she is distinctive in this sense: while there is no single figure who can stand for the slave trade in its entirety, Victoria willingly became the icon of empire and has remained so.
Moreover, unlike slavers, she crafted this very icon. In this article I shall present some recent responses to Victoria monuments in the work of artists. While very unlike the challenges made by protests and attacks, these artworks are nevertheless contiguous with such actions; the artists, too, engage critically with the political force of imperial monuments -and therefore Victoria's image -in the twenty-first century. As such I discuss the works explicitly as part of sculptural and imperial history, rather than from the perspectives of contemporary art discourses and, particularly, as a further element in the continuing history of Victoria's self-fashioning. More violently, statues of Victoria were dynamited in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1954, and nine years later the statue in Quebec City during court hearings against members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) as part of a broader terror campaign. 5 In both cases the attacks exemplify the shaping of local politics by the legacy of empire.
Statues were removed or relocated at moments of decolonization as official responses by the State. In Lahore in 1951 the statue of Victoria was removed to the Lahore Museum (and in 1974 replaced with an image of the Koran in the same elaborate architectural frame, signalling the transition from British colony to independent Islamic nation).
Similar removals -and at times reinstallations -took place across the empire. This is merely a handful of examples, but indicate that contemporary attacks, some of which I discuss in what follows, are part of a long history of anti-imperial struggle.
For those committed to retaining the monuments, a popular argument is that removal amounts to an erasing of history. What this argument overlooks is that the monument itself has already erased history. Like colonialism itself, the presence of Victoria at the heart of the place has already silenced the history of indigenous peoples.
The monument, of course, will always present a partial history: that is both inherent in the limits of the form and in its political intention. The Victoria at Brisbane, for example, was erected to celebrate and naturalize settler colonialism and to wipe away the Aboriginal presence. The radical response to this has been that monuments should simply be destroyed. This position claims that because such statues explicitly and uncritically celebrate imperial activity, they are morally compromised and are acts of violence in their own right.
Between destruction and retention lies the possibility of recontextualization or, to use Catherine Hall's term, 're-remembering'. 6 What this might mean in both theory and practice is less clear-cut in terms of necessary action and potential efficacy. In Hove in 2021 a petition circulated, demanding more contextual labelling for the town's statue of Victoria (which is the same Brock statue as in Brisbane). The petition noted: The statue of Queen Victoria in Hove proudly declares her the Ind Imperatrix (Empress of India). This is a title given to her because of the British colonisation of There has been much discussion of counter-monuments. 9 While this has, to date, been realized more in Germany and in post-Soviet states as a form of corrective commemorative practice, the term has been widely used in discussion (even if, as has been pointed out, without sufficient rigour). 10 Indeed, Sir Laurie Magnus, the chairman of Historic England, recently proposed that one of the ways of enabling statues to be retained could be to erect counter-memorials alongside them. 11 In both this model and that of the request for additional signage, there are two related problems. The first is simply the complexity of history, and a history that continues to unfold into the present.
While this could be managed in a museum or similar institution, there are limits to what can be done in external public space, and not least because the very siting of the sculpture continues to connote privilege and legitimacy. The second is that these forms conceive the staging of the debate as between two clear sides: imperial or national versus decolonial; or the original monument versus the contextualizing response. This reduces judgement to a straightforward moral choice; and while, of course, a moral choice has to be made, this reduction of politics and history risks turning this into a kind of virtue signalling sticking plaster over the deep wound of empire. The fundamental difficulty here is the assumption that one might simultaneously satisfy unity (an interpretation of the monument that is consensual) and diversity (an interpretation of the monument that allows and generates dissent). As Tim Barringer has noted in relation to the Hove statue of Victoria and its counter-memorial, the Patcham Chattri, the history is one of 'ambivalence': the very tension between unity and diversity, and the changing nature of that tension across time, is what requires our attention.
