Troubled history

An anonymous young woman, tightlipped, holds her hand up to the light in Sara Shamma’s touching portrait of a modern-day slavery survivor. The subject is an issue close to the Syrian artist’s heart.

“Over time, we have frequently turned to artists to make sense of difficult or complex issues,” says Shamma, who is based in London. “I hope my responses will help raise awareness of this very live issue.”

Shamma, an artist in residence at King’s College London’s (KCL), has collaborated with the university’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience and the human rights charity the Helen Bamber Foundation to produce a series of portraits, on display at the Arcade gallery in Bush House, London, from 1 October until 22 November. 

As part of her residency, Shamma interviewed slavery survivors and used their stories to help communicate the university’s research on the psychological impact of modern slavery and people’s recovery from it. 

There are an estimated 40 million people suffering from modern-day slavery around the world. Though generalisations should be avoided and people’s experiences vary widely, becoming a slave is a traumatic experience, is likely to lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and can have a long-term effect on the victims’ sense of autonomy. So how can museums increase people’s awareness of such a complex issue?

Various institutions, from the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool to converted former plantation houses in the American Deep South, have taken distinctive approaches to dealing with contemporary or historic slavery and its legacy. In August, the London mayor Sadiq Khan endorsed proposals for a new British slavery museum in London as a way of tackling modern-day racism, partly by challenging historic narratives around race. 

What all these approaches have in common is their mission to engage those affected by slavery in the stories they tell. An awareness of the complicated cultural terrain in which such representations exist is also vital. 

Shamma says stories of the Yazidi women kidnapped by Islamic State (Isis) in northern Syria and forced into sexual slavery motivated her to push her work into a new direction. “I am from Syria and I was there when the war was happening,” says Shamma, who was deeply affected by the news that women were being kidnapped. “Since then, I have wanted to do something about it.” 

She says KCL approached her and she realised the university would be a good partner for her desire to tell such stories. “Through them I’m able to meet women who have been trafficked,” she says. “This is a huge subject and I’m realising how big it is now. The first few interviews I did were difficult, very depressing. I couldn’t sleep for days. I started to think about everything and feel everything, smells and sounds and situations. But I slowly got used to it.” 

Shamma’s experience of talking to these women led her to believe they may never recover completely. “But they have the hope of having hope,” she says. And it has been a difficult project because, understandably, not all these victims of slavery liked talking about what they’d been subjected to. But Shamma says it is important to shed light on the subject, because many people all over the world don’t know how significant it is.

So what are the benefits of using art this to interpret such a complex topic? Part of the motivation is the use of emotional, as opposed to rational, language, according to the exhibition’s organisers. “When we started the project, I had not worked with an artist previously and I was thinking about accessibility,” says Siân Oram, a lecturer in women’s mental health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at KCL. 

“How many people would come to an exhibition versus reading an academic article, and what kind of people? As the project has gone on, it has helped me understand that it is communicating in a different way. When you write an academic article you have to use small fragments of text and you get used to doing that; it feels very reductive. Sara’s work feels much more like a whole-body experience.” 

Oram hopes Shamma’s work humanises the victims of slavery interviewed. “It’s important to see these women as people who had lives before what happened to them, survived the experience and are still people now who exist apart from those experiences,” she says. 

Shamma’s paintings do not directly identify the women she interviewed – she takes the feelings and emotions from the people she has spoken to and uses them as the basis on which to create physical embodiments of fictional people in her paintings.  

Oram hopes Shamma’s depictions will help society move away from thinking about slavery survivors as simply victims. She emphasises that this project involves women who are now psychologically and physically safe. 

It is difficult to sum up a single approach to a phenomenon that continues to take place in hundreds of countries. From a western perspective, it is also hard to discuss slavery without referring to Britain’s historic role in it. In the case of the transatlantic slave trade, institutions can discuss not just the historic record, but also slavery’s legacy, and campaign actively against the long-term divisions it causes, which can affect not just individuals, but whole cultures. 

The Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana, US, for instance, is the only plantation museum in the state focused on the lives of enslaved people. This sugarcane and rice plantation invites the public to walk through former slave cabins and the owner’s house. “It’s an education about slavery in the space where it happened,” says the museum’s executive director, Ashley Rogers. “We consider ourselves a resource for people to understand slavery in southern Louisiana and hope visitors will leave with an understanding of how central this labour system was to this region.” 

Visitors have to explore the museum with a tour guide, spending the first half of the tour learning about slavery in the south. “I understand how slavery is discussed in this country, and people come to us with a lot of baggage, but if what we fall back on is accurate and based in scholarship then  it is not hard at all,” says Rogers.

She adds that the facts are important, but “we do have the perspective that this was a great societal ill, and there are legacies. We don’t shy away from that perspective. We imagine slavery as something that happened in the past, and that it’s over and things have got better. But we also have to talk about what came later, because what came later is what we inherited. People didn’t leave the Whitney plantation until 1975.” She says two museum staff members had family members who had worked at the plantation for decades. 

Back in the UK, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool opened in 2007 and explores topics including life in West Africa before slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and slavery’s legacy. As well as its educative role, the museum campaigns against issues including racism and hate crime. Exhibits include anklets worn by enslaved people in Niger, donated by Anti-Slavery International, as well as photography depicting sex trafficking and prostitution in the UK. 

“We all live with the consequences of transatlantic slavery and the slave trade, and we cannot understand the modern world without knowledge of it,” says Richard Benjamin, the head of the International Slavery Museum. In the 1780s, Liverpool was the European capital of the transatlantic slave trade, with its ships carrying up to 1.5 million enslaved Africans. Despite this, teaching the slave trade to 11- to 14-year-olds in British schools only became compulsory in 2008.

The Atlantic gallery in the National Maritime Museum, London, also explores the cause and effect of the transatlantic slave trade, including tales of resistance such as the Haitian revolution of the late-18th century, an anti-slavery insurrection, but not contemporary enslavement. 

The gallery is due for an overhaul, according to Sarah Lockwood, the head of learning and participation at Royal Museums Greenwich, and this could form part of plans for any new slavery museum in London. “The gallery is in desperate need of updating so we would want to create a new one,” she says. 

Would a new slavery museum be sustainable in London? Would integrating it into a place that’s already in existence work? Lockwood says it would be an interesting conversation to have. The legacies of these systems will continue to generate widespread social division and injustice for the foreseeable future, given that a quarter of those in contemporary slavery are children (according to a UN report on the subject). But we need more than statistics if we are to empathise with survivors.

“There aren’t many artists who are brave enough to tackle a topic like this, but Sara’s background and the way in which she encountered the subject matter meant I was led by her,” says Kathleen Soriano, the curator of the KCL show. 

“We engage with art on different levels: some engage with the object, some want meaning,” Soriano continues. “Art is not just about making you think, it’s about making you feel. I was thinking about that an awful lot when Sara was making her work. What she is trying to do is make work that gives an idea of how she felt hearing some of these stories.”