Deep in the heart of this enthralling exhibition – with its monumental bronze heads and soaring neon figures, its dead heroes praised in clay and gold, its thrumming son et lumière tributes to the legends of Black music and history – is a whisper of a work, so quiet you might almost miss it. Floating in a glass tank, as if in mid-air, is the ghost of a female figure.
Or at least, the spreading branches of a nervous system have been cast in fine glass – delicate traces of a once living being. She is Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951), an African American woman whose cells were illegally harvested by white doctors during cancer treatment without her knowledge or consent. HeLa Cells have been vital to medical research ever since, everlasting in their impact even as Lacks herself was ignored in life and death. But here she comes again, in this ethereal epitaph: visible only from certain angles, materialising only for those who take the time to look.
