Art curator and writer Ekow Eshun has said the fear of the other is a “defining aspect of our time right now” as he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the arts.
Eshun was among 67 people given honours by the Princess Royal at an investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle on Wednesday. The 58-year-old chairs the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, which oversees the artworks that appear on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, central London.
‘Everyone feels quite troubled and destabilised’
Speaking to the Press Association after the ceremony, he said: “I think everyone feels quite troubled and destabilised at the moment.”
He added: “I think these, in some respects, are quite strange times.
“It all feels very unsettled by just all kinds of developments, climate change to immigration to the pace of technological change, and I think very often we embody that unease in this idea of an outsider, a foreigner, a stranger, as an epitome of difference, otherness, something that we can’t quite fathom.
“So, in my head at the moment, I tend to think of the fear of the other, the fear of the stranger, as one of the defining aspects of our time right now.
“But with that said, I’m really interested in how we, as individuals or collectively, might also come to look from the position and from the viewpoint of the other and of each other.
“Because I would suggest that doing so allows us to see the world from different perspectives, through new eyes, in different ways that can only, from my perspective, be a good thing.”
Reflections on ‘the stranger’
Eshun wrote about the concept of “the stranger” in The Guardian on Tuesday, reflecting on former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s speech on immigration last year in which he said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers”.
The curator deemed the address “one of the moral low points” of Sir Keir’s premiership. The former prime minister said last year he regretted the phrase after it drew comparisons with the language of Enoch Powell.
Eshun told PA “the world’s a complicated place”, but that people should “embrace” that complexity.
‘Embrace difference’
He said: “I tend to think that the world is more interesting when we embrace complexity, when we embrace difference, when we embrace otherness, when we have a world, we have a country, we have a society, community where we actually honour each other for the fact that we come from and embody different ways of looking at the world, different cultures, different identities.
“This seems to me to be a richer, a more expansive way of living and being in contact with each other, rather than imagining that there are only two ways and there’s only us and there is only them.
“I would suggest that actually there is all of us together in our difference.”
Eshun became the first black editor of a major magazine in the UK when he took the position at Arena Magazine in 1997. He also became the first black director of a major arts organisation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where he worked from 2005 to 2010.
In recent years, Eshun has curated exhibitions for the Southbank Centre and National Portrait Gallery in London, focused on black artists and the black figure in contemporary art.
He said he talked about art and books with the princess at the ceremony on Wednesday, later adding “art is one of the significant ways that we can come to understand and move closer to each other.”
Curated by Eshun, the 10th edition of the touring exhibition British Art Show will go on display across several venues in Coventry on October 2, before moving to Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield and Newcastle over the next two years.
