Beauty, shock and horror

At the British Museum, Hew Locke places his work alongside art and artefacts plundered by colonisers from the peoples and cultures they destroyed

Adrian Searle

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…

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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 25 October 2024

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