A sobering set of wrought-iron ankle shackles used to restrain people below deck as they were transported from Africa to enslavement have gone on permanent display in a room of beautiful sculptures at the Walker art gallery in Liverpool.
The shackles have been placed near sculpted portraits of the Sandbach family made in the 19th century by John Gibson, Liverpool’s leading sculptor. The family members were part of the Sandbach, Tinne and Co dynasty that made an immense fortune trading in enslaved people and their output, including sugar, rum, molasses, timber and coffee.
The display of shackles in the same room as art comes after a community-led project to explore, confront and expose the links between slavery and art. Led by a steering group of marginalised young people in Liverpool, the project set out to “address the erasure of colonial history in the Walker sculpture display”.
Alex Patterson, an assistant curator of fine art at National Museums Liverpool, said the project told an uncomfortable truth about the artworks – who commissioned them, and where the money came from to pay for them. “In the past, these histories have been overlooked, ignored or purposely omitted from public view,” she said. “This has meant we have only been telling one side of the story.”
Patterson said she had learned much from the group “and I’m extremely grateful to have been part of their conversations, which were sometimes very personal and challenging for them. Individually and together, I admire their drive, their ability to think outside the box, and to challenge the institutions and the hierarchies that exist inside them.”
The shackles come from the collection of Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. They are the type used during the so-called “middle passage” of the Atlantic slave trade to restrain African people below decks in a ship’s hold.
The Walker said the decision to display them next to sculptures “was made to show that slavery does not only exist in history and inside the walls of the International Slavery Museum, but that its legacies are still present in our streets, in our buildings and in our culture today.”
Members of the Sandbach family included merchants, politicians, clergy and philanthropists and were key players in the development of Liverpool. They became dizzyingly wealthy largely through the slave trade. The family were awarded substantial claims in compensation after the abolition of slavery in 1833.
The project’s steering group worked with artists and historians including Malik Al Nasir, a poet whose PhD studies explore his ancestral links to, remarkably, both the Sandbach Tinne corporation and Africans enslaved by it.
The steering group said it hoped its work would be a catalyst for wider change and that other institutions would recontextualise artworks with colonial links.
Gavin Odhiambo Okello-Davies, a steering group member, said: “It’s a revolutionary project that deserves the world’s attention. We’ve paved a path for so many future generations of PGM (people of global majority). We’ve got so much to explore as a national and international community.”
