FKA twigs, Headie One and Fred again have teamed up to produce this powerful and stunning song and video, Don’t Judge Me, which is about being Black and British and having to deal with an “invisible oppressor”, namely cultural and institutional systemic racism, forces that are hard to see and act against.

What contributes to the impact of the video is the backdrop of American artist Kara Walker’s installation at the Tate Turbine Hall last year, Fons Americanus, a 13-metre tall fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. The installation subverts the celebration of British Empire and instead parodies the use of such memorials to elevate a narrative built on the hidden histories of the victor’s fortunes built on the transatlantic slave trade, exploitation, racism, and tragedy. Water is a key theme in the sculpture referring to this movement of slaves between Africa, Europe and America. And the figures Walker has sculpted in this faux-triumphal work are grotesque often bloated, throat’s slit, in shark-infested water, lives imperilled, anguished—making visible black children, women and men whose lives have been exploited and erased using the visual language of the perpetrators.

Walker is best known for her black cut-out silhouette wall installations depicting narratives of atrocities committed in the American South, and has said: “I’m gonna take everything I do about power and desire – and use the tropes of the slave narrative or the slave romance, like the antebellum romance, as the way to talk about these themes because this is something that clearly won’t go away. It will just keep being an unaddressed bugaboo in American culture.”