‘It’s quite a thing to do a show here and openly use the word looting’: artist Hew Locke on decolonising the British Museum

After his triumphant Tate installation, The Procession, the artist is preparing a radical exhibition tackling Britain’s imperial past. He talks about why we must return plundered artefacts and rethink attitudes to heritage

Within the oak-panelled walls and glass display cases of the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum – a long, impossibly high-ceilinged room that is a temple to the gods of reason and imperialism – there is a little unmarked secret door, leading backstage or who knows where. You would never spot it unless you were looking. But for the rest of the autumn – for the first time in its 200-year history – that door will be symbolically flung open and three raucous figures will be emerging from it, invading the hushed space of marble busts and dinosaur fossils and leather-bound books. Leading the charge will be a young child of indeterminate heritage, in rags and patches, calling the others on.

The figures emerge not only from the secret door but from the imagination of the artist Hew Locke, who was recently sitting with me on a low leather seat nearby, one quiet early morning before the museum opened, explaining, with half a smile, how it will look. “There are three figures but the sense is that this is just the advance guard, there are hundreds more behind, you know, like a horde,” he says. “The child is holding a medal, an enlargement of a medal that was given to soldiers in east and west Africa, to the Benin expedition guys [who plundered that country’s riches]. And he has a little armband with a very crude plastic replica of the Koh-i-noor diamond. It’s a mix-up, a messing around with colonial history, a messing around with ideas of the collection here.”

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