Exhibition in London on slavery history

From British daily The Morning Star:

EXHIBITION: The Slave Ship Brookes

London Print Studio, 425 Harrow Road, London W10

JUDITH AMANTHIS is disturbed by a stunningly original display of slave-trade prints exhibited as part of Black History Month.

THE London Print Studio’s director John Phillips, an artist, printmaker and sculptor as well as a long-time practitioner of art for people’s sake, has grabbed print’s capacity to range from exquisite fine art to grubby newsprint to propaganda tool.

He’s planted it – gallery, print studio and community workshop combined – on London’s Harrow Road, known to locals as Carnival City.

For the area’s African-Caribbean community, Black History Month is a chance to draw attention to the atrocities of both the transatlantic and Arab slave trades.

Their history is still monstrously alive – into the vacuum of the North’s greed for Africa’s riches are sucked, still today, the majority of Africa’s inhabitants. This is one among many facts that the studio has worked into an exhibition of stunning originality.

Its focus is Thomas Clarkson’s famous print Stowage of the British Slave Ship “Brookes” Under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, a massively successful propaganda tool in the hands of anti [sic]-abolitionists. …

Then there’s a life-sized digital print of the back of a naked man. He’s whitewashed all over and labelled “sold.” Only his palms, turned outwards, show his colour.

The space between his shoulder blades, where the whip’s lash would have fallen again and again, bears a quote from the favourite whitewasher of ancient and modern slave-holders alike, Aristotle.

“It is clear that some men are by nature free and others slaves – and that, for these latter, slavery is both expedient and right.”

Exhibits until November 10. More info: (020) 8969-3247.