I was dreading this show – how wrong could I be: Entangled Pasts, at the Royal Academy, reviewed

In the wake of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition Black Atlantic about its founder’s ties to the slave trade comes the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts, less of a mea culpa than an examination of conscience by an institution which, although hailed by its first president Sir Joshua Reynolds as an ‘ornament’ of Empire, was innocent of direct links to slavery.

I confess that I was rather dreading this show, which sounded from the pre-publicity like a hollow exercise in Britannia-Rules-the-Waves breast-beating, but from the moment I stepped into the courtyard and saw the posturing Sir Joshua on his plinth upstaged by Tavares Strachan’s life-sized ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ (2023) – a riotous gathering of black luminaries in bronze and gilt – I realised my mistake. Since the election of Frank Bowling as the first black member of the RA in 2005, the Academy’s ranks have been swelled by artists of Caribbean, African and South Asian descent who have something to say about Empire other than ‘sorry’, and they set the tone for this exhibition.