Great British Cover-Ups and the Art of Selective Memory I: Witness

Abstract

This essay situates Great British Cover-Ups: Witness Edition within debates on nationalism, commemoration, and institutional critique. Building on Henio Hoyo’s concept of the postage stamp as a “small ideological text” that constructs national memory, it examines how the project reuses Royal Mail commemoratives - from Windscale to Windrush -to expose acts of state omission.

Framed through Hans Haacke’s and Fred Wilson’s strategies of institutional critique, the essay argues that the performative posting of commemorative envelopes on Remembrance Sunday 2025 transforms postal bureaucracy into a system of ethical remembrance, expanding the act of witnessing beyond official history.

Document Metadata

Title: Great British Cover-Ups and the Art of Selective Memory I: Witness
Author: David Sidney Bell
Contact: studio@davidbell.art
Date: November 2025
Version: 1.0 - Witness Edition
Document Type: Practice-based contextual essay
Keywords: selective memory, philately, nationalism, institutional critique, remembrance, commemoration, postal art, archive, Royal Mail, Great British Cover-Ups