Confronting the past at Hew Locke: what have we here?

As he puts it, ‘Which history we remember depends on what’s been made visible for you.’ Locke’s mission in this exhibition is to make visible narratives, objects, stories that have remained, for the most part, hidden.

Central to Locke’s approach are two sets of interpretive labels: one by museum curators and another in his own irreverent voice, emphasising the dissonance between institutional narratives and alternative, lived histories. The exhibition challenges colonial nostalgia, placing looted artifacts – like the Taíno spirit figures from Jamaica – against Locke’s commentary. Calling these figures “Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles,” Locke highlights their cultural erasure as well as the colonial violence that brought them to the museum.

Locke’s Watchers – carnivalesque, anthropomorphic figures – occupy the exhibition like spectral witnesses, observing viewers as they confront the messy intersections of sovereignty, trade, and violence. Beneath their gaze are artifacts that expose colonial exploitation, from East India Company memorabilia to paintings of slave ships, their grim realities concealed by seemingly benign maritime aesthetics.

A particularly poignant artefact is the form that slave-owners had to fill in when slavery was abolished. The form, which contained information on the number of slaves the individual owned and their ‘estimated value’ allowed slave owners to claim compensation from the British government for the loss of their property ‘because enslaved people were property’. Seeing the document brings one face to face with the visceral violence and sheer dehumanization at work here.

Locke’s other additions include ornate busts of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert Edward from his Souvenirs series, weighed down by gaudy adornments symbolizing imperial spoils. These works are a striking critique of the excess and human cost of empire, a theme that is also echoed in painted-over share certificates from now-defunct colonial enterprises.

What Have We Here? compels viewers to reckon with the British Museum’s complicity in the stories it tells and the stories it omits. The exhibition resists simplistic resolutions; Locke acknowledges the complexities of restitution debates while demanding accountability. As with the Koh-i-Noor, he insists that these artifacts’ histories are entangled with multiple nations, making repatriation a fraught but necessary conversation.

This is not an easy exhibition to digest in one visit. Its density mirrors the layers of colonial history it uncovers. But as Locke notes, this is the beginning of a conversation, one that museums like the British Museum must engage in with transparency and humility. And by destabilising official narratives and putting the overlooked at the centre, What Have We Here? emerges as both critique and invitation, asking us to imagine new ways of confronting the past.