Hew Locke’s Foreign Exchange recast a monument to empire

THE STORY, IN BRIEF

Dan Hicks’s June 2022 Hyperallergic report examined Hew Locke’s Foreign Exchange, an Ikon commission for Birmingham’s Commonwealth Games festival. Locke placed the city’s Queen Victoria statue aboard a fabricated ship alongside five smaller versions of the monarch. Rather than removing the monument, the intervention used added figures, crates and military imagery to examine, in Hicks’s reading, the circulation of imperial symbols. Hicks connected the work to Locke’s childhood encounters with another Victoria statue in Guyana.

Summarised from Hyperallergic · Dan Hicks. AFROSCOPE Daily has not independently reported this story.