It is here that the work of artists challenges our conventional ways of viewing and interpreting public sculpture. In what follows I present five works that use monuments to Victoria as their subject and material, whether the object itself in situ or a photograph or cast of the statue. 12 Rather than counter-monumental, we might identify these works as counter-ceremonial. Ceremonial was always the principal means of animating the statue and realizing its potential for ideological efficacy. 13 From unveilings, through annual celebrations of nation and empire, to the marking of occasions such as state 9 See, for example, Sabine Marschall, Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in funerals, monuments to Victoria across the empire were the focal point, giving meaning to public space and delimiting the public itself, in that ceremonial affirmed the criteria for inclusion or exclusion. In Brisbane the annual Empire Day celebrations began at and revolved around the statue of Victoria, decorated for the occasion, and, as elsewhere, included parades, pageants, the awarding of certificates to children for helping or supporting troops or similar acts of loyalty, and marches for the veterans of imperial wars in Crimea, Sudan, and South Africa. 14 The protest in Brisbane in 2021 was a kind of counter-ceremonial; indeed, it replicated the performances of Empire Day, with Victoria as the spatial and political focus, the speech given alongside the effigy, the use of flags, the adorning of the statue (but with paint rather than flowers), and the march spreading from the monument through the space of the city. It was a thoroughgoing reversal of the historical ceremony, thus reversing the values of the monument and exposing what the image of Victoria had banished from public view.
The artworks shown here are counter-ceremonial in a different way. They do not take orthodox ceremonial forms and repurpose them, but create or evoke new forms of ceremonial; they do not offer a reversal of ceremony, but address the issue of ceremonial itself. Through a range of critical art practices, the artists included here mine the history, reimagining the experience of the monument and its relationship to individual and society. Moreover, they draw out the fact that these monuments are embedded in global networks and signal the relationship between the specific colonies -each of the artists is attentive to the particular location of the monument -and the imperial whole. These artworks address not only what the monument stands for but also what it looks like. If defacements aim to unmask the force of the monument in legitimizing imperialism, these works also explore how the symbol was formed and what is at stake in its sculptural and spatial details; and, crucially, how the physical and iconographic nature of the statue relates to its political function.
We can see five forms of aesthetic counter-ceremonial in the five works, all of which reframe the statue, literally and conceptually, and all of which undo the power of the monument, shifting the locus of power from Victoria to elsewhere. Thus, the monuments are repositioned in ceremonies of the public rally or public political speech, in the rituals of travel and decorating, and in the practices of immersive theatre. The clearest instance of this is the project undertaken by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gary 14 For helpful accounts of Empire Day and its creation, see Jim English, 'Empire Day in Britain, 1904-1958', Historical Journal, 49 (2006 These counter-ceremonial works engage very closely with their source material, not simply taking Victoria as a generic icon of empire, but thinking carefully about the monument itself, its form, iconography, and location. This necessitates an engagement, whether deliberate or not, with Victoria's own self-fashioning, and there are two aspects of this that these counter-ceremonial strategies expose; indeed, what these works also reveal is the continued power of Victoria's image making. Although these monuments were not commissioned by Victoria, but by institutions and towns and states and nations in order to prove their allegiance to and relationship with empire and the Crown, they are part of a continuum of royal patronage and conform to the image that the Queen created for herself. These contemporary artists use Victoria's two principal strategies to undo or reveal the politics at the heart of the empire's monumental culture: first, the manipulation of public and private and, second, the use of the decorative, of surface to create an image of depth or interiority. We shall see both these aspects reworked by contemporary artists, evidence of the continued force not simply of imperial politics but also of Victoria's image: the representation of herself that she fashioned.
