Anyone walking over Waterloo Bridge during the past week may have been surprised to see an ocean liner on top of the Hayward Gallery.
It was put there by Tavares Strachan, who has been described as “one of the most compelling, imaginative and audacious artists of his generation”. It’s not hard to see why.
He has travelled to the North Pole for his art, launched a sculpture into orbit, produced his own encyclopedia, and then there’s the ship, which will be one of the most viewed artworks in London for the next few months.
“Think of art as a giant arrow to point to an idea,” he says. “With the ship on the roof, it’s about asking: what is this? Why is this? Who would be motivated to do such a thing and why? For me the big deal is curiosity.”
Part of his practice is telling the stories of lost, forgotten and ignored black pioneers. The story behind the ship is of Marcus Garvey, an important voice against racial violence in America in the early 20th century, who set up the shipping company Black Star Line in 1919.
His idea was to bring people from the global African and black diaspora to Africa, but the company was beset with problems and stopped operations three years after launch. Garvey himself was targeted by the US government as a troublemaker and deported to Jamaica.
Two years ago, Strachan bought the rights to Black Star Line with the intent of re-establishing it. The company is still in its early stages but Strachan seems confident he can get it off the ground. The model on the Hayward is the SS Yarmouth, Black Star’s flagship.
I ask if there is art in running a shipping company. “Can the experience of getting on a boat and sailing across the Atlantic be artful, be understood as something deeper?” he asks (he often responds to a question with a question). “It’s always been important for artists to be critical of art. To question it and poke at it.”
We meet at the Hayward as the works are being installed. Strachan looks impossibly cool, with his close-cropped hair and beard, dressed all in black with biker boots and a jacket he designed bearing the moniker ‘Intergalactic immigration’.
As an artist, Strachan has been feted around the world from twice presenting at the Venice Biennale to receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’. Already this year in London, a major installation of his was unveiled at the Royal Academy, a sculpture that nods to Leonardo Da Vinci, called The First Supper.
Now in the brutalist gallery on the South Bank, we walk past huge busts, collages and at one point an African village hut being constructed. Added to the nine-metre high neon work outside reading: “You Belong Here”, the spread of what’s on display is breathtaking.
The show is called There is Light Somewhere, and looks back over the 44-year-old Bahamian’s career so far. “I’m interested in beauty. Beauty is the baseline. It’s the soundtrack, it’s the honey, the thing that pulls you in. The form is good at getting you to pay attention.”
And what he wants viewers to pay attention to, and be curious about is stories. The first part of the exhibition is work related to his feats of exploration.
One such feat was becoming the first Bahamian to reach the North Pole in 2013. It was only after planning to go that he learned about the story of Matthew Henson, an African American explorer who was part of the first successful mission to the North Pole, now all but forgotten – it was a story that drove him on.
I ask about what it was like. “It was rough, it’s a gnarly place. But it’s a poetic place,” he says. “You find solace in that extreme. Human creativity often finds itself at its peak in deserts of some kind, where there’s a lack of something.”
It is a long way from Nassau in the Bahamas, where he grew up. “I grew up in a neighbourhood where you don’t do stuff. My father finished school at 14 because that’s what the system allowed for – he went to do a service job. My mother was similar. For me the bar was learning to read and write, that’s what I was supposed to do. That was my limitation.”
So how did he conceive of the exploration he’s done? “It was learning at an early age that a lot of this shit is made up. We’re making it up as we go along. We tell ourselves we know stuff, and we do, but we don’t know way more than we do. That truth leads to curiosity.”
That curiosity also led him to the edge of space, during cosmonaut training in Russia, which is also reflected in the Hayward show. “The exploration piece is about what it means to be human,” he says. “It’s about what are we doing while we’re here. The infinite nature of time and space in relation to the finite number of hours you have on the planet as an individual.”
There is a sculpture of his orbiting the earth – with help from SpaceX – and again, there is a story. It is about Robert Henry Lawrence Jnr, the first African American selected for the US space programme, who died in a test plane before he got to space.
He’s also worked with aeronautics experts, extreme climatology and deep-sea exploration. Was the deep-sea work for an art thing, I ask. “I don’t know, man,” he smiles. “Everything’s for an art thing.”
When asked about what drove his exploring, he says, “So much of it is connected to the fact I lived on such a tiny island. There’s something about being on tiny islands that motivates the desire for leaving. You just want to go, and the going became a serious metaphor.”
The second part is around his Encyclopedia of Invisibility from 2018, which he called a “home for lost stories”. It features 17,000 entries about figures forgotten by history.
The third section is about recent work, which looks at connections to traditional African cultures and includes plaster busts of Western cultural figures including James Baldwin and Nina Simone.
Strachan regularly references music during our chat, especially the power of reggae, “because I didn’t grow up going to art galleries. My earliest references of artists growing up were musicians.” But he couldn’t sing, and while he played a little drums, he always loved painting and drawing.
He remembers being inspired by Junkanoo, a West African festival staged annually in Nassau. “I was four and I thought, ‘I want to do that,’ though I wasn’t sure what the ‘that’ was. I still don’t know what it is.”
The Bahamas was a British colony until 1966, just over a decade before his birth, and remains part of the Commonwealth. He says growing up there were still reminders of the colonial power everywhere from how the police dressed like British police, to the statue of Queen Victoria in the town square and the school curriculum.
“I had a great childhood, but I grew up in a place where I didn’t know my true story. It’s bittersweet,” he says, adding when he comes to Britain it feels familiar. “I grew up very British in a way. We wore uniforms to school. My name is a Scottish name. How did I get that name? No one ever explained to me until I was an adult.”
His work explores colonialism and slavery, and we talk about the attacks on monuments to historical figures related to the slave trade – such as the toppling of the statue of British slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.
“If someone walked into your house and stole your family and built a monument to themselves, and for generations you had to live with that, how would you feel about looking at that object every day? It’s a simple question,” he says.
“Robert E Lee was fighting to keep slavery. Do I want to look at him on a horse looking majestic? I don’t know... do you? I’m not saying you should remove them; I’m just asking if you want to look at it every day. My feeling is they are important pieces of history – whether they’re unsavoury or not. It’s less about removing them, and more about putting them into context.”
One curator has said that in another life, Strachan could have been a politician. Has he ever considered it? “No, I don’t have the desire to manipulate people. I don’t feel that’s how I want to use my talent,” he says. “They’re not all the same and I don’t have a vendetta against politicians, but we know there’s a certain divisiveness between politics and religion. They draw a line. I’m trying to erase those lines.”
He tells me how sometimes, growing up, his family went hungry. “I’m talking about that reality,” he says. “To say that that’s political is to say being a human is political, that the human experience is political. I’m not sure that it is.
“I’m saying I grew up fighting for opportunity and am wondering whether that should have been the case. Does that make me a politician? I don’t think so. If you’re being mistreated and you say so, does that make you a politician? Does that make you an activist? I don’t know.”
As we wrap up, we talk about how artists are important in highlighting change. “I think it’s important to constantly learn and shift how we think about the world. Remember the time everybody though the world was flat? I think about that all the time. I think about how certain things feel like a fundamental truth about the human experience. Then every century or so it changes radically, and you’re like, ‘Holy shit! This is not how the world is.’
“I think artists have historically been sitting there at the centre of the dialogue of how it’s constantly changing. Paying attention to stuff that isn’t in the frame. Because maybe the frame is the problem, and the gaze needs to shift.”
