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Cameron Rowland
ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
FOR THE GREATER PART OF A DECADE, Cameron Rowland has been engaged in making not so much a museum of racial capitalism as a visitor center for it, where its artifacts are instructively pried free from daily use. In line with other projects by Rowland, the artist’s institutional solo debut in the UK, curated by Richard Birkett, is minimally populated in terms of exhibited objects, despite ranging over two floors of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (and including a nominally priced stack of works [Enclosure, 2020] for sale in the bookshop). This sparseness in fact offers the viewer a space crowded with real abstraction. What is salient about Rowland’s work, across all its different iterations, is neither the exceptional acuity of how it depicts this mode of production nor the totality of what is disclosed in its expansive research apparatus—it’s the way it actually bores into the legal infrastructure of property. The opening line of the twenty-page exhibition handout tells us, “Abolition preserved the property established by slavery.” If the system of property built by slavery survives its abolition and even thrives beyond it—as in the globalized free-trade boom experienced by Britain in the wake of the 1833 Abolition Act that is cited in the show’s title, “3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73,” which handsomely compensated slave owners “for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right” to forced labor, a ruling repeated in other abolitions throughout the imperial nineteenth century—then, like all capitalist relationships, the link between property and abolition must be racked by antagonism. In that sense, perhaps, the spirit of abolition can be extracted from property, but only by means of heightening those relationships’ contradictions through the graduated and tortuous legal realism that Rowland’s terms, such as disgorgement (the court-ordered return of ill-gotten gains) and encumbrance (a type of lien), evoke.
Rowland’s primary media are not physical objects but the legal mechanisms that often serve as titles for the work. Depreciation, 2018, added friction to how a piece of land, a fictitious commodity, was able to circulate. Disgorgement, 2016, bought shares in a company holding profits still intact from slave-insurance policies, pending reparations....