What Have We Here?

Emma Hogg, BA Social Anthropology 09/12/2024

The exhibition begins with an introduction to ‘The Watchers’, a series of scattered figures placed at vantage points across the gallery. Their constant presence stretches beyond the boundaries of the exhibition, branching out into the Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery, reminding spectators that they are also being watched.

Hew Locke's highest-profile show yet, and potentially his most controversial, ‘what have we here’ runs at the British Museum from the 17th of October 2024 until the 9th of February 2025.

The Guyanese-British artist takes particular interest in Britain’s colonial influence in India, Africa and the Caribbean, with contributions from his own personal experience growing up in a newly independent post-colonial Guyana. Using selected items from the British Museum’s collections, he combines recognisable symbols of imperial power with specially commissioned pieces of his own. 

Locke explores repatriation, the postcolonial museum, and Britain's imperial legacy, all issues which have been widely debated in mainstream cultural discourse and which have taken on the mantle of the ‘culture war.’ The artist's own personal voice is at the forefront, with yellow post-it style notes bedecked with his personal reflections and opinions on each of the gallery's cases. The language he uses, informal and oftentimes cutting, offers an intimate insight into his reaction to the history at hand.

The exhibition places museum objects alongside contemporary works of art made from predominantly ‘modern’ materials, which makes for stark and confronting displays. A series of Royal Parian Ware busts, including that of Queen Victoria (‘Souvenir 20 (Queen Victoria)’), are decorated with visually striking brass, suggestive of the ‘spoils of empire.’ 

Locke’s use of archival material binds the viewer entering the exhibition and exploring its cabinets; they are entangled both in the history of the objects, and in the history of the British Museum as the objects’ collectors and exhibitionists. Locke explains that his pieces function as a way to challenge the visitor’s own part in the process of exhibition, and facilitate a debate about the continuing path of decolonisation within museums.

The exhibition features replicas of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a notorious gemstone taken from India by the British Crown and now kept with the crown jewels in the Tower of London. Locke explains that the history of the diamond’s possession is so long and fraught that the question of who the diamond would even be returned to, remains contested.

Model ships are a recurring theme throughout Locke’s work, most recently in his 2019 ‘Armada’ installation, of which two pieces are included in this exhibition: ‘Armada 6’ and ‘Windward’. At the British Museum, they are contextualised as symbols of British imperial power, and reimagined as vessels of critical postcolonial exploration. Locke reappropriates ships, traditionally associated with naval domination and power, and uses them to represent trade, migration and the flow of ideas. 

Over the years, Locke has made a variety of comments regarding his relationship to Britain and its Imperial legacy. He has expressed an ‘ambivalence’ towards the royal family, stating: ‘My political position is neither republican nor monarchist.’ 

Regarding his decision to accept an OBE in 2023, the medal for which is displayed as part of the exhibition, Locke’s note reads: ‘I accepted the title, so the medal - my own treasure, really - is here to acknowledge that I’m embedded in a certain culture, I’m not looking down and judging.’