LONDON.- Today London Museum Docklands opens The Reflections Room, a new display space for artists. Complementing the museum’s galleries, the new space offers room to explore a range of ideas and perspectives that foreground emotions and human experiences connected to London’s history. The first display will feature Exodus by celebrated British-Caribbean artist Zak Ové, which will be on display and free to visit until 25 May 2025. The museum also confirmed plans to acquire the artwork. It will join the museum’s permanent collection following its display at London Museum Docklands.

Exodus sees Zak explore migration through the present lens, highlighting the history and challenges of major population movements through time. The mixed media installation echoes a gridlocked cityscape, where colourful toy cars, trucks and human figurines mingle with elephants, giraffes and other wildlife towering over a scene of traffic. It rests on two green, white and red Castrol oil drums that nod to multinational business and finance in the modern world. The work suggests a reflection on today’s discourse around migration.

Exodus is accompanied by a wall of historic maps that present a visual sense of data on international migration, agricultural trade, and tourism between 1500 and 2005. This invites viewers to examine the relationships between such movements and the artwork on display.

Jean-Francois Manicom, Senior Curator at London Museum Docklands, said: “Art is a powerful tool to understand human experience in all its complexity and diversity. Alongside the records and objects in our galleries, we wanted a space where artists can express fears, doubts, hopes, and beliefs. An opportunity to bring in new voices to the museum, including those that are often less visible in London. If our collection is the body of the museum, this room is its soul, and we are delighted to launch with this work by Zak Ové and announce the news that we will be welcoming the piece to our collection following its display. Migration is something which has long been at the heart of this city's story and continues to be an important topic today.”

Zak Ové said: “The history of mankind demonstrates a knowledge of humans walking freely around the Earth, often leaving in large numbers from one region to another. There is a theory that modern humans share a single racial stock having emerged out of Africa to replace all other populations. With this in mind, I set out to make a piece that spoke about the movement of people from African countries, which is symbolic of all people who find themselves in Exodus. In the piece, all vehicles and dolls face the same way as there is only one way out, one way to leave, and only one hope of a future elsewhere.”

Born in London, Zak Ové has a multi-disciplinary practice across sculpture, film and photography. Using themes and histories from the African diaspora to the Caribbean, he reappropriates everyday modern objects to create playful and imaginative works that call attention to often challenging histories and how they link to the modern day. He draws particular attention to the unmasking and re-telling of histories that have been suppressed by Colonial narratives.

Ové borrows ideas from Afro-Caribbean Obeah culture and religion to address the misrepresentation that African peoples have experienced in keeping their religious and secular identities alive in the face of Western ideas of Christianity and the onset of enslavement. His symbolic use of dolls pays reference to a belief system that was kept alive in resistance to enslavement. Through this work, the artist addresses the dilemma of the displacement of people by wars fought for political and economic agendas. Without a country of their own, they are left with little to no options, unsafe routes, and limited means to find shelter and safety.