The first works that greet you in the new exhibition In the Black Fantastic are Soundsuits by Nick Cave.
These are but a smattering of more than 500 of the African-American artist’s outlandish costume-sculptures. One is encrusted with buttons and gemstones, with a vast flour-sifter for a head, filled with multicoloured fibres, like a giant hairy eye. Cave is a perfect opening act for the show, because he unites so many of its themes. His first Soundsuit was made in response to police brutality, after he watched the footage of the brutal attack on Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, the trigger for uprisings across the city.