All these artworks alert us to the fact that the discourse of 'the public' is far more complex than many uses of the term suggest, and that the word as deployed in 'the public', 'public sculpture', 'public space', and 'public sphere' is misaligned in the making, presentation, and reception of these sculptures or installations. The monument is a form that aims to collapse these terms into an unproblematic singularity and, in the case of monuments to Victoria, to assert homogeneity across what John Darwin has described as the 'unfinished' empire. 15 As Victoria herself knew well, public and private are mutually constitutive categories: there is no simple separation. The circulation of the image she crafted depended on the ways in which the mixing of public and private was constantly in process: the deployment of the private to create the public image, and the use of the public to circulate an image of privacy. Victoria's image populated millions of private spaces during her reign and subsequently in the form of coins, prints, books, photographs, ceramics, and other ephemera. In many instances the Queen was meticulous in examining and approving the designs, such as those of coins. 16 Similarly, one can see the crafting of the private Queen in public form in her Highland journals, or in published reports of life at Osborne House and other royal residences. Indeed, Victoria's image was crafted and circulated on the basis that private Queen and public Queen worked in tandem. 17 The second principal strategy used is decoration and surface. Of course, detailed and decorated surfaces are essential to all public images, particularly monarchs, emperors, and those in power. This is of importance for Victoria not least in managing sex and gender: how to present her female body as both powerful and normatively feminine, politically authoritative, and sentimentally maternal. Her dress, jewels, and regalia, such as the Order of the Garter, also serve to represent the empire as part of what David Cannadine has termed 'ornamentalism', the culture of decoration and pageantry deployed to create social hierarchies for imperial ends, with deference to Victoria, the epitome of the ornamentalist, as its heart. 18 Even the lines on her face in old age, as the somatic decoration of duty and care, served their purpose. Victoria certainly eschewed vanity in her final decades and preferred those sculptures that showed her ageing features. The monument by Edward Onslow Ford in Manchester, unveiled in 1901, is a good example of this. Victoria referred to both the bust and the monument by Ford as 'very fine', ordered various versions, and gave one marble rendition to her grandson Arthur as a birthday present in 1899. 19 The pattern of age traced across her skin served a political purpose. The monument includes a quotation from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 -'Let me but bear your love, I'll bear your cares' -as if to clarify that this body The title reminds us that history has not erased this responsibility, and that the act of re-remembering remains a duty; that, in Wodiczko's terms, we need to be an active inner public, rather than a passive outer public surveying the spectacle of empire and its remains. 22 The 'you' in the title remains ambiguous: this is part of the point being made. In the face of competing publics, how can unity and diversity be synthesized, and particularly in the face of Victoria's image, which exemplifies the unity of white empire achieved through the suppression of diversity. Removing the image may be a first step, as protests demand; but these aesthetic interventions suggest that a more extended and critical reframing of the monuments is required, counter-ceremonials that serve as a reminder that the Queen still falls to us.

Tatsurou Bashi, Villa Victoria (2002)
Villa Victoria was created for the Liverpool Biennial in 2002 and is one of a series of works by Tatsurou Bashi (a pseudonym of Tatzu Nishi) in which domestic or semi-domestic spaces are constructed around public monuments, thus recontextualizing them and, crucially, changing the relationship with the viewer (Fig. 1). 23   replete with wings and a foot stepping triumphantly on the globe. The architectural exedra around the central statue has four allegorical groups marking its corners, representing Justice, Wisdom, Charity, and Peace, supposedly the virtues not only of Victoria herself but also of her empire. 24 This elaborate setting extends the meaning of the Queen's statue; it makes explicit her global power, her apparent moral status, as well as the grandeur of imperial Britain.
Bashi built a hotel space around the statue of the Queen: a stairway which led to a reception area outside the room and a fully furnished bedroom with an en suite bathroom, which visitors could book for a night's stay. In Villa Victoria most of the architecture and sculpture of the monument disappeared: only the huge bronze effigy of the Queen, between columns, remained, an incongruous presence in the quotidian space. For this work, an important starting point was the oft-made observation that public sculpture, in spite of its size, centrality, and presence, is ignored or overlooked.
Bashi remarked that 'this phenomenon is much more interesting for me than the historical meaning of monuments' (Nishi,pp. 173,182). Nevertheless, in returning Victoria to hyper-visibility, Bashi's work does the same for empire and its legacy. It forces its way back into the visual field but is now decontextualized; a reminder that in representing empire, these monuments also decontextualized themselves, replacing history with allegory or reducing indigenous agents to colonial puppets.
While his work brings people closer to the normally distant statue, it creates an uncanny effect; what might have been a more intimate encounter was in fact far from intimate, not least because of the inconsistent scale -the human scale of the room against the monumental scale of Victoria. Moreover, devoid of allegorical symbols and devoid of the ceremonial space, the statue became curiously inert and misplaced.
If the monument was designed to animate public space, here the space disenchants the statue. There was an unresolved collision of imperial splendour and generic hotel room, of Edwardian luxury and contemporary functionality.
The choice of hotel room was carefully considered. Bashi made a connection with Liverpool as a port city, a place where, historically, people came and went. The hotel room is a temporary residence for those who are travelling and away from a fixed base.
