Outpoll | Hew Locke's Major Museum Show Explores Empire

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Hew Locke's Major Museum Show Explores Empire

Hew Locke's Major Museum Show Explores Empire

1 day ago7 min read7 comments

The stage is set for a profound and timely production at the Yale Center for British Art, where Hew Locke’s monumental survey, 'Passages,' unfolds not as a quiet retrospective but as a vibrant, three-decade-long interrogation of empire, its lingering specters, and the complex choreography of cultural identity. For Locke, a Guyanese-British artist whose work has always thrived in the liminal space between history and the present, this exhibition is his most ambitious museum show yet, a grand narrative woven from the threads of colonial history, personal memory, and a sharp, often humorous, visual poetics.Walking through the galleries is like moving through the acts of a powerful, wordless play; his iconic flotillas of model ships, adorned with the gilded frippery of heraldry and the tarnished remnants of trade, become a fleet of ghosts sailing through the halls of a institution dedicated to British art, challenging the very foundations of its collection. His portraits, where he meticulously embellishes historical figures and royalty with cheap trinkets, plastic flowers, and beads, are not acts of vandalism but of reclamation—a poignant, almost ceremonial dressing-up that reveals how power is constructed and how it can be subverted through the transformative magic of art.The work resonates with the same narrative depth one finds in a great historical musical, where the personal and the political are inextricably linked in a soaring, emotional arc. There’s a bittersweet melody to his use of humor, a tool that disarms before it delivers its critical blow, much like a satirical number in a Sondheim masterpiece that makes you laugh before you realize the gravity of the truth being sung.This exhibition is more than a collection of objects; it is a backstage pass to the artist’s lifelong dialogue with the legacies of the British Empire, a conversation that feels urgently contemporary as nations continue to grapple with their colonial pasts. Locke’s process is one of assemblage and accretion, building layers of meaning just as a set designer builds a world, using materials that speak of both opulence and decay, of official history and the unofficial stories that persist in the margins.The show’s title, 'Passages,' itself suggests a journey—not just the Middle Passage of the slave trade, which haunts much of his work, but also the passage of time, the passage of objects from one meaning to another, and the passage of the viewer through an experience that is designed to be both aesthetically rich and intellectually demanding. It is a testament to Locke’s skill that he can take the weighty themes of diaspora, commerce, and power and render them with a tactile, accessible beauty, inviting the audience to look closer, to question the symbols they have been taught to revere, and to consider the beautiful, complicated, and often painful tapestry of a globalized world. In an era where cultural institutions are being called upon to re-examine their own roles in shaping historical narratives, Locke’s work at the Yale Center for British Art feels less like a simple exhibition and more like a necessary, and long-overdue, act of theatrical reckoning, a performance that promises to leave its audience transformed long after the final curtain.