The Last Supper recast: artist Tavares Strachan on reimagining Da Vinci’s dinner guests

‘Who is not Judas?’ … The First Supper will be unveiled in the Royal Academy’s courtyard as part of Entangled Pasts. Photograph: Jonty Wilde/Courtesy of the artist and Courtesy of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

In 2006, Tavares Strachan FedExed a 4.5-ton block of ice from Alaska to his childhood primary school in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas. It was displayed there in all its frosted glory in a solar-powered glass-panelled freezer. This was a trophy of sorts, from a series of Arctic expeditions the artist had embarked on. Yet his achievement was less a triumph over physical hardships than a challenge to imaginative ones. Strachan was the first Bahamian ever to visit the North Pole. Making a leftfield career move into art hadn’t exactly been the norm in the Caribbean country either.

And then he made his next giant leap: training to be a cosmonaut at Star City in Moscow. It was the beginning of a multifaceted body of work that is proving audacious by any standard: exploring, in every sense imaginable, the forces that shape recognition and erasure. The words “We belong here”, rendered in neon, recur in his art.