Bashi's Villa Victoria thus thematized mobility and permanence in the stable presence of the statue set against the movement of colonial trade and governance, and, from the perspective of imperial history, a Victoria that collapses space and time in favour of unified and unchanging power. This is a reminder too, albeit unwitting, of Victoria's image as a global traveller, taking up residence elsewhere along with her imperial machine.
The hotel room also has a hybrid status, neither fully private nor fully public. Bashi's work swaps public and private but is less directly concerned with political conceptions of the public and more with the question of public space. Indeed, Bashi is interested in the way that public space is controlled and administrated. His works, including this one, have to be approved by public agencies and are usually funded by public-sector bodies, such as the Liverpool Biennial, supported by Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council, for Villa Victoria (Nishi, p. 182). These processes, along with the extensive bureaucracy, approvals, and resistance from opponents are all part of the project; the tensions between art and bureaucracy, the possibilities and constraints of public art and its governance, are central to Bashi's work in theory and in practice, and this concern resonates in relation to the apparently natural presence of Victoria in the cityscape.
However, Bashi does not operate with a naively straightforward distinction between public and private. Indeed, Villa Victoria mimics the way that Victoria deployed public and private, using the circulation of her private image in domestic spaces to support her public political agency. This is repeated here, but the mismatch of the huge statue in the domestic space serves as a serious joke, asking what if, rather than Parian reductions of her portrait bust, or prints of statues in Osborne House, a full-size monumental sculpture were moved into a private room? And yet, this has a historical truth to it: the Queen did dominate and her image did expand to fill these spaces, conceptually if not physically. The domestication of Victoria's image was central to its ideological efficacy, and here Bashi offers a witty or even absurdist take on the presence and workings of empire in such spaces.
Like Wodiczko and Kirkham's, this work engages with the question of naming, albeit more obliquely. Victoria's name is iconic; that is, it immediately generates a symbol and one that is fixed as a sign of empire and power; its use across the world is a means of asserting legitimate authority and imperial homogeneity. In contrast with this fixity, the artist's name is constantly changing. Indeed, Bashi -better known as  (Fig. 2). These quotations form a patchwork of statements about empire, generally supportive, and, while recognizing that it was built on exploitation and colonial violence, asserting that no apology is necessary and that silence on the matter is preferable. 26 Ernst's Silent Empress was a public commission for Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. This may be why the Wakefield monument was chosen but, given its prevalence around the globe, it was an appropriate example. Ernst's work from the perspective of the statue's history provides a useful reminder that Wakefield was also the empire, that empire was not just overseas in the colonies but also at home. 28 All these replicas of Williamson's sculpture meant that the same empress at the same moment presided over the global empire, a spatial unity that was unchanging.
The central concern of Silent Empress was the legacy of empire and the question of apology for this history. It was not simply about articulating an apology; rather, it raised  the question of what an apology might be, what it would mean to apologize, and how to avoid apology as an end point, as if saying sorry simply excused the past and closed debate. Indeed, the use of quotation from Victoria in the 1840s to Gordon Brown's statement, made in a 2005 speech when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, that 'the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over' underpins the idea that this matter is not something consigned to the past, but -like Victoria's image -has a persistent legacy. 29 Ernst has pointed out that she deploys the conception of apology as Eingedenken, as defined by Walter Benjamin. This is to remember the past from the perspective of the present; to conceive the apology not as the completion of the past, a fresh start as it were, but as signalling a continual responsibility. 30 For Ernst, a first step in addressing this was to attempt 'to expose the rather heroic form of remembering' in European public commemoration and the way in which colonialism was still marked by an aesthetic of presence, moral virtue, and even glamour. How might this heroic form of remembrance be undone? How might one draw out what such heroic image making ignores or actively suppresses? How might the statue as a form of forgetting rather than remembering be brought to public attention?
