National Trust's Thakar textile exhibit reframes colonial extraction as inclusive curation while obscuring provenance power dynamics
Original framing: “Karun Thakar’s textiles help the National Trust tell a more inclusive story of Britain’s history” — bing news
The National Trust was founded in 1895 by Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter, and Hardwicke Rawnsley — all embedded in Liberal imperial networks. Its first properties were aristocratic estates enriched by East India Company revenues (e.g., Kedleston Hall's Curzon family). The 2020 'Interim Report on Colonialism and Historic Slavery' identified 93 Trust properties with direct slavery/colonial links, yet the Trust rejected the report's recommendation for 'honest storytelling' about provenance. This exhibition continues a pattern: aesthetic inclusion substitutes for structural accountability, mirroring the 1990s 'heritage industry' critique by Robert Hewison.
The Thakar exhibition performs a classic trickster inversion: it uses the very textiles displaced by colonial extraction to decorate the institution that benefited from that extraction, calling the decoration 'inclusion.
' The National Trust's power-knowledge apparatus — founded by Liberal imperialists, enriched by Company wealth, governed by elite networks — deploys a diaspora collector's prestige to legitimise a 'new narrative' that changes curatorial labels but not property deeds, not governance structures, not the material conditions of the artisan descendants whose looms fell silent so Manchester mills could roar. The eight dimensions converge on one structural truth: without provenance-linked co-governance, living knowledge repatriation, colonial wealth redistribution, and decolonial conservation praxis, 'inclusive history' is merely heritage-washing — the aesthetic management of unresolved theft. The textiles themselves, as Eshu would remind us, are not passive witnesses; they are active agents of the knowledge systems the Trust still refuses to recognise as sovereign.