The culmination of the recent Entangled Pasts exhibition at the Royal Academy, London (3 February–28 April 2024) was undoubtedly Lubaina Himid’s monumental work Naming the Money (2004) (Fig. 1). The exhibition itself was an ambitious and highly admirable engagement by the Royal Academy with its own institutional “entanglement” with colonial and imperial histories since its foundation in 1768 up to the present day. It acknowledged and dealt with extremely sensitive and contested issues, notably the Atlantic slave trade, but also the East India Company, colonial and often genocidal occupation of the non-European world, transculturation and imperial hybridization, and other related subjects. Art works were selected from across the lifespan of the RA, with past and present works placed in dialogue with each other, usually on the basis of contemporary works critiquing or exposing the latent ideologies of empire and race embedded in earlier material that was produced within openly—and generally celebratory—imperial contexts.
Mostly, this curatorial approach worked very effectively. The opening two rooms began with the display in Room 1 of portraits of non-white sitters, which also entailed covering up some of the sculpted portrait busts of canonical white artists, thus partially erasing the presence of heroic white men literally embedded in the fabric of the building in an arresting reversal of the usual racialized orthodoxies both of the art-historical canon and also the genre of portraiture itself. The visitor then moved into Room 2, to be confronted by Hew Locke’s Armada, with its astonishing array of ships and makeshift nautical vessels, to emphasize that all those portrait sitters could only have come into contact historically with the RA—in whatever form, and by whatever means, whether voluntarily or by forcible abduction—via the ocean. As an opening statement, Locke’s installation rightly placed the sea at the center of everything in the exhibition. It spoke eloquently, for example, to John Akomfrah’s massive triple screen film, Vertigo Sea, towards the end of the show, but also troubled the assertive confidence of the eighteenth-century history paintings, such as Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe or John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, which enveloped it in Room 2.
At times, however, the dialogic curatorial approach could be jarring, oblique or simply inscrutable, as though the exhibition had been curated by committee. Thomas Stothard’s The Sable Venus, for instance, was made to illustrate Bryan Edwards’s pro-slavery book of the 1790s, and more specifically Isaac Teale’s poem of the same title included in the volume, which is a revoltingly prurient fantasy about beautiful African women traveling voluntarily across the Atlantic to satisfy the lust of white plantation owners unable to resist their charms. The notoriously brutal, inhuman and frequently fatal conditions in which enslaved Africans were held on board ship during the Middle Passage, as the voyage from Africa to the Americas was termed, are nowhere to be seen in Teale’s poem or Stothard’s print. Displaying the latter, therefore—based loosely on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and a horrifically racist and misogynist apologia for the Middle Passage, with implicit reference to plantation rape—requires particular care and sensitivity. It cannot be left to “speak for itself,” as it effectively was here, despite the invitation to view it dialogically against Kara Walker’s and Keith Piper’s searingly ironic subversions of racial stereotyping stemming from the culture of enslavement in the Caribbean and the antebellum Deep South. Similarly, without some prior background knowledge, it would be difficult to know what to make of Ellen Gallagher’s highly abstracted and esoteric canvases, except that they were placed in a section dealing with artistic representations of the sea. They have ostensibly little representational about them at all, and the label’s mention of Drexciya, the imaginary submarine world populated by the resurrected bodies of the dead and dying thrown overboard by slave ships during the Middle Passage, appears to have little connection with the content of the paintings. Nor was it clear how they were supposed to relate to Turner’s paintings of whalers hanging nearby. In other words, the viewer needed to have done considerable advance reading to understand what was at play here, and I wonder what non-specialist visitors made of such seeming anomalies. In the end, this was a problem of the ambitious scale and scope of the exhibition, which opened up multiple difficult and nuanced historical and aesthetic narratives that could not be adequately addressed within the exhibition format.
Ultimately, such problems were outweighed by the manifold strengths in bringing such works together and dealing head-on with the implications of the RA’s institutional complicity in the histories of empire. Yet, it meant that the show could feel disjointed and lacking in clear thematic consistency; which is where the decision to include Himid’s Naming the Money in its entirely was a stroke of genius, as this complex piece (itself also highly demanding of the beholder) pulled together all the issues indicated or implied elsewhere in the exhibition.
