Image: Museum London
Museum London has opened 'Biscuits and Empire: Reframing Colonial Photography', an installation that brings colonial-era photographs from the institution’s collection into dialogue with a contemporary video work by artist Zinnia Naqvi. The exhibition is on view from June 6 to November 8, 2026, and examines the connections among empire, memory, identity, and the global biscuit trade.
According to the museum, the project begins with twice-baked bread biscuits, or “sea biscuits,” which were made to last long ocean journeys and fed sailors, traders, and settlers across centuries of imperial expansion. The exhibition argues that the colonizers photographed their travels and that these carefully composed images helped shape how colonized lands and peoples were seen, categorized, and understood. Museum London says the photographs in the show were taken in the 1940s and reflect a colonial point of view at a moment when imperial control was beginning to break down.
The exhibition also highlights London, Ontario’s place within those supply chains. Museum London says the photographs reveal how the city was tied to the global biscuit trade and that local manufacturing depended on colonial supply networks, creating direct links between London and British India. The images on view are drawn from the museum’s material culture collection, including a photograph identified on the exhibition page as 'Biscuit Stall and Seller, British India', from the 1940s.
Presented alongside these photographs is Naqvi’s 'Heart-shaped Box' (2016), described by the museum as a video installation and a contemporary counterpoint to the archival material. The work draws from personal archives, including home video footage, music posters and pop culture from the mid-1990s, after the artist’s family immigrated from Pakistan to Canada. In the museum’s account, the camera stays inside the family home, showing the artist and her siblings singing along to grunge music, and pushing back against earlier image traditions that reduced colonized people to objects of study or spectacle.
Museum London identifies Naqvi as a lens-based artist working in Tkaronto/Toronto whose practice examines colonialism, cultural translation, social class and citizenship through photography, video, the written word and archival material. The museum says her recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design and still-lives, and that her work has been shown across Canada and internationally, including in New York, Iceland, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.
The institution has also linked the exhibition to its broader program of current and upcoming installations. 'Biscuits and Empire: Reframing Colonial Photography' appears on Museum London’s exhibitions page as an installation running through Nov. 8, alongside other projects in the building, including 'MOTHERGROUND: Dominique Rey with Madeleine & Auguste Coar' and 'Amanda McCavour: Double Shadow'. The 'Biscuits and Empire' page notes support from TD Ready Commitment, and describes the installation as part of Museum London’s exhibitions and installations program at 421 Ridout Street North in London, Ontario.
