‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now’
Art isn’t always pretty pictures. Sometimes, art is politics; sometimes, art is power. ‘Entangled Pasts’ places work by contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas alongside paintings and sculptures by Royal Academicians of the past. The aim is to highlight how art has served to perpetuate racism and colonialism, or at the very least profit from it. It opens with depictions of Black figures by Gainsborough and Reynolds, portraits of former slaves, abolitionists, attendants and illegitimate children. There weren’t a lot of Black people in Britain at the time, and most of those who were here struggled to escape lives of subservience. In among those paintings; a gorgeous, quiet, contemporary portrait of the Black painter Scipio Moorhead by Kerry James Marshall, a fleet of model ships by Hew Locke. Already, at the start of the show, the balance favours old, tricky, problematic art over brilliant new work. It’s uncomfortable. Maybe that’s the point. Elsewhere there are paintings of the pale-skinned children of plantation owners, portraits of the families of colonial governors. John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) was the only academician to own slaves, but the other artists here are implicated because they would have had patrons who owned plantations or profited off the slave trade. Again, there are contemporary works by the likes of Yinka Shonibare and Sonia Boyce here and there, but they’re left as background material to a foreground of histo