Exhibition will help us be more inclusive

The motivation behind Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change was to make a genuinely exploratory exhibition in response to a live public debate about the connection between art and our understanding of history.

I had been struck by the Rijksmuseum’s Slavery exhibition and thought about mounting  one at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA).

The project became an important forum  for acknowledging that the institution is inextricably bound to the violent histories of empire and slavery, the many legacies of which permeate society today. 

At the time of creating the exhibition in 2021, the RA’s collections team had already established a programme of decolonial research into our history.

In the first instance, it involved a biographical survey of more than 175 Royal Academicians from 1768 to 1850 to establish their links to colonial interests and their relationships to the abolitionist movement.

This research is available on our website and we will share more as the research progresses. 

From the outset, the question for Entangled Pasts was how to address such  a vast and complex topic through the prism of art, rather than historical illustration and documentation, and how to think critically about the institution’s past, present and future.

We needed an independent perspective. We invited professor Dorothy Price to lead a curatorial team, coordinated by RA curator Sarah Lea.

Esther Chadwick and Cora Gilroy-Ware, experts in 18th-century and 19th-century art respectively, worked with curatorial researcher Alayo Akinkugbe, and RA assistant curator Rose Thompson to shape the selection. 

Important conversations with Royal Academicians – including Lubaina Himid, Hew Locke, Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah– guided their approach, as they devised a structure that allowed for poetic dialogues between historical and contemporary works of art, to produce questions and new meanings, and to generate open conversations.

At the same time, the choices were grounded in detailed research about each work, maintaining the specificity of their historical context. Our designer, JA Projects, enhanced these dialogues through its approach to our neoclassical exhibition spaces.  

All exhibitions are collaborations, but the process of making this exhibition has engendered more and different types of conversation: externally with lenders and artists new to the RA, with academic colleagues at study days, and a full-day symposium that connected several researchers from different locations.

Most important for the RA itself are the conversations taking place internally between different areas of the organisation, as we reflect on the project.

The challenges of communicating the exhibition’s themes and intent to audiences and stakeholders called for cross-department working; a dedicated group was set up to enable this, which has forged new links in the staff community. 

We are conscious that the exhibition formed part of a much wider conversation –one that has been taking place over many decades.

Visitors were encouraged to share their thoughts on the show via feedback cards and post-visit surveys, which they also used to share personal histories, as well as ideas and suggestions. We are working on how we can meaningfully bring that feedback to bear on our next steps. 

Entangled Pasts was attended by 81,035 people. Even if we had hoped for a slightly higher attendance, the fact that “global majority” audiences were about 16% higher than our average is a positive step. 

The big question is how we understand the platform the RA has now, and how we can use it equitably, inclusively and sustainably. We want to serve our current audiences, who we know love discovering and learning about art, while building trust with new audiences.

Entangled Pasts forms part of a programme that includes exhibitions such as Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South (2023), and next year a survey of Brazilian modernist painting, as well as solo exhibitions dedicated to Kerry James Marshall and Mrinalini Mukherjee. 

The impact of the exhibition is informing our internal culture and conversation about becoming a more inclusive institution. We are on a journey, like all organisations balancing multiple considerations.

The curators and artists, whose voices form a Smartify audioguide that continues to be freely available after the exhibition, did a fantastic job in reminding us of the power that art has to embrace contradiction and nuance.

Art continues to be an agent of change and can provide  an opportunity to foster a deeper understanding of these histories, for an organisation and for its audiences.

Axel Rüger is the secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, London