Dan Guthrie: Empty Alcove/Rotting Figure, Chisenhale Gallery, exhibition review: ‘Fantasy of erasure’
Installation view of Dan Guthrie’s Empty Alcove/Rotting Figure, 2025. Photograph: Andy Keate
On the fifth anniversary of the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, Chisenhale Gallery has commissioned a thought-provoking series of new works by Dan Guthrie that let us glimpse a world without racist depictions.
Empty Alcove/Rotting Figure is comprised to two video installations, each five minutes in length, that take as their subject the Blackboy Clock in Stroud where the artist grew up.
Accompanying the videos is a website at earf.info which contains archival material about the clock and a ‘journal’ by a range of commentators.
The timepiece at the centre of the works incorporates a wooden blackamoor figure which perches in the alcove of a building in the Gloucestershire town.
Created at the height of the slave trade, Stroud’s Blackboy has recently been discussed in a community debate initiated by the artist and taken up by the local council.
A formal consultation overwhelmingly recommended its removal from its current location, yet the object, which is privately owned, remains in place to this day.
So Guthrie has abolished it.
Empty Alcove, 2025, commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery. Photograph: Andy Keate
Empty Alcove is a five-minute shot of the alcove itself, shorn of its statue, with a voiceover by the artist and another person describing what we see.
We also hear birdsong and the sound of children playing; as the voiceover says, the ‘streets feel welcoming’ and ‘mundanity blossoms’.
Rotting Figure shows the gradual disintegration of a statue-shaped object wrapped in black plastic, with a voiceover by the same pair.
In contrast to the peaceful vibe of of Empty Alcove, this is a more actively hostile fantasy of erasure.
The videos are described by Guthrie as acts of ‘radical unconservation’ – the imaginary acquisition and destruction of offensive objects.
Innovative use of faux audio-description juxtaposes dry factual accounts with urgent contestation of the ‘bare facts’.
This re-abling of alternative voices is a deft manoeuvre that places Guthrie’s artistic agency front and centre in place of the figure he has removed.
You don’t leave the gallery satisfied that a relic of our racist past has been safely consigned to the dustbin, but you do leave with the hope that we might collectively get there one day.
Dan Guthrie: Empty Alcove/Rotting Figure runs until 7 August at Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, E3 5QZ.