Spike Island, Bristol
From Georgian silver to porcelain toilet bowls and Ghislaine Maxwell’s cast-off curtains, this assemblage of readymade objects asks impudent questions of the well off

When the centrepieces of this exhibition arrived two weeks after the opening, they hardly seemed like works of art at all. They comprised a pair of wooden chests full of Georgian silver, which until recently belonged to the 9th Baronet Bellingham. Emails printed and pinned to the gallery walls reveal that the dinner service was obtained through a complex negotiation between the show’s artists, Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane, and the Bellingham family trust at NatWest.

According to Al-Maria, a friend of Bellingham’s, the childless peer was eager to dispose of his birthright, which had become an emotional burden. Some of that load now rests at Bristol’s Spike Island gallery alongside a different kind of inheritance: 240 chamber pots the artists bought on eBay from Graham Randles, the son of pub-owning antique collectors. The unassuming diptych, with its utensils for either end of the digestive process, nods to how property of different classes moves through the market’s belly.