Building the Collection - La Bouche du Roi
Collecting contemporary objects is crucial to the British
Museum. It means the Museum will be able to continue telling the
story of the world’s cultures for future generations. But acquiring
objects from the present can also give staff and visitors the
opportunity to look at objects from the past in a different
way.
In 2007, the British Museum acquired La
Bouche du Roi, a work of art created between 1997 and 2005 by
Romuald Hazoumé, an artist from the Republic of Bénin, West Africa.
The title of the piece translates as ‘The Mouth of the King’, and
refers to a place in Bénin from where many thousands of slaves were
transported to the Americas and the Caribbean.
With help from the Art Fund, the UK’s leading
independent art charity, and the British Museum
Friends, La Bouche du Roi was bought as part of the
Museum’s commemoration of the bicentenary of the Abolition of the
Slave Trade Act. It is a powerful work of art in its own right and
makes a striking and thought-provoking exhibit.
The work’s main components are 304 ‘masks’
made from plastic petrol cans, each with an open mouth, eyes and a
nose. The petrol cans mirror the images of the enslaved people in
the famous Brookes print of a late-eighteenth century
Liverpool slave ship. This print was made at the time to illustrate
the horrors of the slave trade. In this modern version, the petrol
cans also help tell the story of the motorcyclists who run black
market petrol between Benin and Nigeria. As well as representing
the spirits lost to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the piece also tells
the story of modern forms of economic oppression.
Although La Bouche du Roi isn’t a
historical artefact from the time of the slave trade, it helps the
Museum tell the story of what happened then and what is happening
now. But by putting it on display in the context of the
anniversary, Museum staff could also offer visitors a different way
to think about objects in other galleries, such as the
Enlightenment gallery, which displays artefacts from the eighteenth
century. In this way a work of contemporary art can have a
different kind of value in the collection of a museum than in an
art gallery.
La Bouche du Roi was on display at
the British Museum from 22 March until 13 May 2007, when it was
packed up to go on a Partnership UK tour to Hull, Liverpool,
Bristol, Newcastle and the Horniman Museum in London. Collaborative
tours, organised with partner museums throughout the country, give
the Museum the opportunity to show objects from its collection to
as many people as possible.