Tavares Strachan: ‘There’s something nice about materialising the absurd’

‘If I was going to bring a sentient being from another plant to get a little taste of human civilisation over a long period of time, I might bring them in this room’ explains Barbadian artist Tavares Strachan, as he stands in a room of our Hayward Gallery, the walls of which are covered with his artwork Six Thousand Years (2018).

This piece, and The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility (2014-18) are two works through which Strachan presents individuals and events which have been historically marginalised. ‘As someone who grew up with an encyclopaedia, if you look around you and you don’t see anyone in your neighbourhood represented in the encyclopaedia you start to ask that simple question; where are the people in my neighbourhood?’

Strachan is in conversation with Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff as the two take a tour through the gallery’s survey of his work, which includes immersive installations, moving neon works and fantastical sculptures.

Among the latter are two works celebrating and commemorating the life of the political activist Marcus Garvey. The first, a large bronze head, stands at the gallery’s entrance – ‘It was about creating a work that felt like it should have existed many centuries ago to honour someone I consider to be a giant and to do it in a way that represents the statue of his body of work’ explains Strachan. The other is a realisation of Garvey’s Black Star Line by way of a large liner floated on water on one of the gallery’s terraces.

Also in this video the artist introduces pieces from A Map of the Crown, his series of bronze sculptural works adorned with real Black hair – ‘There’s a certain vocabulary of things one can do with Black hair’ – and Seated Panchen Lama (2011) a sculpture in pyrex glass and mineral oil which refers to the 1995 disappearance of the child originally designated as the Panchen Lama and, in the artist’s words, portrays ‘how fragile cultures can be’.