060 BRIEF ENCOUNTERS


I have always thought of the best exhibition design as inspired choreography – using the objects, the themes and the available architecture to pace and persuade the visitor, drawing us up close to observe details, and packing a heart-stopping punch when required. Ali’s approach here combines some very simple, minimal rooms interwoven with big set pieces. Te first of these is the opening gallery, into which he has inserted a striking bust of a black man, sculpted in the classical style, and set on a plinth in the centre of the room. Says Ali: ‘I encountered this amazing bust by Francis Harewood at the Getty (Museum) about ten years ago and it was always included in the (proposal for the) show but we made the suggestion to situate this bust at the centre of the room… Standing at the centre of a space as a black person is a moment of empowerment and strength but it comes with its own inherent fragility that exists in the moment of occupation. So in this


instance, this magnificent, handsome man is accompanied by his friends.’ What Ali is referring to are the portraits of black people arranged on the walls around him, some by contemporary artists (Kerry James Marshall’s reimagining of 18th-century former slave turned artist Scipio Moorhead), but most of them historic, including Gainsborough’s 1768 portrait of Ignacio Sancho, actor, writer, composer and the first man of African descent to vote in Britain. Ali says: ‘Tis is rare: I’ve never stepped into a room where you just have black figures at the centre.’ A masterstroke in this black-walled room is how Ali has treated the busts of venerable white artists that look down from a set of ceiling alcoves, framed in gold – Michelangelo and Da Vinci among them. Tere were eight, but he has reduced the number and placed large, mirrored panels over a few at intervals, so that as we look up to these near deities, we see ourselves reflected back. Given the unusually diverse and atypical crowd gathered for the show’s opening,


according to Ali, this was a fantastic way of demonstrating the diversity in the room. Te subsequent gallery, themed Sites of Power: Conflict and Ambition, is more conventional in one respect – mostly historic paintings, arranged along the walls, by the 18th-century ‘masters’ representing the power and might of British aristocracy (clients made rich by the growth of the slave trade and colonial plantations) and the British navy, the tool by which they wielded that power. But into the centre of this room, at waist height, the team has inserted Guyanese- British artist Hew Locke’s Armada, a flotilla of colourful vessels bearing decorative elements such as coins, badges and replica medals, that suggest their role as ‘votive’ offerings. Beyond this are rooms that show cross- cultural influences on artists of both colonised and colonising countries, another reveals works by 18th-century European painters asked to represent the colonies as idylls, interwoven with works that demonstrate anything but (Yinka Shonibare’s colourfully dressed woman kneeling on a set of ornate steps, or Karen McLean’s Primitive Matters: Huts, which foregrounds simple Trinidadian workers dwellings against a slide show of opulent colonial mansions).


About two-thirds of the way round there is one atmospheric, cinematic room surrounded by deep, blood-red velvet drapes in which Isaac Julien’s powerful anti-slavery film Lessons of the Hour plays – suddenly, the voices of those who have suffered are in the foreground. But the room beyond this is the most breathtaking: with darkened, deep blue walls it features the haunting soundtrack and scenes from black British artist John Akomfrah’s anti-whaling, anti-slavery film Vertigo Sea (revealing, frame by frame, man’s inhumanity to mammal). Next door to this is Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s stunning parade of bruised and battered refugees, Afua’s Surviving Children, conjured in driftwood El Anatsui fished out of the Danish sea, and carved and scorched by the artist into this haunting procession. Set against the flaming anger of Frank Bowling painting Middle Passage, it’s as if the sun is setting on this tragic scene. And indeed there is joy in the following two rooms, filled with Lubaina Himid’s colourful characters (100 cardboard cut-outs, the outfits and postures of which demonstrate their slave status on one side, while short caption on the back offer up their ‘real’ names and identities). At the end of our tour, Ali says: ‘ I think what we are really good at is giving the objects space to say what they need to say – and respecting and knowing what that is.’ I’d second that.


Clockwise from top El Anatsui’s Afua’s Surviving Children sculptures, made in driftwood; Hew Locke’s Armada, a flotilla of vessels


bearing decorative elements such as coins and badges; Yinka Shonibare’s colourfully dressed woman on a set of ornate steps


RIGHT: VERONICA SIMPSON ABOVE: THOMAS ADANK


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