In 1951, an African American woman had her cells harvested while being treated for cancer. She was not asked, and she gave no consent, but the doctors took them anyway. Those cells became essential in future medical research, but she was forgotten. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, and an effigy of her floats in mineral oil in Tavares Strachan’s Hayward show.
This is what Bahamian artist Strachan does. He uncovers hidden Black histories – histories ignored, forgotten, erased by dominant white western narratives – and gives them new life. He doesn’t place Black stories into the history books, he writes his own history book; an infinitely more confrontational, powerful move.
The show opens with chaotic collages that meld together images of colonialism, scientific diagrams and important figures in Black history. There’s Haile Selassie looming over Elizabeth II, King Oba as an astronaut, W.E.B. Du Bois as some kind of astral traveller. Selassie appears again in a totem made up of shields and footballs in a field of rice plants arranged in the shape of an African pictogram in the next gallery. Strachan’s hectic collision of symbolism and history is a head-spinning journey through Blackness.
It all culminates in ‘The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility’, a staggeringly ambitious research project dedicated to preserving missing histories. It’s installed as a floor-to-ceiling archive of framed pages, all filled with lost stories. It’s a monumental attack on how we commemorate our past, and who gets to do it.
Strachan’s work isn’t just about the history of Blackness, but its future, its potential too
But the Bahamian artist isn’t just a historian, he’s an explorer, a scientist, a poet and an (Afro)-futurologist too. He went to the North Pole, then came home and launched the Bahamian Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center to encourage kids to study science; he sent a bronze sculpture of the first African American astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence jr into low orbit, then created a shimmering neon map of that man’s nervous system. Strachan’s work isn’t just about the history of Blackness, but its future, its potential too.
There’s more history upstairs, where Strachan has placed enormous busts of figures like Nina Simone, King Tubby and Sister Rosetta Tharpe in an installation covered in deep red iron oxide: a mineral found in African mines, and on the surface of Mars. Outside, a huge ship floats on a lake; a recreation of a boat from Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line shipping company. There’s a lot of information here, a lot of ideas.
The show is largely let down by the sculptures themselves, which are so central to the work but often feel both rushed and mass-produced. Lots of them are just not that great, and the neons are pretty underwhelming. The whole thing could all do with editing down, a bit of focus.
But the chaos of ideas is part of the point. Strachan is constantly drawing links between African history, slavery, religion, jazz and hip hop, ancient Egypt, space exploration. It’s dizzying, complex, ungraspable, because that’s what history is. Black pasts have been erased and forgotten for so long that you can forgive Strachan for striving so hard to say so much. He’s just got a lot to squeeze in.