ENTANGLED PASTS
ROYAL ACADEMY
3 FEBRUARY - 28 APRIL 2024
The Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts was developed to tackle the Academy’s racist and colonial history head on, as an attempt at decolonisation. Curated by Dorothy Price, the aim of the exhibition was to “bring together over 100 major contemporary and historical works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism” (Royal Academy, 2024). The contrast of old and contemporary pieces chronicles the Academy’s changing relationship with race and invites reflection on the intersection between art and race, particularly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Blackness and conversations about racism were approached with sensitivity in mind, using collaborative curatorial methods, and thus blackness is portrayed well, and the exhibition does not feel exploitative. Despite this, some aspects of this show were problematic, suggesting that the exhibition is somewhat successful in ethically curating race.
The Royal Academy is “closely entwined with the matrices of colonial power… [its] entanglements with empire and colonialism are complex and the institutions research into them is ongoing”, and Entangled Pasts works to address this history. The exhibition “does not attempt to cover the geographical extent of British colonialism” but provokes questions such as “how have artists responded to colonialism, then and now?” (Price and Lea, 2024: pp.12-13). And thus, Entangled Pasts contrasts the old and the new, displaying historic works by Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copely and JMW Turner alongside contemporary works by Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid. This stark contrast in style, meaning, history and cultural relevance is uncomfortable at times but creates a powerful message in the changing attitude of the Academy and the art world towards colonialism and racism, addressing antiblack and antiasian racism. It is an absolute provocation of thought and creates space for conversation about current issues around race. The works were hard-hitting and emotional; as a Jamaican descendent of enslaved people myself I found the work Vertigo Sea by John Akomfrah to be highly thought provoking - focusing on the atrocities that took and take place on the ocean, the film contrasts the modern whaling industry with the history of slave ships travelling the Atlantic. This perfectly encapsulates the intentions of the exhibition, using history and contemporary work to portray how colonialism is now addressed and understood by some historically racist institutions such as the Royal Academy. The exhibition also recognised the different experiences of people from different ethnic and social backgrounds, as well how gender created different experiences of colonisation for the colonised, thus acknowledging intersectional feminism as the appropriate framework from which to discuss the layered power dynamics that exist within colonial and post-colonial societies.
Entangled Pasts was made in response to the global political instances and conversations of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent international Black Lives Matter protests which led to the physical toppling of racist histories such as the statue of Edward Colston being removed during protest in Bristol. These instances showed “the deeply entrenched fault lines of social injustice thrown into sharp relief by COVID-19 [which] fatally exposed the intersection of race, class, gender, poverty and vulnerability that crystalised around Floyd’s death” (Price and Lea, 2024: p.11). While Floyd’s murder “was a catalyst for a more inclusive practice in most arts organisations… it was a kind of knee-jerk reaction… a rush to correct things or prove a position to define their allegiance with the identifying audiences that they should have been speaking to all along” (Carroll, 2024). This questions the reasoning behind the Academy’s timing for this exhibition, suggesting perhaps a disingenuous motivation for creating this show. Decolonisation of the gallery has been taking place since long before 2020 and the gallery has been long aware of its ties to colonialism and the benefits of that. Was the Royal Academy ‘jumping on the antiracist bandwagon’ of the post-Floyd world and popular antiracist movements, perhaps to secure ethical optics, rather than acting with purely decolonial motivations in mind? “As we have seen in the past four years, institutions that seemed to have woken up, can very quickly go back to sleep” (Onuzo, 2024). It impossible to know the intentions of the Academy in their timing and whether they will continue to address their colonial history and platform more artists of colour, however it is potentially an instance of race-washing.
