What We Have Become

Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive, London

28 March – 1 June 2024

Review by Ella Sinclair 

Tucked away in Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive, What We Have Become is a thought-provoking group exhibition displaying multimedia artworks from five different artists, curated by Basil Olton. The remit of this ambitious exhibition considers the impacts of archives on our personal and cultural identities. 

The exhibition title references Stuart Hall’s 1993 essay ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in which he notes that cultural identity ‘is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’.’ ‘We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about ‘one experience, one identity’ without acknowledging its other side – the ruptures, and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s ‘uniqueness’, writes Hall. Treating the silence and erasures in archival records kept by the British state on Black and Asian British communities as a point of ‘rupture’, (the curator’s note explicitly mentions the Windrush Scandal), the exhibition responds to this violence by filling the archival gaps.

Diensen Pamben’s 2020 photography series, titled ‘The Protester’, opens the exhibition. Photos of defiant protesters at a Black Lives Matter march in Brighton line the wall. Shot in a style that mimics police surveillance, Pamben’s black and white images of the protesting crowds engage with the uncomfortable stories behind the photos: racist policing. In the central image, a single young woman, who has climbed above the protesting crowds, raises her clenched fist up into a grey sky. 

Resilience, captured so poignantly by Pamben, is a central theme of the exhibition.  What We Have Become is also a space for healing. Not only does the exhibit explore the violence of archival silencing, it also aims to work toward reconciliation. In this aesthetic space, new narratives, told on their own terms, are on display. 

Visitors will spot Rudy Loewe’s vivid painting We Been Here as soon as they arrive: the colours are striking, as are the sharp gazes of the activist Black women Loewe depicts with his use of vibrant acrylic colours. Each vividly painted woman (donning coats and scarfs of blue, pink, and purple, against a bright background of yellow) holds a hand-painted placard in mobile protest as they appear to move across the canvas. At the forefront, a sign reads ‘Britain doesn’t want us if they can’t own us.’ Resistance is a theme that hums through the exhibition. 

Continuing to move through the space, the just audible tones from artist Holly Graham’s work waft through the room. Whilst listening to Graham’s video essay exploring the politics of archival work, the visitor is invited to look down through glass vitrines at Graham’s selection of colonial and personal archival imagery. Graham’s essay explores the unsilencing of Black communities in the archives with a duty of care, in a way that takes back control of silenced narratives without doing any further harm. The listener takes in these fragmented audio snippets as they explore Graham’s archival work, in which Graham has carefully considered the methods and poetics of display. Graham’s choice of paraphernalia (from eighteenth-century sugar loaf cutters, to images of colonial sugar bowls, to her Grandad’s Jamaican passport with a stamp confirming his British citizenship) is entirely overlapping, becoming woven together: an array of familial and institutional record keeping which becomes connected, as they are, through the display. Images  of Graham’s grandad, who settled in South London after leaving Jamaica, are woven thoughtfully amongst archival images of colonial documents and reports. The image of deep blue ocean waves is the background to one vitrine, a poignant reminder of the Black diaspora’s shared trauma: ‘the rupture’ that took us across the Atlantic.

Similarly, Kelly Wu’s piece is a stunning array of personal and institutional record keeping. Miscellaneous objects, from bus tickets to ceramic ornaments, placed in and around vitrines document the presence of Chinese-diasporic communities in Britain. These objects are accompanied by motifs from the archives documenting London’s first Chinatown, just a stone’s throw away from the exhibition in Limehouse. 

The empowering narrative of the exhibition subverts the gaps in traditional archival collecting, inserting the rich contributions of minoritised diasporic communities in Britain back – quite literally – into the archive, the home of the exhibit.

The exhibition ends with the curator’s captivating interdisciplinary contribution: Olton brings together ceramics and collage – fragments of Empire Windrush passenger lists, the deed for Commercial Road (signed by slavers) – in a direct response to Hall’s essay. The fragmentation is deliberate. Olton speaks to the ruptures in the shared history of Caribbean diasporic communities, and the gaps in archives pertaining to these groups. 

The erudition of the curator is clear in the multitude of aims of this exhibition. Not only does Olton respond to archival silencing of Black and Asian British communities, he also fills these gaps, explicitly noting the Home Office’s Windrush Scandal and Hall’s essay as two themes the exhibition responds to and explores. Far from aloof, Olton’s intellectual aims are accompanied by an array of community work. Alongside the display, the artists hold talks, events, and workshops with local communities and schools. Above all else, What We Have Become is a space for reconciliation, a space for healing through fresh engagement with the archives. It is a conscientious re-telling of Black and Asian Briton’s histories on their own terms, which the exhibition has done successfully.