While the sound is crucial to the project, equally important is the visual and material form of the work, since this directly engages with the form of public sculpture both generally and, here, specifically in terms of Victoria's image. The loudhailer, which appears incongruous on the Edwardian statue, breaks the carefully designed form of the empress's body. Moreover, it hides much of her face, which was so important for Victoria in terms of recognition and the moral signals it gave. The duct tape used, crudely wrapped around the statue to hold the loudhailer in place, offers a hastily constructed and purely practical surface against the finely modelled and detailed surface of the empress. This has two important consequences. The first is that it provides an immediate sense of the collision of past and present, in keeping with the conceptual underpinning of the work. Indeed, it asks of the viewer how one might connect the Edwardian imperial effigy and the contemporary materials of the building trade and 29 This is a comment made by Brown at a press conference during a trip to Tanzania   Beyond this, Ernst plays somewhat fast and loose with her source material. For example, there are quotations from Victoria which were not originally about empire or foreign policy, but were in personal letters to Vicky, her eldest daughter. Thus, the phrase 'Yes, it is an awful moment to have to give up one's innocence' was in a letter written on the eve of Vicky's wedding, and originally read, 'Yes, it is an awful moment to have to give up one's innocent child to a man.' 36 However, what Ernst appears to be doing here is creating a monologue for Victoria that reconstructs attitudes to empire in the language of her time (and subsequently); or, perhaps a more generous interpretation still, that the words were spoken in an imperial context, one that haunted speech and writing.
The point of Ernst's work is to make the statue speak the unspoken, including the wish that colonial violence remains unspoken. This is what the silent empress keeps silent, the silence that is the source of her mute statue's power. Like Wodiczko, Ernst demonstrates the different ways in which sculpture and speech shape and address the public. In this project the tensions of public and private emerged in another way. While this was a public commission, after only thirty minutes, Wakefield Council demanded that the work be removed on the grounds that it was 'disrespectful'. 37 The end of the video reveals the irony of this, as the sound tag is removed, the installation team leaves the site, and the empress is left, as she was, undisturbed and silent in her injunction to 'say as little as you can on these subjects'.

Hew Locke, Hinterland (2013)
Richard Hope-Pinker's statue of Victoria stands outside the law courts in Georgetown, Guyana, an imperial presence in an independent republic. In Hew Locke's photograph, Hinterland, the statue is relocated from the orderly context of Georgetown into the hinterland where, 'surrounded by the ghosts of empire' as Locke himself puts it, Victoria is transformed by Guyana and its Afro-Creole culture (Fig. 3). 38 China, in Hansard, Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 53, cols 800-08 (8 April 1840); and Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600-1950(Leiden: Brill, 2012 Similarly, the Queen's counsel to 'say as little as you can on these subjects […]  The subsequent history of the monument parallels that of Guyana's, as one might expect, given that history is one of struggle against colonialism, independence, and the realization of the nation. Thus, anti-colonial protestors dynamited the statue in

1954, blowing off its head and left hand, and the statue was removed in 1970 when
Guyana became a republic. Cheddi Jagan, leader of the People's Progressive Party, noted that the removal 'had therapeutic value for the nation and the individual', that it was necessary psychologically as much as it was symbolically. 39 To remove the statue was also to remove the myths of Victoria's self-curated image. As Harold Lutchman noted in the year of Guyana's becoming a republic, 'it was for years part of Guyanese education to be taught that slavery was abolished because of the initiative of Queen Victoria the Good.' 40 However, the statue of Victoria was returned to its original site in 1990. 41 This was, and remains, a contentious move, and the restored empress, occupying again the symbolic spot, suggesting that she remains the legal arbiter, the fons et origo of the law, was subject to further attacks, defaced with red paint in 2018.
Hinterland is not unconnected to such attacks; indeed, Locke describes his practice as 'mindful vandalism'. 42 Of course, his attacks take place on the surface of the photograph rather than on the sculpture itself, since the sculpture is not available for modification. 43 More importantly, rather than defacing or destroying, this aesthetic vandalism is about reimagining the sculpture. Locke uses art as critique, and critique as a means of making art; this is not a simple statement -as graffiti or defacement might be -but a work of art with a more complex engagement with the visual and material qualities of the sculpture, and of the history in which it is embedded. self-fashioning of Victoria, who represented herself covered with the badges of office, products of empire (such as diamonds), and objects symbolizing dynastic authority (Wood, p. 283). However, the decorative surface of Hinterland is not the baubles of empire but the stealthy and subversive decoration of the statue by Guyana and its history.
