An atmosphere of mourning pervades 'When will we be good enough?, a new exhibition by Osman Yousefzada. The sound of an unidentified human or reed instrument - vulnerable and lamenting - emanates from somewhere, you're not yet sure where. This disembodied voice is one of the many types of 'extractions' around which the show turns. Objects and film footage wrenched from their places of origin are repositioned as artefacts and symbols. Traditions are uprooted and restaged, while the people at the heart of the show remain all but absent.
Much of the work in the show has a deliberately gnomic quality, with little explanatory information, so that the exhibition takes some piecing together. Yousefzada has fully embraced the opportunity to root around the museum's archive, allowing him to make associative connections across continents and spans of time. Items from The Box's collection are scattered throughout; for example, weapons that originate from the South Pacific are tethered to some 19th-century busts. Footage of an elderly Southeast Asian man, dragged from a protest by uniformed police, appears before an ostrich egg under a glass bell jar, a taxidermy golden eagle and a bust of Elizabeth I. There's an array of other video footage too, its context unspecified. Spot lit, these museological placements amplify the idea of the museum as a site for ordering and displaying knowl-edge, folding inevitable questions around ecological damage, cultural theft and repatriation into the mix.
How you navigate all this is another question. A flotilla of small wooden boats in the centre of the room
- painted in thick black lacquer - guides the way. One is stacked high with tinned mangoes; another carries a giant ceramic poppy seed; above another hangs a glass terrarium bursting with plants that the West might once have described as 'exotic. They are heading straight for what resembles, from afar, a picnic blanket. It turns out to be a couple of plush, red Moroccan carpets pushed together and dotted with spun brass vessels in a range of sizes, which, upturned, recall tureen lids or food cloches. The picnic is attended by three plaster cast busts dressed in Roman military garb that are set on the floor, hubristic expressions drawn across their colourless faces. The figures - clear likenesses of well-known power-hungry tech moguls - look on, unmoved by the invisible lamenting hum that rises before them. Black electrical cables snake from two of the vessels towards a nearby television set that shows black-and-white footage of men at work on board a ship. I'm later told that they are laying submarine telegraph cables.
There are a number of visual cues that direct the interpretation of this exhibition and the cables are one of them. Yousefzada traces lines of connection between people and continents throughout history: slave, migration and trade routes, but also telecommunications infrastructure such as the submarine telegraph cables from the 1870s to the digital fibreoptic cables of today. Many of these networks are owned and leased by a tiny number of multinational tech companies - hence the busts of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Once you see that, you see conjoining threads everywhere: one textile wall piece holds a thick mass of tightly coiled, plaited and knotted dark rope; in another, the outlines of silhouetted black figures, who seem to be helping each other up or taking giant steps onwards and upwards, spew out threaded ten-drils. You see anew the black electrical cables that are sometimes used to power the artworks on display. By making these connections explicit, Yousefzada encourages us to make transhistorical connections of our own.
Postcolonial theorist Edward Said argued that history is made by men and women just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated'. Yousefzada uses his sculptural, archival, filmic and textile assemblages - with plenty of space for allusion - to ask how history is being made now, by whom and, of course, who is being excluded from it. He asks what are the consequences of history's current 'disfigurements' when the passage, presentation and possession of information, alongside systems of knowledge and communication, are controlled by so few. Structural iniquities, subjugation and violence - consequences of colonial and imperial hegemony - are anything but a thing of the past.
