Title: Not Your Unc

Artist: Kazvare Made It

Artwork Description: This work reimagines a microwavable packet of Uncle Ben’s rice, relabelled “Not Your Unc: Jollof Rice,” with a sticker reading “put some respec’ on his name.” The familiar supermarket packaging, common in many British households, is disrupted to challenge the casual naming and branding of Black identity within global food culture.The original “Uncle Ben’s” branding, now rebranded as Ben’s Original, carried imagery and language widely read as drawing on racialised histories of familiarity and deference towards Black men. Its presence in everyday domestic spaces makes these associations quietly persistent rather than distant or historical.In the background, archival text from The Rice Journal (1917) outlines early strategies for marketing rice as a branded commodity, revealing how value is produced through packaging, advertising, and repetition.Together, the work draws a parallel between food branding and the construction of Blackness as something to be made legible, familiar, and consumable. “Uncle Ben” operates within this logic of familiarity, while “Not Your Unc” interrupts it.“Jollof Rice” asserts diasporic specificity, reflecting how West African and Caribbean food cultures exist within and alongside British domestic life. The phrase “put some respec’ on his name” becomes both humorous and corrective, asking who has the authority to name, define, and package cultural presence.

Medium: Printed as giclée prints on 100% cotton rag paper.

Size: A2