Indeed, colour and whiteness structure the work. Locke has said that he sees colour a means of reinvigorating sculpture, albeit a reinvigoration that simultaneously transforms its meaning. Here, the bright palette is a marked alternative to the pristine whiteness of the cleaning and repair effected before the monument was re-erected outside the law courts in Georgetown. Relocated away from the centre in the hinterland, nature takes over, the pattern on the plinth and figure resembling the way in which moss or lichen grows over stone surfaces, the liquidity of the swamp as a threat to the ostensible permanence of marble. This is also a reminder that the statue, when removed from its original site, had been left in the botanical gardens in the capital.
While there is no literal sound as in the works by Ernst, Wodiczko, and

Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gary Kirkham, Queen Victoria (2014)
On 12 and 13 June 2014, in Victoria Park, Kitchener, Ontario, Krzysztof Wodiczko projected the bodies of six people onto the statue of Queen Victoria that has pride of place in the park (Fig. 4). The projected participants, five refugees and one woman of  Both the statue and its location were wholly identified with empire and its legacy.
The participants' narratives of marginalization and exclusion were told from a position of absolute centrality, both giving them a chance to engage in democratic exchange and to demand recognition, and ironically revealing the limits of democracy in the wake of the settler colonialism represented by Victoria.
This intervention is typical of the major strand of Wodiczko's art. As one of the world's leading public artists, he has staged similar projections around the globe, exploring the social and political tensions embodied in monuments and revealing the exclusions at the heart of apparently inclusive statues. His work interrogates the limits of democracy and democratic exchange and the way in which the public sphere, apparently an open space of civil society, is too often transformed into a space of 'publicity' instead, the domain of advertising, media, and corporations. Indeed, Wodiczko's extensive work with monuments around the world has at its heart the question: what is the public in 'public sculpture'? His projections and similar projects ask about both the actual constituency -that is, who is included and who is excluded -and about the conceptual and political understandings of the public that inform these monuments. His work is largely an attempt to complicate and examine the assumptions that are hidden by the all-too-easy articulation of 'public' in both political and everyday discourse and draws on radical trends in democratic theory. 46 Wodiczko terms his participants -in this case, those whose bodies and voices were projected onto Victoria -the 'inner public', distinguishing them from the outer public, those who form the audience for the work. This is a practical distinction pertaining to the making of his works, but one which also has a political resonance, not least because his 'inner public', as in this work, consists of those who are marginalized and can only become part of the monument's public at a cost. This is pertinent to the crucial role of playwright Gary Kirkham in making the work. Kirkham, as a local writer, liaised with refugee and indigenous peoples, since these communities were not simply there to be gathered up by a world-famous artist, but were already embedded in social structures and hierarchies that required the building of trust. This work of forming the inner Like Sophie Ernst, Wodiczko and Kirkham make the silent empress speak, and in so doing reveal the power of that silence. However, rather than having the Queen speak the words of those in power, the voices -and projected presences -are of those excluded from the imperial body, or whose inclusion comes at a price of self-abnegation. The superficial flickering images of the participants against the solid bronze of Victoria is metaphorical of social position, and this tension between film and sculpture, the ephemeral and apparently permanent, parallels the participants' testimonies. Lamees Al Athari, for example, a refugee from Iraq who is now a Canadian citizen, describes the difficulty of being Iraqi-Canadian: 'it's not as easy as it sounds', she says, as she describes the strangeness of having to pledge allegiance to the Queen and a new culture. The history of naming has a further dimension, implicit rather than explicit. When the statue to Victoria was raised in 1911, the city was called Berlin -this was a German-Canadian city -and Victoria shared the park with a monument to the Kaiser, a bust by Reinhold Begas, the leading German sculptor. The complementary loyalties of German-Canadians were wholly consonant with Victoria's own family; the Kaiser was her grandson, present at her death in 1901, and having unveiled the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace on 16 May 1911, just eight days before the unveiling of the Kitchener statue. In 1914, unsurprisingly, things changed. The bust of the Kaiser was removed (subsequently stolen and likely melted down) and in 1916 the city was renamed Kitchener, after Earl Kitchener, the hero of the Boer War, who had just died.
The new name emphasized the connection to Britain and its empire.
