Hew Locke: What do we have here?; Haegue Yang: Leap Year – Review | Art

CAptain Speedy, wearing an Ethiopian fur coat, sits for his photo on the Isle of Wight. The year is 1868 and he has just returned from the British punitive expedition to Abyssinia. His trophies include the lion’s mane shield leaning against his chair and the barefoot boy on his knee. This is Prince Alemayehu, seven years old.

The prince’s father chose to kill himself rather than submit to the British. His mother died before the trip to England. Queen Victoria will take this kidnapped child as a godson, send him to public school on a boat, and ultimately arrange for him to be buried at Windsor Castle when he dies of pleurisy at the age of 18. Ethiopia has requested the return of Alemayehu’s remains. All it has received so far is a lock of his hair.

What to do with the shield, fur cloak and shell necklace that Alemayehu is wearing in the picture? even the photo itself? Push them into the British Museum. Because what is this place if not the largest repository of “objects” (as they call them) in the UK? Speedy’s wife was struggling with all of these things when he died in 1910: not just the loot, but also the African clothing and his own photos of Ethiopia. The Empire on which the sun never sets is on display in the British Museum.

What’s so fascinating about Hew Locke’s new show? What do we have here? is that it doesn’t just tell the story of imperial theft and massacre. It goes behind the scenes at every turn. Speedy speaks the language, acts as a diplomat, takes solemnly beautiful pictures; The suicidal king himself plundered the churches of his Christian country. All objects in the photo appear in reality before our eyes, along with their new, complicated stories. Look twice and think again: This could be Locke’s motto.

What should his exhibition at the British Museum be called: a dialogue, an experience, a shocking revelation? It’s all that and something else. The Guyanese-British artist spent two years in the vaults and selected more than 200 exhibits from them, not only for their appearance or type, but also for the strange stories they tell.

The show begins with Locke speaking amiably onscreen, surrounded by plastic crates and file boxes that extend into the gallery. The objects are grouped like small still lifes around certain portraits, such as Alemayehu, in plywood boxes. Yellow Cards offer stories, ideas, and Locke’s own exuberant musings. The past is forever in the present.

And from the top of these display cases his strange figures look down, the largest of them half the size of life: a Greek chorus of observers. A golden conquistador wears a feathered helmet, a shaman peers through fluttering robes, a carnival ghost wears a skull mask. One is wearing a Benin T-shirt, another is wearing jeans, a third is wearing armor, superbly made from cardboard – modern sculptures based on ancient masks, medieval breastplates, lime wood carvings – entire traditions of world art, made from scrap metal. It would be an exaggeration to say that you have once again become an exhibit of these images, but some of this change is intentional.

Locke values ​​visibility. Here is a portrait of Charles II, the jolly monarch, as well as the usual evidence that he was a secret Catholic. But next to it is his 1663 charter for the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading to Africa. Is his faith really more important than his involvement in enslaving people? The problem is what is displayed. “What history we remember depends on what was made visible to you.”

Locke shows beautiful prints of London’s East India Docks in 1802, “like Heathrow, Harwich and Rotterdam all in one,” as he says. One wharf was nicknamed “Blood Alley” because the sugar sacks rubbed the skin off the workers’ backs. But there are no people in these pictures: they were intended as reassuring propaganda.

Here are shiny brass discs looted from Benin City by British troops in 1897. If you look closer, you’ll see that parts of the edge are missing; Look even closer and you’ll see the severe burn marks. Here are trays of glass beads that are exchanged for coffee, oil and enslaved people; those exchanged for people have strange facets, like jewels: as if they were making a necklace out of people.

Your vision is sharpened. Look at the ventilation holes along the waterline in this cheerful painting of an ocean-going ship and you realize it must be a slave trader’s ship. The white girl in this 19th century photo turns out to be an enslaved person (the African American bloodline is invisible but disastrous). Count the countless bars rising like a miniature ladder on a Victorian medal and you’ll realize that the British simply didn’t have the money to keep issuing new medals for all the African conflicts.

The show is richly packed: infinite wealth in a single room. And Locke’s own art is comparatively restrained and tactful; some of his political paintings on colonial stock certificates and his Victorian busts adorned with the trinkets of the Empire. However, I wish Locke’s observer paintings were better lit to reveal his extraordinary gift for expressive nuance.

But ultimately, as he says at the beginning, this company is all about dialogue. It’s Locke’s ability to notice that counts, forcing you to notice all the anomalies too – the pitcher that belonged to Richard II but somehow ends up in Ghana; the 16th-century African statue of a Portuguese mercenary fighting on his side against Europe; the strange affinity between Alemayehu and Queen Victoria’s other kidnapped “godsons”, between Speedy’s beard and the lion’s mane. More than his characters, Locke’s attention counts; he discovers secrets, recognizes paradoxes and asks unexpected questions: he himself is the ultimate observer.

Haegue YangThe artist, born in South Korea in 1971, also conjures up art from scrap. Christmas trees made from drying racks decorated with light bulbs; Curtains of blue and silver bells that create a sonorous sound as you pass by; An exquisite pagoda lantern suspended high above the gallery and made of blinds.

Merging old and new. Traditional “sitting tables” are photographed, now no longer visible among the Coke machines and hectic cars on the side streets of Seoul. Plastic bouquets or cheap metal turbines grow on finely woven chairs, transforming them into Sputniks. Yang creates minimalist sculptures from mass-produced sinks.

She brings additional fine skills to sewing, weaving and crocheting: a beguiling star constellation is printed with pink ink and a lotus root. A starburst is cleverly cut out of images of plastic containers from a hardware catalog. Her transparent tissue paper collages combine ritual calligraphy with everyday images: the seasons, birds and flowers, faces indicated with the smallest incisions, a manicured hand that might remind you of who works in our nail bars.

Yang has lived in many countries and done many different jobs. Leap Year wanders accordingly, occasionally losing fascination and focus. But the silence of Yang’s art finds a sonorous finale. A colossal installation of vertical and horizontal blinds rises in stages like a flying pavilion. Light penetrates the slats but also plays across them in changing spotlights, as if searching for the artist who is the subject of this work, the Korean composer Isang Yun, who spent years in political exile. Yang re-stages his soaring music in a radical act of everyday poetry.

Star ratings (out of five)
Hew Locke: What do we have here? ★★★★
Haegue Yang: Leap year ★★★

Hew Locke: What do we have here? is at the British Museum, London, until February 9th