British Museum, London
In a show full of beauty and horror, which even includes ‘Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles’, the artist places his own works alongside those plundered by Britain from long-destroyed peoples

Part history lesson, part crime scene, Hew Locke’s What Have We Here? is filled with beauty and horror. At the heart of the show, in the Great Court Gallery of the British Museum in London, are looting and vandalism, the destruction of societies, the erasure of cultures and the enslavement of their peoples. All are embedded in the British Museum’s own history and holdings. And that’s without even touching on the frieze of sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens, and the sorry story of their acquisition, or to whom exactly many of the other objects in the museum might be returned, even if there was a will to do so.

Where are the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taino people now, whose hardwood spirit-figures of a birdman and of Boinayel the Rain Giver were found in a cave in Jamaica in 1792. The sculptures entered the British Museum’s collection, while the Taino were mostly wiped out, if not by murder then by diseases to which they had no immunity, following the arrival of the Europeans. “These sculptures,” Locke writes, noting that the people who made them no longer exist, “are Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles. They’ve become a symbol of collective memory, an idea of Jamaican nationhood.”