<
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/oct/15/shocking-hew-locke-expose-british-museum-looting>
"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 cave
in Jamaica in 1792. The sculptures entered the British Museum’s collection,
while the Taino were mostly wiped out, if not by murder then by diseases to
which they had no immunity, following 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 inescapably, 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."
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: October 15, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-15-114026282
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