The curatorial team on Entangled Pasts was comprised of mostly people of colour and led by Dorothy Price, a Black woman and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld – this suggests ethical curatorial practice as PWCI should “widen up the pipeline and make sure the right people are coming through to the field” (O’Leary, 2024). The team seems to have conducted an inclusive curatorial approach, using a “diverse team” to reach “broad audiences” (Villeneuve and Love, 2021: p.137). The exhibition was accessible to people from many different backgrounds as it addressed African, Caribbean and South Asian histories in relation to colonialism and platformed artists from these places or of these diasporas who have created works in response to colonialism and its effects. This certainly made the exhibition most accessible to people of these backgrounds whilst also targeting the Royal Academy’s usually very white and middle-class audience. The atrocities of colonialism were not addressed in the exhibitions marketing and press releases, rather the Academy’s relationship with colonialism was addressed. In the exhibition itself, slavery and indentured servitude, racism, murder, rape, amongst other horrors of colonialism, were displayed and addressed from the onset. Downplaying the intensity of the exhibition could be intentional to try to attract as vast an audience as possible by making the exhibition seem more palatable. Ultimately this is efficacious in working towards ending institutionalised racism and thus should be considered ethical practice despite it seeming problematic on the onset – if one is aware of what colonialism was and meant, it is likely they would know what to expect in an exhibition about colonialism and race. Perhaps the exhibition should have had free tickets to allow for wider audience diversity as the institution already “struggles to attract non-white visitors”, instead of ostensibly marketing to white audiences (Grant, 2024).
One issue I found with the curatorial delivery of the exhibit was that while it intended to contrast the historical with the contemporary, towards the end of the show only contemporary works were displayed, giving the impression of a group show. This somewhat undermines the purpose of the exhibition as it is reductive to group together artists whose only similarity seems to be colonialism (as established in the Women in Revolt!case study). It also is problematic to platform artists that we know were racist or display artworks that show racist depictions of people of colour. As explained by Art and Culture Editor at Time Out, Eddy Frankel,
“All these works are racist at worst, problematic at best. The issue is that there’s so much of it, and it’s given so much attention, that it almost eclipses the real draw. This show has some amazing, beautiful, moving work in it. John Akomfrah’s video about the turbulent history of the sea, from whaling to slavery, is lush, gorgeous and heart wrenching. Betye Saar’s freshly pressed KKK sheet and slave ship ironing board is brutal, shocking and brilliant. There’s an amazingly tumultuous Ellen Gallagher sea painting, a room of ultra-colourful Lubaina Humid cutouts, each with their own painful narratives. All of these works tell the show’s story perfectly without giving a platform to all these old paintings the RA is so clearly ashamed of. The basic point of the show is a good one - but by tipping the balance so heavily in favour of the past, by giving so much space and prominence to questionable old paintings, they’ve let the bad work dominate the good work, leaving contemporary art as an afterthought. As a result, this feels like a show of racist paintings. It’s an act of public self-flagellation, exhibition as mea culpa, an institution holding its hands up and admitting guilt and complicity in colonial, racist, imperialist histories.” (Frankel, 2024).
This is a curatorial misstep – in attempting to address its own racist past, the Royal Academy “got too caught up in apologising for the past to make a change in the present” (Frankel, 2024). This begs the question, can an exhibition about race and colonialism be ethically curated within an institution that has an overtly racist history? To curator Araba Banson, ethical curation is “working within a personal framework where I acknowledge my biases, the biases of institutions and the barriers to engagement, and dissolve the limitations which amplify the ills of society which I believe we all have a responsibility to dismantle” (Banson, 2024). This suggests that ethical curation around race cannot be realised within the boundaries of an historically racist space. While the Royal Academy has acknowledged its biases and history it has also platformed racist artworks and artists. It is important to show history accurately, but this can be achieved without showing racist old paintings. This could have been avoided by audience feedback on the exhibition curation and content as it is “really important that [curators are] getting feedback from audiences [and] that we ask for opinions to make sure that [PWCI are] inviting and open to new audiences of all different colours” (Carroll, 2024). This feedback can be attained by “conducting research during events and co-producing with audience responses in mind” to ensure “the act of production is an ongoing process, and not necessarily a one-time-fits-all approach” (Banson, 2024).
Overall, the exhibition showed careful consideration of the ethics of curating race and was a good attempt at addressing the institution’s racist past. It would be difficult to discuss this racist history without exemplifying that visually as part of the exhibition, and thus one can understand why the curatorial methods and practice was delivered as such. There is room for improvement here but Price, her team and the Royal Academy delivered a beautiful exhibition about a difficult yet imperative subject.
