Decolonising the British Museum: Hew Locke’s confrontation with looted objects.What Have We Here?, 17 October 2024- 9 February 2025, British Museum, London
Index terms
Mots-clés :
British Museum, empire britannique, histoire coloniale, appartenance, objets, identité, Hew Locke, art décolonialKeywords:
British Museum, British empire, colonial history, ownership, objects, identity, Hew Locke, decolonial artAriel's Corner:
British artFull text
1Perched on top of cabinets lining the wall, Hew Locke’s Watchers observe the visitors to the exhibition What Have We Here? and their reactions to the objects, artwork and cultural artefacts exhibited below them. Gazing down on the materialisation of a complex narrative of the British Museum’s history of its collections, these colourfully-dressed anthropomorphic figures (a conquistador, a shaman, a figure wearing an armour, another one a skull mask) bear witness to entangled narratives of colonial violence, imperialism and dispossession. As Hew Locke explains: “They're a mirror to the viewer. Normally, you’re used to being the one in a position of power. They flip the script, but they’re not meant to push you out.”
2The exhibition What Have We Here? co-curated by Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke, challenges the Museum’s institutional narrative with labels written by the artist on yellow cards, appearing like small notes scattered around the room, and more substantial curatorial notes. Conceived, in Hew Locke’s words, as the beginning of a conversation, the exhibition takes us through space and time to South Asia, Africa, Tibet, Europe and the Caribbean in a profusion of historical documents, objects and images (an Indian miniature portrait, watercolours of exotic birds and animals, paintings of East India Company officials to name but a few objects) that make the visitor feel overwhelmed with the wealth of material information that transforms and complicates the interpretation of the British Museum’s holdings. No linear story unfolds in a single direction or within a well-circumscribed geography in the single, relatively small room where the exhibition is organised. Instead, we are meant to be face-to-face with an accumulation of artefacts and archival documents which, brought together, form a meta-narrative, and even a multimedia form of artwork about precisely “what we have” in the British Museum, how we view the artefacts on display and understand the history they carry with them from their creation to their acquisition and arrival in the Museum’s collections. Locke explained that he wanted to “echo how you create an artwork −the gathering of objects, collage, layers”, an invitation for the viewers to decolonise the museum through their personal elaboration of a critical response.
3“Which history we remember depends on what’s been made visible for you”, Locke says. References to events of colonial history are chosen along with specific objects to ask the visitor to reconsider the stories of looted treasures, with, for example, the story of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, seized from the last Maharaja of Lahore, Duleep Singh, to be presented to Queen Victoria. Among the significant objects that act as material evidence of the history of slavery, display cabinets show the charter granted in 1663 by Charles II to the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa, along with glass beads, which seem at first to simply carry ethnographic meaning. However, closer inspection of the beads reveals that they were made in Europe (Venice and Bohemia) and used by Europeans in trading activities with West Africa, among which ivory, gold and the slave trade. Acting like the objective correlatives of enslaved people who were exchanged for them, the beads on display make a case for the status of objects to be considered as the sum of different histories and disciplines, notably global history, colonial history, art history, archaeology and anthropology.
4Saturated with a complex ornamental bric-a-brac of kitsch ornaments symbolising the ill-gotten spoils of British imperialism, Hew Locke’s famous busts of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert Edward, from his Souvenirs series, lend themselves to multi-layered commentaries on colonial looting of artefacts and territories. The bust of Prince Albert Edward is decorated with small images of skulls among medals of military expedition, reminding the attentive observer that the empire’s construction came with stories of violence and the destruction of societies and cultures. Similarly, the presence of the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taino wooden sculptures, “Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles”, removed from a cave in Carpenter’s Mountain at the end of the 18th century, begs the question of returning looted artefacts to their original countries, while they point to the erasure of Taino culture: “they’ve become a symbol of collective memory, an idea of Jamaican nationhood”, Locke explains.
5The exhibition thus tells multiple stories of the museum’s acquisition of important artefacts. In a fruitful collaboration between the artist and museum curators, this show seamlessly blends Locke’s own artistic productions and interpretation of colonial history with the Museum’s treasures and historical archival material. Like the painting of a Liverpool slaving ship on display (dated 1780), at first a seemingly harmless image (“very charming and quite common” in Locke’s view) that slowly reveals itself fraught with the whole maritime history of the transatlantic slave trade once you look closer at the detail of the hull, the show does not impose one monolithic view on the history of objects in the collection of the British Museum. Rather, one of its strengths is to invite the visitor to engage with these stories and to become part of the conversation.
References
Electronic reference
Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, “Decolonising the British Museum: Hew Locke’s confrontation with looted objects.What Have We Here?, 17 October 2024- 9 February 2025, British Museum, London”, Miranda [Online], 31 | 2025, Online since 19 May 2025, connection on 09 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/65731; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/1410o
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