Part history lesson, part crime scene, Hew Locke's What Have We Here? is filled with beauty and horror. At the heart of the show, in the Great Court gallery of the British Museum in London, are looting and vandalism, the destruction of societies, the erasure of cultures and the enslavement of their peoples. All are embedded in the British Museum's own history and holdings. And that's without even touching on the frieze of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and the sorry story of their acquisition, or to whom exactly many of the other objects in the museum might be returned, even if there was a will to do so.
Where are the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taino people now, whose hardwood spirit-figures of a birdman and of Boinayel the Rain Giver were found in a Jamaican cave in 1792? The sculptures entered the museum's collection, while the Taino were mostly wiped out, if not by murder then by diseases to which they had no immunity, after the arrival of the Europeans. "These sculptures," Locke writes, noting that the people who made them no longer exist, "are Jamaica's Elgin Marbles. They've become a symbol of collective memory, an idea of Jamaican nationhood."
Locke's terse little notes are placed beside many of the exhibits he has chosen from the collection. Working with his partner, curator Indra Khanna, and with the curators of the British Museum, Locke has done much more than set his own sculptures and images among works in the museum's collection. He has also borrowed from the royal collection, the British Library and elsewhere to make an exhibition that is deeply shocking. This is an exhibition that looks not only at works in the collection themselves, but also at what they once meant and the further meanings and resonances they have accrued in their journeys here. The show's title appears plain enough. After that, everything is complicated.
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