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.
There’s sorrow here, as well as misery and violences, among the cowrie shells and beads and Amerindian feathered headdresses and African drums and Tibetan Buddhas and Edo sculptures, in the trade seals and tiaras fashioned in the form of exotic beetles and even in the lovely watercolour depictions of toucans, ducks and a caiman wrestling with snakes or the topographical paintings of London’s docks that Locke has bought into play in this low-lit gallery.
Shadowy presences dangle their legs over the tops of cabinets lining the walls. Others stand and stalk the chipboard surfaces, gazing down as we pass. Some wear the sashes of diplomats and courtiers; others the uniforms of long-departed foreign armies. Some wear masks and headgear meant to terrify. We look at Locke’s Watchers, and they watch us. Their purpose is to wait, bearing witness in their colourful and sometimes carnivalesque finery.
In the display cabinets below are a profusion of objects and images, including a 1780 maritime painting of a ship, out from Liverpool in a fair wind, sails billowing. Only the configuration of ventilation ports indicate what the cargo might be, the bodies below decks on the middle passage. Nearby is the charter, issued in 1663 by King Charles II, to the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading in Africa, which was owned by the King’s brother James, the Duke of York, Edward Colston’s boss. And here are further documents relating to the East India Company, which had a private military force twice the size of the British army. Here’s the company ensign, its coats of arms and the chairman’s chair, a wannabe’s throne.
Follow the documents, follow the money: here’s a claim for compensation by a slave-owner for the loss of his prosperity after abolition, and a little medal given to slaves in recognition of good conduct. Here’s a miniature portrait, made by an Indian artist, of an East India Company executive at a desk strewn with ledgers. Among the paperwork hang various share certificates for steel companies and rubber corporations, cotton mills and other ventures, all drawn and painted over by the artist.
Locke has also included works from his Souvenirs series, Victorian busts of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert Edward (the future Edward VII) and Princess Alexandra, whose mass-produced, fake marble heads are encrusted and weighed down by a ridiculous profusion of baubles and gewgaws and spoils of empire. The prince has skulls among the medals on his breast.
We go from display cabinet to display cabinet, some set in the false walls, others free-standing, with a growing sense of both expectation and hesitation. There’s almost too much to take in on a single visit. Here are anti-slavery prints and a contemporary US T-shirt featuring a photograph of Apache leader Geronimo alongside three of his warriors, the garment proclaiming: “HOMELAND SECURITY, FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.”
An Asante circular pendant, once used by a priest in religious rituals, is repurposed as the centrepiece of a large, fancily decorated gilt Victorian dish. Ignoring the pendant’s original function, Locke writes, the dish “traps it and kills it at the same time”.
A flight of arrows hangs above a replica Enfield Maxim machine-gun on its tripod. The Maxim slaughtered South Africans in the second Boer war and in the first Matabele war in Zimbabwe. It gunned down up to 3,000 people armed only with swords, in the 1903 British invasion of Tibet. The troops were accompanied by two specialists from the British Museum who supervised the collection of books and manuscripts and other treasures, then 400 mules transported the booty away.
A British expedition to Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) in 1867-68 also included a representative from the museum’s Department of Manuscripts, who came back with a 1520s European portrait of Christ, which had been in the country for centuries. The expedition also returned with a processional cross from the 1720s, which had been looted from a church then bought by Lord Napier and later donated to the museum, when the spoils of this foray into a Christian country were divided up and auctioned by the troops.
What Have We Here? carries a cumulative, endless shock in a small space. Locke is doing us all a great service. As he says, this is the beginning of a conversation. At the very least, museums have a lot of explaining to do. That’s what they are here for.
• Hew Locke: What Have We Here? is at the British Museum, London from 17 October until 9 February
• This article was amended on 15 October 2024. The number of Tibetans gunned down in the 1903 British invasion of Tibet was up to 3,000, not 30,000 as a previous version said.
