Tavares Strachan review – encyclopaedic art that sizzles

Hayward Gallery, London
From a hut that plays music as if it’s history’s jukebox to a rocket fuelled with sugarcane, the Bahamian makes art freighted with history and peopled by the overlooked and flawed

‘You belong here,” reads the neon sign high on one of the Hayward Gallery’s exterior walls, in a curving handwritten script. But where are we and what does belonging mean? That’s what Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan asks in There Is Light Somewhere, which fills the building. Origins and arrivals, disappearances and sudden returns have a big part to play in Strachan’s art.

Along the way, the artist has walked to the north pole, following Black polar explorer Matthew Henson, and taken a block of arctic ice back to the Bahamas. He has trained as an astronaut in Russia and blasted a sugarcane-fuelled rocket into the stratosphere, as part of a programme to interest young Bahamians in science and technology, and to further whatever dreams they have of escape. Referencing sports and reggae, untold lives, the writings of James Baldwin and Black astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr, Strachan’s art is always encyclopaedic, engrossing, disconcerting and engaging. Neon figures sizzle with life. Writing flares on a black wall. Highly crafted sculptures rise from living fields of rice and sounds fill the air.

Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere is at the Hayward Gallery, London, 18 June to 1 September