Though the exhibition foregrounded mostly era-specific media-in a purpose-built viewing room, one could watch the seminal films of late Bajan-born Black British cinema pioneer Menelik Shabazz, including Breaking Point: The вЂSusвЂ™ Law and Black Youth, 1978-the ensemble testified that the condition of racialism imposed on the Black British subject has been omnitemporal. Stefan KalmГЎrвЂ™s description of the exhibition-the last production he oversaw during his five-year tenure as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London-as a вЂњlong overdue celebration of black communities and their historic struggles against racismвЂќ was unfortunate in ignoring the futurity of grief. These items told of oscillating periods of oppression and subcultural resistance, but the accompanying case studies detailing the tenuous legal means by which this community has faced persecution-the reinvocation of the 1824 Vagrancy Act or the blatantly racialist вЂњsusвЂќ law that permitted police officers to arrest individuals on the basis of suspicion until its symbolic repeal in August 1981-foretold the inevitable futures of such a carceral logic. Across the institutionвЂ™s main ground-floor exhibition space, archival documentary photographs, moving images, printed ephemera, and first-person written testimonies were installed within a labyrinthine structure conceived by exhibition designer Abi Wright.

Is it because the multimedia exhibition, arguably the most extensive presentation of Black British community grassroots activism produced to date, culminated in the first institutional presentation of The Killing of Mark Duggan, 2019, an investigation by Goldsmiths, University of LondonвЂ“based human rights research agency Forensic Architecture? (The mixed-media installation dissects the discrepancies in the official report on the police killing of the twenty-nine-year-old Duggan, whose death catalyzed a week of rioting that consumed London and many other towns and cities in England ten summers ago.) Or is it because the show took place one year after the George Floyd protests, which, in the UK, prompted a marginally productive discourse on the imperial legacies in public sculpture? Most urgent and timely to my mind is the way this exhibition-empirical in both substance and execution-succeeded in identifying the paradigm of innocence, a condition historically denied to the Black British subject at the whim of the punitive state, as an absolute and inherent virtue.Д¬o-organized by community organizer Stafford Scott, coordinator of Tottenham Rights his daughter, curator Kamara Scott and her longtime friend and colleague, critic and curator Rianna Jade Parker, вЂњWar Inna BabylonвЂќ delineated the historiographic cartography of anti-Black subjugation in the more than seventy years since the mass arrival-on-invitation of West Indian workers in Britain. I must implore those who were keen to term вЂњWar Inna Babylon: The CommunityвЂ™s Struggle for Truths and RightsвЂќ an вЂњurgentвЂќ or вЂњtimelyвЂќ exhibition to question exactly why this moment best served to accommodate such a show. The undead corpse of empire-wraithlike Babylon-breeds violence and contempt.

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Empire at war absolute corruption