Exhibit B

South African artist Brett Bailey’s unforgettable if limited investigation of the darker, forgotten corners of colonial history is a startling piece of work.

Among the swept frames and portraits of white Scottish dignitaries hanging in the Old College’s Playfair Library Hall, a variety of meticulously constructed “exhibits” await our inspection. Except here, the sculptures blink back.

Taking the heinous European phenomenon of human zoos (where objectified “savages” were treated as mere spectacles by supposedly superior Westerners), Bailey places several living men and women into nearly still-life tableaux alongside seemingly anodyne explanatory notes with titles like “The Age of Enlightenment”, “The Missing Link” and “Cultivating the Natives”. Further reading reveals the true horror: a group of runaway slaves have their bones broken before being “slowly roasted” in the Dutch colony of Paramaribo; Sarah Bartmann, the nineteenth century “Hottentot Venus”, famous for her large, fleshy thighs and buttocks rotates naked on a plinth; and most movingly, four singing heads, their bodies hidden from view, form a Namibian choir and sing traditional laments while real photographs of African beheadings are suspended above them.

It’s hard to look at, the returned eye contact inevitably intensifying feelings of silent shame. To what end, we wonder? It’s belligerent and bruising, unremittingly so, with nothing much beyond the dreadful depictions. Perhaps Exhibit B’s real legacy lies in its exposing of the insidious process of documenting history and museum curation across the world. The beaten, blooded and debased human beings on display here might be silent, but for once, Bailey’s work will see their stories heard across the world.