No object is just an object: everything is a symbol. And in Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s excellent exhibition of items from the British Museum’s endless archives and stores, every object is a symbol of power, dominance and exploitation.
Locke (who recently filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with a kaleidoscopic carnival) spent two years digging through the stores, finding maps, photos, sculptures and artefacts that tell countless clashing stories of empire, countless narrative threads. There’s the beautiful Queen Mother Idia mask that Locke uses to symbolise African culture, a golden replica of a British machine gun used to slaughter opposing armies, sculptures of sacred beings carved by Amerindian natives of Jamaica. Locke’s own masked figures sit above all the display cabinets, watching, protecting, judging and celebrating the death of empire.
But the show isn’t a straightforward narrative. It’s complex. There’s a huge Medieval English ewer jug that was prized by the Asante court but looted back to Britain in 1895, there’s a canon traded to the Benin army by the Portuguese and then stolen 350 years later by the British, there’s a vast portrait of Queen Victoria wearing the enormous koh-i-noor diamond, which was stolen from the Sikhs in 1849, who in turn stole it from the Durrani Empire, who stole it from the Afsharid dynasty, who stole it from the Mughals. Power is not linear, and it’s not eternal, but its symbols survive.
The show comes right in the middle of a long debate about the purpose of the British Museum and the restitution of its many looted treasures. The show doesn’t resolve that debate, and it’s not meant to, it just adds fuel to the fire.
Britain obviously comes out of this badly, as it should. But it’s not just about the evils of the British, it’s about the evils of empire and power. There’s so much shocking, harrowing death and violence here, so much greed and exploitation. It’s horribly, deeply uncomfortable.
There’s a palpable sense of shame to living with the legacy of the British Empire, but also an awareness of that one particular empire’s death. We are living in its shadow, sure, but also walking on its grave. More than anything, Locke’s display of objects feels like a warning to beware of how power ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, but always comes back.