Exhibition review Deeply shocking, this is a show of beauty and horror

Part history lesson, part crime scene, Hew Locke's What Have We Here? is filled with beauty and horror. At the heart of the show, in the Great Court Gallery, are looting and vandalism, the destruction of societies, the erasure of cultures and the enslavement of their peoples. All are embedded in the British Museum's own history and holdings. And that's without even touching on the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens and the sorry story of their acquisition, or to whom many of the other objects in the museum might be returned, even if there was a will to do so.

- Adrian Searle

Where are the pre-Columbian Caribbean Taíno people now, whose hard-wood spirit-figures of a birdman and of Boinayel the Rain Giver were found in a cave in Jamaica in 1792? The sculptures entered the British Museum's collection, while the Taíno were mostly wiped out, if not by murder then by diseases after Europeans arrived. “These sculptures are Jamaica's Elgin marbles. They've become a symbol of collective memory, an idea of Jamaican nationhood,” Locke writes.

Working with his partner, the curator Indra Khanna, and with the curators of the British Museum, Locke has done much more than set his own sculptures and images among the Museum's collection. He has also borrowed from the Royal collection, the British Library and elsewhere to make an exhibition that is inescapably, deeply shocking. The show's title, What Have We Here?, appears plain enough. After that, everything is complicated.