Entangled Pasts

I had to be in London for the day, so I needed a treat, a gallery I could drop into for an hour or so. Luckily, I booked to see “Entangled Pasts” at the Royal Academy. Its full title is “Entangled Pasts 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change”, at which your heart might sink - but it shouldn’t.

This is a supremely intelligent show, that’s been carefully considered and planned, with no tub-thumping or preaching. It’s hugely varied in form - sculpture, painting of all kinds, film - but also in subject matter, ranging from portraits of colonialists’ families to models of mud huts, imposed over slides of colonial mansions.

I was glad to take my time. I started looking at a video about Frederick Douglass - “Lessons of the Hour” - and often I’ll dip into such things for ten minutes, and then move on. Here, I had to stay, without realising I’d committed myself for an hour, but it was an hour well spent. Buying “the book of the show” sometimes sems an extravagance, but here it was essential. There was so much that I’d missed, hadn’t seen properly, or wanted to go back to. And in the book there’s the same concern for clarity, appetite for understanding, that marks the whole exhibition. I’m reading it slowly, a page at a time, and loving every minute.