This UK Black History Month, Somerset House presents We Are History, a new group exhibition offering a different perspective on humanity’s impact on the planet. Coinciding with the forthcoming 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the show examines the intricate interrelations between today’s climate crisis and the legacies of colonialism.
It showcases the works of several artists with personal connections to the Caribbean, South America, and Africa, documenting alternative viewpoints, not as an afterthought in climate debates, but as the source of resonant ideas and imagery related to social and environmental justice.
Its curator Ekow Eshun confides, ‘The artworks in We Are History are lyrical, moving and historically charged. They seek to address the climate crisis, not directly or didactically, but with a poetry and nuance that expands the visual framework we bring to the subject. By preferencing perspectives from the global South, the exhibition also identifies environmental change as a racial process with deep roots in colonial history’.
We Are History presents works that are moving, lyrical, and thought-provoking, capturing nature as a place of both beauty and fragility. Featuring artists Alberta Whittle, Allora & Calzadilla, Carolina Caycedo, Louis Henderson, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Mazenett Quiroga, Otobong Nkanga, Zineb Sedira, and a newly commissioned work by multidisciplinary artist Shiraz Bayjoo, the exhibition interrogates the environmental issues facing the southern hemisphere by looking to the past and drawing important insight from the cultural practices and knowledge systems of indigenous peoples.
Collectively, the artists aim to expand the common narrative around climate change, a subject that is often linked to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the West. We Are History invites visitors to look further back in time, exploring significant periods of change such as the 18th-century colonial era, which saw plantation agriculture and the forced mass migration of people through slavery reshaping lives and landscapes on a global scale.
The show runs from 16th Oct 2021 to 6th Feb 2022
For further information please visit https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/we-are-history
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