Biscuits and Empire: Reframing Colonial Photography

Made to endure  long ocean journeys, twice-baked bread biscuits were a common food for sailors, traders, and settlers. Known as “sea biscuits,” they helped fuel centuries of imperial expansion as European powers claimed territories across Africa, Asia and the Americas. The colonizers photographed their travels. Carefully composed, these images shaped how colonized lands and peoples were seen, categorized, and understood. 

Biscuits and Empire: Reframing Colonial Photography brings together a video work by artist Zinnia Naqvi and a group of colonial-era photographs from Museum London’s material culture collection. Taken in the 1940s, the photographs reveal how London, Ontario was tied to the global biscuit trade. Local manufacturing depended on colonial supply chains, creating direct links between the city and British India. Captured by a visiting photographer, the images reflect a colonial point of view at a time when imperial control was beginning to break down. 

Shown alongside these photographs, Naqvi’s video installation Heart-shaped Box (2016) offers a contemporary counterpoint. 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. Here, the camera remains in the family’s home, showing the artist and her siblings singing along to grunge music. These scenes present people on their own terms, pushing back against earlier image traditions that reduced colonized individuals to objects of study or spectacle.

About the Artist

Zinnia Naqvi is a lens-based artist working in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, social class and citizenship through the use of photography, video, the written word, and archival material. Recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. 

Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally, with exhibitions in New York, Iceland, Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates.  She received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montreal.