Guest Curator – Whitworth Art Gallery, “Revealing Histories: Trade and Empire”

I was invited as a guest curator for the Whitworth Art Gallery’s exhibition Revealing Histories: Trade and Empire, part of the North West-wide programme marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Working alongside the Whitworth team, I used the collection to expose Manchester’s entanglement with transatlantic slavery and empire and to “talk back” to works that had long been shown without that context.

For my section of the show, I was inspired by Tony Phillips’ powerful etching series History of the Benin Bronzes. I chose to place these works at the heart of an installation built around a “Dislocation Puzzle Table” – a participatory piece that invited visitors to physically move, rearrange and piece together fragments of text and image. The aim was to mirror the dislocation, theft and scattering of African objects and histories, and to ask whose stories museums choose to assemble or leave in pieces.

By bringing together Phillips’ etchings and my installation, the curatorial approach was deliberately dialogic: not a single authoritative voice, but a conversation between historical works, contemporary Black perspectives and the audience. The exhibition challenged comfortable narratives of trade and progress, insisting that Manchester’s wealth and the museum’s collection be seen in relation to slavery, colonial violence and ongoing debates about restitution.