Rise Up, Fitzwilliam Museum: A claustrophobic interrogation of the legacy of the slave trade

Telegraph

21-02-2025

And so, the Fitzwilliam Museum's sorrowful, self-appointed anatomy of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade continues. Two years after Black Atlantic, a deliberately disruptive show that addressed similar themes, took over its historic galleries, the next instalment, Rise Up, arrives in the temporary exhibition spaces. Bring a tissue, is my advice; aside from the occasional jab at, say, the 'white colonial perspective', or the 'doublethink' of the Countess of Huntingdon, the mood is mostly sombre.
A sense of claustrophobia is apparent from the start. A vast painting by the British-Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo, depicting the 18th-century black campaigner Olaudah Equiano and his white wife (whom he probably met in Cambridge), with their young daughters, is crammed into a tight space at the entrance, hung on a false wall; on the other side, a pair of imposing columns like monumental grave markers, made of wooden planks to evoke slaving ships, and inscribed with horrifying statistics, dominate a dark-grey gallery, as a distracting audio recording recites the names of 29 enslaved African women and young girls from a page inside a plantation inventory presented nearby: 'Sue, Old Juliet, Little Grace, Joan…'
Elsewhere, a lump of charcoaled wood engraved with a poem picked out in gold leaf by Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba serves (we're told) as a 'metaphorical tomb' for the 'millions of Africans that were trafficked' (12.5 million, according to the catalogue).
The artefact, though, that most moved me was a sampler completed in 1833 by Susannah Edwards, an enslaved girl removed from an illegal slaving ship by the Royal Navy and resettled in Sierra Leone as a 'Liberated African' (as her stitches proclaim). The contrast between the brutality of her life's story and her needlework's ingenuous, homespun simplicity skewers the heart.
The history of abolitionism provides a structure. The first room reveals the savagery endured by enslaved Africans in the New World; the second gallery changes tack and provides a lesson in literary history, by presenting influential 18th-century volumes, many by black writers such as Equiano, which rallied the British public to the abolitionist cause.
Uprisings in Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean are a focus of the final space, before the exhibition peters out, with a curiously lukewarm call to carry on the 'fight', as a label puts it, 'for a more equitable society'. 'How much has really changed in over 200 years?' this same label asks. 'Thankfully,' you might respond, 'a lot.'
To offset the glut of documents on display, including ledgers as well as first editions, and so to enliven an otherwise bookish atmosphere, the curators intersperse on-point pieces by various contemporary artists such as Keith Piper. Several, though, are run-of-the-mill.
In the foreground to the catalogue, the Fitz's director, Luke Syson, sounds cautious, acknowledging that, as the museum's 'journey of change' is only 'just beginning', 'we will sometimes make mistakes.' It would be wrong to describe this heartfelt interrogation of some of history's darkest chapters and complexities as a 'mistake'. But nor is it a crisp or entirely successful exhibition.