Steve McQueen’s Year 3 as anti-Brexit art: Factualizing Global London’s interculturalism through classroom photographs at the Tate Britain

Citizenship, migration and urban belonging in mega-cities are infrequently discussed in relation to young members of society. When visually staged to reflect a rescaling of multicultural membership and optimism for the future, the classroom and its young learners become a testing ground for interculturalism. In Steve McQueen’s Year 3 photography installation at the Tate Britain in 2019, London school classrooms and its 7 and 8-year-old pupils raised the possibility that London’s kaleidoscopic and flourishing interculturalism offer greater conviviality and tolerance through multiethnic proximity in this learning milieu. Here primary schools in the capital seen in over 3,000 classroom photographs affixed to the marble walls of the Duveen Galleries offer what we call the “intercultural image.” The intercultural image promotes wholeness, urban bondedness and superdiversity through increased interpersonal communication. The result of McQueen’s Year 3 is a diverse portrait and allegory of an intensely changing social demographic that gave further credence to the moniker “Global London,” thus challenging at the time the Brexit narrative of anti-immigration and isolationism purported by conservative wings of the British media.