The Accursed Share, a new group exhibition featuring nine artists and artists’ groups, aims to take our personal understanding of debt and put it into a global context. The exhibition explores the many narratives of debt, namely those generated and enforced through stolen land and themarch of capitalism.
On entering the gallery we are met with Cian Dayrit’s powerful tapestries hung on the imperial green walls. These works are made in collaboration with people from marginalised communities in the Philippines, which is also the artist’s home. In one, Tree of Life in the State of Decay and Rebirth (a collaboration with Henry Caceres), a stitched diagram of the feudal systems imposed on land workers is woven into the form of a tree. The tree stretches up from six roots, each labelled with a violent power such as imperialism and capitalism. The spiky, jagged branches break off and multiply, containing the abundant conditions of their making: cheap labour, militarisation, ethnocide. The background is dotted with crosshairs, like blossoms falling from a tree.
The natural world pulls us across the gallery to Sammy Baloji’s Untitled 2018/2023. These found copper mortar-shell casings were decorated by first world war soldiers during downtime away from the frontline and turned into planters. After the war, these became desirable objects for the homes of the middle classes. Plants absurdly sprout from the top, the flourishing greens so at odds with the shells’ previous explosive contents.
Moving through the rich architecture of the sprawling gallery spaces, we happen on weavings by Croatian artist Hana Miletić, replicas of lo-fi repairs she finds within city landscapes. Wing mirrors hastily reattached to cars, broken windows temporarily patched with gaffer tape – small quick fixes are made monumental, constructed with delicate fabrics and laboured over for hours, this attention repaying the debt of the initial action. The weavings are fixed unceremoniously to the gallery walls as though plastered on like bandages, giving the feeling they are holding the building together – quiet moments of resilience that try to contain the show’s capitalist violence.
We step into Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money. Populated by hand-painted lifesize cutouts of figures, all in brightly coloured apparel, the space vibrates with connection and community. The figures, which are based on the enslaved Africans so regularly depicted in paintings of European courts, step out of these flat nameless constraints and into Himid’s new landscape. The figures are placed in direct conversation with each other, sharing music and culture. The name of each person is read aloud by Himid, banishing the false westernised identities bestowed on the enslaved people.
The works in The Accursed Share extract debt from our ideas of the personal and force us to acknowledge its impact on politics and community. The word “debt” is defined as something that is agreed by both parties. But what this exhibition shows us is that global debts, land debts, and colonial debts were never agreed. There was never negotiation – just extraction by means of western violence and power. As conversations about these severe infractions come into view, we need not only to acknowledge what is owed but to work out how to pay that back, and how to return the appropriate interest accrued.
