Film director to create artwork of all London’s 2,410 schools’ Year 3 pupils

DIRECTOR STEVE McQueen has said his ambitious contemporary art project to create a portrait of all of London’s Year 3 school pupils is the result of an “urgency to reflect on who we are and where we come from and what is the future”.

The 12 Years A Slave film-maker and Turner Prize-winning artist plans to oversee photographs of tens of thousands of schoolchildren from across the capital over the next nine months.

Every primary school with Year 3 pupils will be invited to have their classes photographed for the project, with the resulting artwork to be displayed at London’s Tate Britain and around the capital next autumn.

Tate director Maria Balshaw has said it “may well be the most ambitious art work we have ever shown at Tate Britain”.

The project will aim to capture the moment of excitement, anxiety and hope in the milestone year for the seven and eightyear-olds, through the traditional medium of the class photograph.

Unveiling the project at Tate Britain, McQueen said: “At some point in one’s life you tend to look backwards and you ask ‘Where is so and so?’ and ‘What’s happened to them?’

“It was one of those things where I just wanted to reflect also on how I got to where I got to.

“I just wanted to reflect back on a certain point in my life where things changed and things churned. People have passed and died, people are doing well, not doing well. Those kind of trajectories those kind of paths, I wanted to go back to the beginning of a certain kind of consciousness.”

Rows of children from London’s 2,410 primary schools will sit and stand alongside their teachers and teaching assistants to show the diversity of the city where McQueen was born as well as the potential of the generation that are growing up in the capital.

The installation of the photographs will take over the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain from November 2019 to May 2020 and will be free to visit.