Tate Liverpool
The US artist has turned his powerful gaze on Malaga, a self-determined, racially mixed island that was cleared of its inhabitants – and the bones of their ancestors
A black architectural wedge angles up to the roof, its cut slate slopes glowering in the gallery. More slate – broken this time and reminiscent of a Richard Long sculpture – makes a black circle on the floor, where a plinth sits, topped by a revolving green neon sign saying “MALAGA”. There’s more: a huge blackboard chalked with notes about Liverpool’s and Bristol’s role in the slave trade; about brown babies and “half-castes”; about the state of Maine’s anti–race-mixing laws; that in 1973, Theaster Gates was born free.
There is an awful lot to take in, let alone unpack, in Gates’s Amalgam, a restaging of a show held earlier this year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Amalgam is a near-anagram of Malaga. Each of the works here is an amalgam of sculptures and signs, the real and the remade. There is music. There is video. There is dance and history. The difficulty lies in fitting its parts together, working out exactly what it is we are looking at.
Continue reading...