London-based British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke took to Instagram to share his disappointment upon learning that the city of Ostend in Belgium has apparently canceled a site-specific artwork they first commissioned late last year. Locke wrote that the decision was made by the Ostend’s newly-elected city council, which said that there was not enough public consultation before his proposal was accepted.
Emails to the city council general email address on their webpage by Artnet requesting comment did not elicit a response. Locke thanked the supporters who liked the post over 1,400 times and drew 125 comments in just one day online, telling them it “means a lot.”
Locke told me via email he had not yet got around to giving the piece a title. “I find the title emerges out of different ideas as I work on a piece…which obviously isn’t going to happen in this case.”
Asked if he had had further communication from the city council, he said: “The last piece of correspondence I had from the council was the one where they officially told me of their decision. I haven’t heard anything from them since. I had asked them on more than one occasion that we work jointly on a press release to announce their decision, but they didn’t respond to this and just put out their own statement.”
The Ostend project was aimed at re-contextualizing the city’s equestrian statue of former Belgian King Leopold II, whose reign was notorious for his brutal exploitation of Congolese people in the late 19th-century including forced labor, torture, amputations and starving as part of taking over and trying to control the country’s rubber resources.
According to the 1999 book “Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa” in the 1880s as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II seized “the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million—all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian.”
In recent years several statues of the king have been targeted by protests and removed around Belgium. In 2023, the city decided to keep the public monument, but commission the new art project to give it context. Locke’s proposal was chosen over 11 other artists, and all were exhibited in the Royal Galleries in Ostend. Locke’s project involved five pillars topped with gold sculptures that reference colonial history.
According to a previous report in The Telegraph, the first challenge for the artist was the fact that the 1931 statue is protected under Belgian law, so he was not allowed to add to or alter the sculpture itself. Instead, he decided to “interrupt the view” of the statue with the aforementioned five poles. They are topped with golden symbols of the Congo’s exploitation, including a severed hand and Leopolds’ decapitated head.
Locke’s social media post depicts a mockup of the equestrian statue with three of the pillars situated in front of it. One appears to be an elephant head while one of the others appears to be Leopold’s head.
According to Locke’s post: “They announced my project on their own website, and to the press. The Council gave the main reason as that not enough public consultation took place before my proposal was accepted. I suggested that, in that case, we undertook more consultation with the people of Ostend about my proposal. Although my project was for a temporary piece only, I also offered to reduce the time of installation frm 10 to five years. I had no response to either of my suggestions. Their suggestion of moving this site-specific piece would have destroyed the meaning and value of it.”
In a subsequent post, Locke featured an image of his current installation at Art Basel, saying “While all this stuff in Ostend has been happening, I have been in Art Basel …here is my new series ‘Odyssey’–on display now at the P·P·O·W booth, B10.”