ABSTRACT
In 2014 a friend invited me to a preview of a work entitled ‘Exhibit B’ by the South African artist Brett Bailey displayed in London at the Waterloo vaults, a grimy subterranean space of concretised imaginings hidden beneath the hustle of the city street. Immersed in my own writing, I’d heard nothing about the exhibition. I arrived, only to be led with a dozen other audience members into an empty room, where each of us was separated from our acquaintances and invited to walk silently around a series of rooms that stretched out in front of us. In each room we found recreated scenes of nineteenth-century colonialism, the plight of refugees, and contemporary objectifications of black culture – but in each scene was not a mannequin, but rather a living human body; bodies shackled, abused, put to work, and looking back at us as we made sense of the living images before us.
