Viewing The Royal Academy explores art’s colonial history

The Royal Academy unpicks the threads that tie art to Britain’s colonial history in Entangled Pasts, drawing on its own collections and loans from other organisations. It brings together 100 artworks – spanning from the foundation of the RA in 1768 to now – to examine the role of art in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition, indenture and colonialism, while reckoning with its own complex links to these movements.

Contemporary perspectives come courtesy of artists, including Yinka Shonibare, Sonia Boyce, Barbara Walker and John Akomfrah. Among the highlights are Hew Locke’s haunting fleet of ragged ships suspended from the ceiling, reflecting the movement of people across time, and John Akomfrah’s 43-minute visual assault, Vertigo Sea, in which images of historical tragedies – from slave killings to drowned migrants – are cut with scenes from nature. Horrifying yet captivating in equal measure.