A Tangled Mess

Some thoughts on art I’ve seen this week

Frank Bowling, Middle Passage (1970). © Frank Bowling (Copyright Visual Arts-CARCC, 2023) Photo: NGC.

This week I went to see the new show at the Royal Academy in London. It’s called Entangled Pasts: 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change, and it looks at the relationship between Britain’s imperial histories and the visual arts, and how art shapes narratives of empire, slavery and resistance. The explicit aim of the show, the curators say, is to explore how the effects…