This essay examines the artwork Hinterland (2013), a painted photograph of the statue of Queen Victoria in Georgetown, Guyana, by Hew Locke, a Guyanese Scottish artist. Inspired by the global movement against colonial symbols ignited by the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter protests in 2015 and 2020, respectively, which saw the toppling of statues of colonial figures, the essay explores the themes of void, surface, invisibility, and visibility present in Locke’s artwork. The essay builds on the idea that moving an object, which changes its position, alters its perspective, in contrast to toppling, which entails complete removal. The statue of Queen Victoria still stands in Georgetown, though it has been moved over the years. The idea of “moving on” (Mbembe) is introduced as a transformative way of looking at colonial statues as visual artifacts so as to emphasize the movement in space and time involved in transtemporality (speaking to the dynamic recontextualization of Victorian figures amidst contemporary societal shifts) as opposed to the act of toppling, which implies a complete break from the past—an abrupt erasure.
Ana Cristina Mendes (Wed,) studied this question.