The racist content of this work has in recent years generated controversy demanding a renewed exploration of the work, its production, and its historical context.

Within the work ‘Viva Voce,’ an encounter is imagined in which (the ghost of) Rex Whistler, played by Ian Pink, is 'summoned’ to a verbal examination, a ‘Viva Voce’, by a fictional contemporary academic called Professor Shepherd, played by Ellen O’Grady.

In an attempt to closely examine the specifics of the mural, Professor Shepherd is seen excavating archival evidence, much of which is contained in the Tate Archive. Key within this is a story originally written in collaboration with Whistler by his close companion, novelist Edith Olivier (1872–1948) shortly after the completion of the Mural in 1928. Finally published in pamphlet form by the Tate in 1954 and also entitled ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats,’ the story provides an allegorical code to the mural and in many ways underscores the depths of its racism.

Throughout the film, Professor Shepherd summons Edith Olivier (played by Cindy Evans) to read passages from her pamphlet as a means of evidencing some of the more problematic elements of the mural.

The work Viva Voce exists as an effort to employ the museum as a site in which this historical artwork is examined in detail, both as a product of the era in which it was created and also as a work that contains deeply problematic attitudes to race and racial difference that still resonate and demand our attention into the present.