Hew Locke: What Have We Here? @ British Museum, London

A most intriguing exhibition, using the collected objects of the British Museum, and his own artworks, Hew Locke invites us to look. Consider. Think about interpretation, meaning, provenance and to look again.

A charming painting of a sailing boat bobbing on the waves may not be charming — once you know the position of ventilation shafts on a slaving ship. His watchers watch us watching and get us to think again.

An itemised list of enslaved people being costed up for reparations (to their enslavers) had me weeping. The heartlessness of it — 11 children under 6 years of age were duly noted down with the other human ‘goods’ and those who were deemed uneconomic ‘the diseased’ and other disparaging terms used. The utter denial of humanity and their freedom.

There was a mock up of the Koh-i-Nor (before and after Prince Albert) and the confusing adoption of royal children of invaded kingdoms as wards of Queen Victoria. Equally confusing was the tangled line of who was entitled to get the Koh-i-Nor back, if this was ever to be a thing.

Also on show where the collections of beads used for purchase of gold, palm oil, people…

And you had to keep thinking about whose image was being projected, whose culture. Contrasted were authentic and Western copies of Nigerian bells — created in the West and shipped back because they were worth something, popular, wanted. The Western copies are cruder and lack the fine distinguishing features of the original — but they were also created for sale, not for worship and honour. Then there’s the photos of the noble King in captivity — still with dignity. (Although at some point, his own belongings will be purchased or taken or gifted from him and end up in the British Museum). At the same time, all these places were impacting us back — and changing us. Just look at our food, vocabulary, plant collections, textiles. Same time, in conquering, we were missing the point of the peoples and their cultures we encountered and extinguished (for a time).

Look again and you saw the King of Haiti channeling Thomas Lawrence for all his was worth — as opposed to the Barbados Penny with its slogan of Liberte. (The Penny mocked the enslaved people whose forced labour and brutal exploitation created the wealth and the products exchanged for these plantation tokens).

Most fascinating of all were the provenances — a Ghanian religious pendant turned into an ornament on a dish which mimics the Assante design, used as part of an indemnity payment to the British. Equally, the most shameful raiding of Christian Ethiopia by another Christian country and sacrilegious pulling apart of religious and cultural works. The acquisition of objects — such as Benin disc ornaments which had been ripped off of walls and damaged and burnt along the way. The impressiveness of Sultan Tipoo and his devouring tiger symbols — treasured and feared by conquering British East India Company soldiers.

Rather than the haranguing tone of Tate Britain’s exhibitions; instead we were invited to look, consider, contemplate and think again. You could also go round the exhibition in any order, to reflect on the imperial majesty of the Indian Durbar — remnants of the red overhang are still in upcycled use today — and to consider whose empire, whose majesty, whose land and people was really being celebrated here? Whose souvenir is someone else’s sacred, cultural or prized possession?

It’s the phrases too which will stick with me — the East India Company of the 18th century is likened to Amazon having an army. Imagine for this is an exhibition of the imagination as we consider portrayal — who is celebrated and who is othered. And you also see objects you don’t normally see — alongside a deeply emotive and moving depiction of an enslaved woman desperately committing suicide and killing her child in the process is a 1793 ceramic jug celebrating a slave ship owner. And goodness, you think, no wonder the abolitionists had to create such sentimental heart-rending pictures when our hearts were so hard. That hardness is show in illustrations of ports as modernly efficient centres of 18th century production — supply and demand of goods, including millions of enslaved people.

For this exhibition not only invites you to look and see, but to really think and have a heart. For there are wonders, such as pewter jug embellished with King Richard II’s heraldic symbols which was traded, used and prized at the Assante royal court, then looted in the Anglo-Assante war by British troops. It’s the how — and the why — that things were not always so, and how shifting history (and its interpreters and interpretations) can be.

@ Images are not the author’s own, but taken from the British Museum’s exhibition, Hew Locke: What Have We Here? They are used purely to illustrate the important points made by the exhibition and its curated objects. January 2025.

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