Resistance and defiance and celebrations, arrivals, departures and returns: from photographs of protests to a Union Black flag, this timely show is an unmissable testament to creativity
Life Between Islands is an exhibition of protests and pleasures, celebrations and insurrections. Several years in the making, and as important as it is timely – as well as long overdue – it is also an exhibition of arrivals, departures and returns. Filled with variety and complexity, the well- and lesser-known, the overlooked or rarely shown in this country, it takes us from pre-war London and the carved figures of Ronald Moody, to digital animation and an examination of successive regimes of punitive and restrictive immigration law from the 1800s to the present government’s hostile environment policies, in a work by the Otolith Group.
An extensive catalogue fleshes out this milestone exhibition of around 50 artists. We visit the home of fictional political activist Joyce, in Michael McMillan’s simulacra of a 1970s West Indian front room. On the TV, Horace Ové’s 1976 film Pressure plays. The first UK feature by a black director, it is a gritty appraisal of lives of the Windrush generation, and the difficulties faced by their British-born children.
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