Sunday, February 16Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

What Have We Here?: Imperial Vanity on trial at the British Museum

By Ruby Day — Senior Culture Editor

The British Museum might just be my favourite place in the world. It’s a transformative building, with a bewilderingly huge collection that can take the visitor anywhere from Anglo-Saxon England to prehistoric Japan. It’s possible to spend a whole day within its walls, and only see half of what’s on display. Even then, the public only has access to an estimated 1% of the museum’s full collection.

To view and interact with so much world history, so easily, is an immense privilege; a privilege that comes at a very heavy cost. However awe-inspiring or endlessly fascinating, the British Museum’s size and scope is owed to centuries of colonisation, theft, and imperial vanity. Considered by some to be ‘an active crime scene’, the collection of roughly 8 million pieces contains sacred objects ripped from their temples, items of nationhood kidnapped from their communities, identities obscured and reframed in galleries far from home. There is constant discourse over these facts, and whatever arguments used to justify acquisition or, more importantly, continued possession, are far from satisfactory. Disputes over repatriation, origins, logistics, responsibility, etc, dominate much of these exchanges, a vicious cycle of impossible grand gestures and disregarded nuance.

There is no certainty over what can be done. What is needed, however, is a conversation. And one has begun in a very unlikely place.

Edinburgh-born, Guyana-raised artist Hew Locke opened a new exhibition, ‘What Have We Here?’, in the British Museum in October. Within a small, dark room in the middle of the atrium, you enter what I can only describe as a courthouse. In the heart of the very institution that stands testament to Britain’s criminal history, Locke puts imperial vanity on trial. He makes you sweat. But most importantly, he makes you think. Locke makes full use of the museum’s purpose as a space that remembers the past, with a collection of objects that make no bones about the nature of their acquisition. A door has been opened to a long, messy, and difficult process of recognition through the simplicity of acknowledgment. The exhibit’s curation is refreshingly bold, a reframing of historical objects in the context of Britain’s interactions with them.

Nothing is explicitly accusatory or condescending. The magic of Locke’s exhibition is its pragmatism, through which he presents the facts as they are, with occasional witty interjections that drive home many uncomfortable truths. After the Koh-I-Noor diamond was involuntarily ‘gifted’ to Queen Victoria, it was polished to a weight 42% smaller than its former size to better suit British tastes. Some of the Benin Bronzes are made out of melted-down manillas that originated in Birmingham. The document signed by Charles II that first facilitated English profit from the slave trade is on display in an MDF display case.

Locke’s ‘looting exposé’ subverts many of the traditional customs of museum curation. No geographical narrative is followed, nor a chronological trip from point A to point B. Locke’s words on the exhibition’s walls state that he’s “purposely not doing that, to echo how you create an artwork—the gathering of objects, collage, layers.” Art is all subjective, interactions with it are largely personalised. In a similar way, Locke’s exhibition proposes questions by making injustices known, pointing out facts obscured by imperial rhetoric and colonialist airbrushing, but provides no answers. As yet, there are none. The conversation, once started, rapidly becomes cluttered; the solution is not as simple as ‘give it back’. In some cases, the original owners aren’t obvious. In others, they are long gone. Locke questions where objects belong, recognising that “things change and shift and opinions differ”, cultivating an evolving dialogue that must be engaged with repeatedly and critically, so these complicated questions can be simplified and one day answered.

Before the exhibition, I had the accidental luck of spending five minutes alone in a gallery with the Parthenon Marbles. To see these extraordinary sculptures up close is a privilege, and despite their status as some of the most disputed objects in the museum’s collection, I didn’t feel guilty. After the exhibition, I felt this privilege even more; for better or worse, the objects in the British Museum’s collection are there, and will be there for the foreseeable future. Out of place, or stolen, or protected, or conserved, we can see them and interact with them in ways we might not otherwise. Hew Locke brings to our attention the horrors and the history of these objects, a pertinent concept that needs continuing, and will stick in my mind every time I walk through the doors of my favourite place.

Image: photographed by Ruby Day