The exhibition will open to the public from the 3rd February 2024.
The Royal Academy’s upcoming exhibition, opening in February, will bring together over 100 pieces of art to explore the role of art in shaping narratives around empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism. This display will span over 250 years, from the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the present day and will be informed by the RA’s ongoing research into its links with colonialism.
Entangled Pasts will use the work of 50 artists connected to the institution to explore the relationship between art and our understanding of the past. These artists will include: Frank Bowling RA, Sonia Boyce RA, Lubaina Himid RA, Isaac Julien RA, Hew Locke RA, Yinka Shonibare RA and Kara Walker Hon RA alongside Joshua Reynolds PRA, Thomas Gainsborough RA, John Singleton Copley RA and J.M.W. Turner RA.
This display was programmed in 2021 in response to public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by
the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. It was also inspired by the RA’s Summer Exhibition 2021, coordinated by Yinka Shonibare with the theme ‘Reclaiming Magic’, aimed to “transcend the Western canon which formed the foundations of the Royal Academy”.
Presented across the Royal Academy’s main galleries, the exhibition will be organised into three thematic sections that intertwine narratives across time. Sites of Power will examine absence and presence in Grand Manner portraiture and history painting, reflecting on the decades surrounding the foundation of the RA, which saw both the height of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and the emergence of the movement for abolition, as well as new networks of artistic patronage associated with the East India Company. Beauty and Difference will trace the proliferation of aesthetic norms via drawings, prints, poetry, sculpture and photography in works that embody the moral contradictions of the Victorian age, during which abolition became a fashionable theme for artists while Britain continued aggressive colonial expansion. Crossing Waters will take an international perspective on the widespread legacies of the Middle Passage, including its farreaching ecological consequences, through immersive spaces that offer time to reflect on our
common history, its ramifications, and parallel issues today.
Particular highlights of the exhibition will include: Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber, c.1770 (The Menil Collection, Houston) and Thomas Gainsborough’s Ignatius Sancho, 1768 (The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), which will be shown alongside contemporary portraiture including Kerry James Marshall Hon RA’s Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, 2007 (Private Collection) and Sonia Boyce’s Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great, 1986 (Arts Council Collection, London).
To book tickets for the exhibition visit: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/entangled-pasts