The exhibition’s title references ‘Mass Man’, a poem by Derek Walcott in which he highlights the disjuncture between the joyful, festive celebration of carnival and a mindful remembrance of times of slavery. ‘But somewhere in that whirlwind’s radiance / a child, rigged like a bat, collapses, sobbing’. Indeed, the commercialised nature of carnivals globally has been increasingly accused of reducing profoundly important cultural and historical events to a ‘fetishized surplus value’ (Nagle 2005), a frequent criticism of London’s own Notting Hill Carnival which takes place every year in the gallery’s surroundings and with which this exhibition coincides.
