Historic colonial statues should not be destroyed, but reimagined, according to British artist Yinka Shonibare. A new solo exhibition of his work tackling Britain’s imperialist past has opened in London.
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 People are talking about the idea of actually knocking statues
00:06 down because of the colonial history of those figures.
00:14 And I felt that actually the best approach is not
00:18 to actually knock them down.
00:20 It's actually better to preserve history and for people
00:25 to actually understand what people did,
00:28 what Queen Victoria did, what Churchill did.
00:31 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:35 I think human beings are very complicated.
00:50 No one is just a villain.
00:53 And I think that's what's very important about those debates,
00:58 because people are very complex.
01:01 Somebody who lived in the 19th century
01:03 is not the same as the person living today.
01:06 So it's important that we understand them
01:10 in the context in which they existed.
01:12 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:15 The point of the War Library is actually amnesia,
01:26 to expose amnesia, to show that we always repeat
01:31 the same thing over and over again.
01:34 And also the importance of the archives,
01:37 the importance of memory.
01:39 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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01:46 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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