Comprising one hundred slightly larger than life-size painted cut-outs, conceived in ten groups of ten, of Black figures dancing and playing music to a musical soundtrack and voiceover by the artist, Himid’s installation occupied nearly the whole of the two penultimate rooms of the exhibition, dominating it both spatially and conceptually. The figures were arranged in groups allowing—or rather compelling—the visitor to walk through and among them as an immersive experience: there was no choice but to be part of this community. It was, therefore, both involving and confrontational for the visitor, not least in being literally overlooked by them, again in a reversal of the usual pattern of Black servants, and Blackness generally, being overlooked, particularly within the history of visual representation. It was confrontational on a deeper level, since these are not just arbitrary figures. They represent the enslaved jettisoned and thrown overboard on the Middle Passage, whether through specific atrocities such as the Zong massacre of 1781, in which over 130 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard in order to recoup their insurance value as lost goods; or whether through the ongoing genocide of the Atlantic slave trade that consumed so many millions of African lives, an unthinkable number of human beings.
Himid’s figures, then, provide a form of resurrection, a creative act of redemption of those enslaved bodies consumed by the slave trade, from the anonymity and abstract depersonalization of being reduced to a statistic. To this extent, they responded to Ellen Gallagher’s invocation of Drexciya, the Afrofuturist imagining of a transformed post-slavery existence. Himid’s figures are each named—twice, first with their African name, and then with their subsequent enslaved, plantation name. And they have artisanal occupations, including ceramicist, musician, mapmaker, herbalist, shoemaker, painter: occupations with which both the artist and the exhibition-goer might also identify. Again, this is not a detached community, but one of which both artist and viewer are also part. In other words, the depersonalized numbers of the dead, through the artist’s own parallel act of making, are provided with form, personality and subjectivity, and given life as individual human beings. So, they are depicted dancing, in brightly colored costume, a mass of movement and energy around the gallery space. And their individuality is also represented as persisting and continuing in the face of the transformative impact of enslavement. Each figure has an individual five-line verse autobiography added to the reverse of the cut-out (Fig. 2). This gives their two names, their occupations, and an abiding value of self-worth and dignity that is theirs under any circumstances, for example:
My name is Nakati
They call me John
I used to make masks
Now my shoes are worn by kings
But I have the colour
They are given their own voices through the artist, quite literally, as it is Himid reading out the texts in the accompanying voiceover.
Yet, at the same time the figures are still two-dimensional cut-outs: there is no pretense that they are somehow realist, or representations of identifiable historical individuals, they are not portraits as such, although in the exhibition they certainly responded tellingly to the opening display of portraits in the first room, some of which were of unidentifiable individuals. Instead, it is clear that this is a form of theater, albeit one in which the viewer is very much a part: intermingled with this provocative crowd, the spectator cannot divorce the act of participatory viewing from what the figures themselves stand for. It is a post-traumatic, therapeutic theater.
Perhaps most significantly, the verse autobiographies attached to each cut-out are on pages from an accounts book, as invoices or receipts, denoting their status as property, with a given monetary value: the figures are, inseparably, both creatively reimagined and re-embodied human individuals, and also statistics, stark numbers from the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, whose value as property meant that their loss could be reclaimed through insurance, underwritten by shipping brokers such as Lloyd’s of London. The fact that Lloyd’s flourished as a marine insurance business, indemnifying slave cargoes at the height of the slave trade, precisely in the decades when the RA was founded, added an extra level of poignant rage to Himid’s installation as the culmination of the exhibition. The title Naming the Money, therefore, invokes the act of accounting, in a triple sense—accounting as part of a financial system that converted human beings into property; but also accounting as atonement, calculating and measuring the loss of life, accounting for the sheer inhuman cost of a practice extending over three centuries. Finally, accounting as assessing the scale and form of reparations, what could reparations for such a colossal injustice and crime against humanity begin to look like or consist of, and how could they possibly be calculated and in what form?
Himid’s own account brings a conventionally invisible history into a confrontational material presence, and what might be dismissed as something of the past incontrovertibly into the present, as a space in which we must all participate. As the summation of the RA exhibition, it also epitomized the Academy’s own attempt to account for its own problematic histories.
Geoff Quilley is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex
Cite this note as: Geoff Quilley, “Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money at the Entangled Pasts, 1768-now exhibition, Royal Academy, London” Journal18 (November 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7634.
License: CC BY-NC
Journal18 is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC International 4.0 license. Use of any content published in Journal18 must be for non-commercial purposes and appropriate credit must be given to the author of the content. Details for appropriate citation appear above.
