Dr Alina Khakoo

I am a historian of art and activism in postwar Britain. My PhD thesis (2024) explored how artists associated with anti-racist and feminist social movements in 1980s Britain made infrastructures – such as independent magazines, archives and art galleries – both to practically produce and circulate their work, but also as exercises in worldmaking. My book on British South Asian artists is forthcoming with Tate Publishing in September 2025. I am also part of the research group Radical Cambridge (University of Cambridge/University of St Andrews), which explores the history of contemporary art in Cambridge in relation to the politics of space. From 2019–22, I worked on the Curatorial team at Kettle’s Yard, including on an archival display reframing the house-museum as a global modernist institution, as well as on major retrospectives of work by Linder and Sutapa Biswas. In 2022, I worked as part of a team at Tate Library cataloguing the Panchayat Special Collection, an artist-led archive of Third Worldist contemporary art.