As you enter Reimag(in)ing the Victorians, a quote from Oscar Wilde faces you from across the room: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” Wilde’s statement draws the attention of visitors to two things. First, the fact that history is an ever-changing form of representation. And second, that it is form of representation produced by us.
One of the most significant – and perhaps unexpected – impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement has been an increased public understanding of history as a subjective representation of the past. The “contested history” debates that have raged over the past few years are evidence of this. And the vicious antagonism that they have provoked gives credence to the work of late 20th century writers like Keith Jenkins, who argues that there is no such thing as an entirely “objective” version of the past.
Reimag(in)ing the Victorians, which is showing at Lakeside Arts in Nottingham, explores how recent artists have engaged with 19th-century historical accounts, media and crafts. From hand-tinted colonial photography to contemporary taxidermy, the exhibition celebrates and interrogates the cultural afterlives of Victorian Britain. But by examining how we “remember” the Victorians, the exhibition also probes into how and why the past is visualised and represented in the present.
