‘what have we here?’

Among the objects​ selected from the British Museum’s collection by the artist Hew Locke for his exhibition what have we here? (until 9 February) is a silver-gilt dish made in 1874 by the Crown jeweller, Garrard and Co. The dish is a feast of ostentation. Concentric bands of palmettes, floriate scrolls, rippling gadroons and spirals encase an intricate boss, where smaller versions of the outer vegetal scrolls dance around an inner star and twenty finialed zig-zags flash like a sunburst. Yet, on closer inspection, the delicate jauntiness and subtle irregularity of these forms set the central disc apart from the decorative bombast of the surrounding layers. Camouflaged by its Victorian frame, it is one of the akrafokonmu or awisiado (pectoral discs) taken from the Asante capital, Kumasi (in modern-day Ghana) as part of the indemnity demanded by British forces at the conclusion of the Third Anglo-Asante War of 1873-74. Similar discs were worn as badges of status in the 19th century by officials of the Asante king, or Asantehene. Among the ritual duties of these akra (‘soul people’) was to wash or purify the king’s soul. Like much Asante regalia, this one encodes a traditional Akan proverb: ‘The evening star, desirous of being married, always stays close to the moon.’ The people, symbolised by the twenty golden points, will remain loyal to their king.

For Locke, this incorporation of sacred Asante gold in a fancy dish is an act of violence that has parallels with the British ransacking and demolition of the Asante palace itself: the blingy appropriation of the awisiado by Garrard ‘traps it and … kills it at the same time’. But if the disc is trapped, it is also the engine of the subsequent ornament, setting in motion the surrounding ripples that amplify its forms like rings from a pebble thrown into a pool. If it has been killed, it remains eloquent about the entanglement of African and European aesthetics long before 1874; the Asante disc has already borrowed European motifs in the four peapod squiggles interspersed with bulbous fronds that the Garrard goldsmith re-echoes and elongates in the second of the outer bands. Like Locke’s own sculptures, installations and drawings, the dish is an assemblage and a reframing that encapsulates what he calls, simply, the ‘messy histories’ of imperialism and modern nationhood which have informed his work for more than three decades. Born in Edinburgh in 1959, but raised in his father’s Guyana as it was gaining independence from Britain, Locke has described his practice of beguiling viewers with his sculptures’ multi-textured intricacies as ‘fly-fishing with a fancy lure’. That’s what the dish is, too: a lure for the eye, beautiful and disturbing. It’s not hard to see why Locke is drawn to it.

The Garrard dish forms the focal point of one of four central displays – on sovereignty, trade, conflict and treasure – that make up the exhibition’s conceptual spine. Each freestanding case houses objects or clusters of objects selected from the museum’s collection, sometimes interspersed with examples of Locke’s own work. In the first case, Parian ware busts of Queen Victoria and two of her successors from Locke’s ongoing Souvenirs series – encrusted with his signature additions of cheap imitation gold chains, brass filigree, artificial plants, snakes, skulls, plastic emeralds, fake hair and replica medals – are placed next to boxes of seals used to impress the insignia of empire on official documents in Australia, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. Intrigue in the glitter of the bric-à-brac that encases these royal visages turns to a feeling of repulsion, danger, a growing sense of the untoward – not dissimilar to the effect of the exhibition overall. Locke asks us to consider imperial power as a grim yet alluring excess of the symbolic, not just as the exercise of brute force (although there is a replica Maxim gun elsewhere in the show). The proliferating connections – from object to object and among the intricate details of his work – produce the uncomfortable sensation that empire’s manifold effects cannot be fully grasped.

This aesthetic of excess in Locke’s work, its ‘too muchness’, has been described by the art historian Kobena Mercer as a ‘postcolonial baroque’ in which ‘spectacular surfaces’ have a double function. They ‘solicit and deflect the gaze of others’, and at the same time operate like a mask that ‘hides and protects the inner world of diaspora subjectivity, acting as a hollow shell that allows the self a contemplative space of melancholy in which to count its losses and hence come to terms with them’. There is a tension in what have we here? between what Mercer calls the ‘signifying indirection’ of Locke’s baroque and the straightforwardness of the classroom. The exhibition is a curious mixture of the didactic and the free-associative, of playfulness and deadly seriousness.

Around the edge of the room, a further series of vitrines elaborates the four themes through wide-ranging historical case-studies and conjunctions, from the formation of the Royal African Company (in 1660) to the Third Delhi Durbar (1911), from England’s first contact with the Americas to the plunder of Maqdala (1868) or the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-4. Non-linear and vignette-like, each constellation of objects could be endlessly reconfigured, or approached from any number of possible starting points.

The feeling of the show, then, is of provisionality, of history in the process of being digested and rewritten. Open shelving stacked with foam supports and empty boxes filled with tissue paper give the impression of a storeroom. Tyvek, chipboard and unpainted MDF suggest packing crates and transit. Yellow labels and highlights indicating text in Locke’s voice look like Post-it notes or a reader’s underlinings. Meanwhile, cardboard figures, masked and dressed in patchwork costumes that refer to the objects and histories on display, survey the gallery from above. These ‘Watchers’ keep guard, pass judgment, accuse. Locke describes them as a Greek chorus. They turn the museum visit unfolding below into a piece of theatre, holding it up as an object for inspection in its own right. This has the effect of introducing curatorial self-consciousness, prising apart presentation and narrative authority. The Watchers’ mood is dark, despite their carnivalesque appearance. Further figures intrude in the museum’s Enlightenment Gallery, like uninvited guests at a party.

What have we here? cements a tradition at the British Museum of inviting artist-curators to frame the collection in their own terms. This began with Eduardo Paolozzi’s Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Nahuatl at the Museum of Mankind (then the BM’s ethnographic gallery) in 1985 and continued with Grayson Perry’s Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman in 2011. Revelling in what he had learned in the Paris of Picasso and Tzara to call ‘primitive art’, Paolozzi proceeded as a Surrealist ethnographer whose role in juxtaposing museum objects with works of his own was to defamiliarise and re-enchant. Perry, by turns irreverent, silly and devotional, conceived of his show as a pilgrimage and a shrine, elevating the idea of human making to the status of a religion in which the craftsman of his title was understood as a saint (and his childhood teddy bear its god).

Both Perry and Locke visited Paolozzi’s exhibition at the start of their careers. The three projects have a good deal in common. But Locke’s show arrives at a cultural moment very different from 1985 or 2011. Where Paolozzi and Perry celebrated magic and the mystical, Locke seeks to demystify. Where they delight in objects as ludic examples of form, materiality and craft untethered from their original contexts, Locke is concerned with provenance and the power dynamics of collecting – although he, like Paolozzi, challenges the notion of cultural purity and singular origins. All three investigate questions of power, but for Locke power is primarily political rather than spiritual. His is a project of ethics as much as aesthetics. He calls for ‘serious dialogue’ and for the museum to take responsibility for its part in Britain’s imperial past. His wit should not distract from the gravity of his demands.