From colonial leaders dressed in trippy patterns to a library of historical conflicts, this delightful show brings a welcome wit and rationality to today’s angry debates
t looks like a happy ending. After the disputes and all the agonising, Yinka Shonibare CBE offers a witty, weirdly beautiful conclusion to the debate over public statues that has raged sinceQueen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Kitchener – they’re all here, a gallery of famous and less famous icons of Britain’s imperial past. Their statues from public places in the capital have been reproduced, not monumental size but human height.
Agree or not, we can talk about it. Shonibare’s joyous comic remake of public statuary lets you approach history with a rational detachment. Queen Victoria seems more alive covered in wax print flowers. EvenWho is he anyway? A celebrated, India-born Victorian general whose career started during the 1857 Indian Rebellion and took him to Afghanistan and the Boer war. The kind of colonial icon we’ve happily forgotten.
We are urged to rethink what matters, and where, in world history. Did Churchill and the Battle of Britain really shape our world more decisively than theWhile you can’t remove and read its incongruously beautified volumes , there is a study table in the centre of the gallery where you can explore a specially created digital encyclopedic history of warfare, with maps, chronologies and artistic depictions of conflict.
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