Left Scenes from John Akomfrah’s anti-whaling, anti-slavery film Vertigo Sea


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THERE HAS BEEN welcome recalibration of our cultural landscape over the past few years, with institutions all over Europe seeking to redress the myopic, racist or misogynist attitudes of past centuries that saw little if any representation from women artists nor artists from outside our own geographic footprint (apart from the US).


It was easier for those with big, international collections (such as the Tate Galleries) to instigate an almost immediate post #metoo, #blacklivesmatter shift, instigating wholesale rehangs that foregrounded artists of every gender, and from the global south and Asia or its diaspora alongside the usual white, male suspects. And the whiff of a new, ‘woke’ (and/or bargain- hunting) collector base triggered a stampede from commercial galleries to represent the latest hot new talent from Lagos, Accra, Colombia or Cambodia. But smaller museums and galleries are only just beginning to demonstrate this shift, in their curation and thinking, since – as any of FX’s exhibition designer readers know – it takes at least two years to pull a serious show together. But at this point in the narrative, galleries have to do more than simply hang a more diverse range of artists on the wall and say, ‘look, aren’t we enlightened?’ Te problems have arisen through institutional and systemic practices and prejudices. For true representation, it’s important for museums to take the trouble to dig deeper and explain the toxic attitudes that lie embedded in their founding philosophies and funding. So hats off to the Royal Academy, which has done this rather well in its show Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change. And that is thanks to its collaborative team of curators and designer Jayden Ali, of JA Designs.


Ali was part of the team that designed and programmed the celebrated British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Bienniale of 2023. He also designed 2023’s highly praised Fashioning Masculinities show at the V&A. With this RA show, he and the guest curators have appraised the very white, patriarchal history that is visible – even embedded – within its walls and worked to create a dialogue that carries us through from the founding of the Academy in 1768 by Joshua Reynolds until today.


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