This, in turn, points to a longer and more complex global history in which this monument is embedded and which adds resonances unarticulated but implicit in Wodiczko and Kirkham's work. The money for the statue was raised by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE). The IODE, whose motto was 'One Flag, One Throne, One Empire', was a hyper-imperialist, white supremacist organization founded in 1899, and one of many women's organizations founded across the empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Victoria League. 49 The IODE was founded by Margaret Polson Murray after a visit to the UK, during which she was swept up in the jingoism in response to the Second Boer War. Like the naming of Kitchener itself, the war in South Africa determined the shape of empire in Canada.
On her return to Canada, Polson Murray decided a women's organization was needed to bolster 'colonial patriotism' and to maintain racial hierarchies in the face of the threats, as she saw it, of migrants and indigenous people. 50 The statue of Victoria, therefore, was intentionally intended as a symbol of white supremacy.
Thus, the statue is no neutral or convenient screen for the inner public's entry into the public sphere. It is the potent symbol of what has barred those people from full democratic engagement. This is not just an engagement with the contemporary the workings of power through public space and its organization. This has been the legacy of Victoria's self-fashioning.

Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen Still Falls to You (2014)
Hadley+Maxwell's immersive installation transformed the statue of Victoria by John Hughes, unveiled in 1908 outside Leinster House, the home of the Royal Dublin Society (Fig. 5)  Thus, the first step was to rematerialize the sculpture as a thin matt surface. These casts were then attached to a steel armature with magnets. The fact that the armature was no longer internal and hidden but wholly visible further emphasized superficiality.
The casts of the monument were reassembled into new sculptural groups: the Queen, Pall-Bearers, Stretcher-Bearers, and Tomb. These partial and fragmented revisions revealed the hollowness of the monument, a metaphorical emptiness inside the grandiloquent ornamental surface. The Queen was at the centre, but now utterly transformed in terms of substance and weight. The volume of the figure remained the same, but now the figure was inverted, presenting a void rather than a fictive solid.
Victoria was suddenly weightless as the monument hung in space, seemingly floating upwards, reversing the form and meaning of the sculpture. It is as if empire itself is a dissolving surface; all that is solid, as it were, melting into air. figure and three supporting groups, but these now engage in a ritual circling around the Queen and signal death rather than eternal life. The dying soldier and his comrades, attended by a female allegorical figure in the standard iconography of sculptural allegory, become stretcher-bearers and pall-bearers, shifting the focus from noble sacrifice rewarded with eternal life to brute death, the body slain rather than the body transcended. The tomb, which may be that of Victoria herself, reinforces this, as does the blackening of the surface, deadening the patina of the bronze original.
The viewer was able to walk around and between the sculptural fragments, a far more intimate experience than in the original. The Queen's skin, which was a distant screen for the projection of imperial desire, is now disturbingly close, fragile and vulnerable. This experiential engagement was enhanced by the use of coloured light and the uncanny cast shadows on floor, walls, and ceiling, and by a soundtrack. 53 The installation, which had a duration of around twenty minutes, was divided into three sections: 'The Discharge', in which the Queen appears in response to recognition from the public; 'The Goading Crowd', in which that public demands dethronement; and 'The Lamentation', in which the public mourns the Queen's death. In each case the ways in which the crowd or public is formed through a different response to the individual, the Queen, is at stake: as a symbol for affirmation, as a scapegoat, and as the object of veneration. 54 Thus, The Queen Still Falls to You, as its title suggests, asks us to consider the complicity of the public in the crafting of Victoria and her image and, by extension, in imperial politics more broadly. The work did not simply reshape the sculpture, but provided an immersive experience with a new narrative, demanding of viewers that they consider their own position as a public for the monument.
Like Locke, Hadley+Maxwell have discussed their work in terms of dealing with ghosts and, like Bashi, they transform the monument's spatial framework to reposition the public audience. In calling back the ghosts of the past and reconceiving the relationship of viewer and sculpture, Hadley+Maxwell bring to our attention certain features of monuments to Victoria that are all too easily overlooked. First, they remind us of the theatricality of public monuments. In a sense the use of the monument for a theatrical display is wholly appropriate, given its role in ceremonial and now, in works such as this one, counter-ceremonial. Second, they astutely insist on the role