INTERFACE

REVIEW

Human Cargo

Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery, Plymouth
22 September – 24 November

Reviewed by: Gabrielle Hoad

What role might an artist play in a museum show commemorating the 1807 act to abolish slavery? ‘Human Cargo’ sees interventions by five contemporary artists that challenge an apparently objective account of the transatlantic slave trade.

The museum’s display ranges from the 1500s to the present day, where it’s estimated more than twenty million people worldwide are still forced into labour. Much of the art operates as marginalia, commenting on the official text offered by the museum.

Raimi Gbadamosi has re-mapped the museum in his own guidebook, challenging the Eurocentric version of history and underlining how other cultures have been looted for their treasures. He’s also made personal selections from the museum’s collection, most of which integrate a little too seamlessly with the mainstream displays. A show so stuffed with dry historical explanations needs something more visceral to re-expose the brutality and horror of the trade. A pickled dogfish delivers, its deadness at odds with the manufactured objects that surround it. We learn that such fish followed the slaving ships to feed on the bodies thrown overboard.

Jyll Bradley has taken the ‘neutral’ white walls of the institution and wallpapered an entire room with her beautifully gaudy yellow and gold Lent Lily design. References to the exploitation of workers in the international flower trade become an assertive backdrop to the displays. Lisa Cheung makes plain the link between historic and contemporary slavery with her ongoing work Sweatshop in which local community groups stitch flags for a large installation, while Fiona Kam Meadley has produced a fair trade information leaflet and competition.

But it’s The Undesirables by Melanie Jackson that brings the story closest to home. This flimsy panorama of etchings records the recent wreck of the MSC Napoli off the Devon coast. The smashed shipping containers, spewing their contents into the sea, revealed many of the mysteries and absurdities of international trade. Hundreds of scavengers flocked to the shore at Branscombe to pick up everything from BMW motorbikes to babies’ nappies. In the images relayed from this rural beach by the world’s media, our desire to have something for nothing – to ignore the origins of what we consume – seemed at its most naked.

With its makeshift lighting and barely unpacked feel, The Undesirables looks as if it washed up in a corner of the gallery entirely by accident. It now sits in unsettling contrast to a collection of grand paintings confidently celebrating Plymouth’s maritime past.

A scratchy, faded animation accompanies the drawings while transcripts and recordings offer personal accounts from different eyewitnesses. All these elements suggest the impossibility of arriving at one coherent narrative about any event, least of all something as complex as the slave trade.

Writer detail:
Gabrielle Hoad is an artist and writer based in Exeter.

art@gabriellehoad.co.uk | www.gabriellehoad.co.uk

Venue detail:
Plymouth Museum & Art Gallery
Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AJ

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