Ekow Eshun is the chairman of the Fourth Plinth and the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. His exhibition “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 9, 2025. His new book, The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them, will be published in the US by Harper Collins in May 2025.
1. HEW LOCKE (BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON; CURATED BY HEW LOCKE, WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF INDRA KHANNA)
“What have we here?” asked Hew Locke at the British Museum, and the answer was an exhibition I’d been waiting to see for years. Invited to curate a show bringing together his work and items from the museum’s collection, Locke gathered over 150 objects, each with its own charged history, to detail a story of British imperial power, violence, and hypocrisy. Compelling and kaleidoscopic, the exhibition merges beauty with horror and mordant humor to expose the self-serving belief, still widely held in Britain, that the empire was a benign enterprise. Here, in riposte, is history told from the perspective of the colonized, not the colonizer.
On view through February 9, 2025.