Exhibit B, The Vaults

A slave market installation including caged humans has been recreated in a highly controversial exhibition which has inspired both reverence and great upset.

How would you react if the animals in the zoo stared right back at you? Or worse, what if you arrived to find the cages filled with human beings on display? In this remarkable installation, creator and director Brett Bailey has reached back through generations in order to reconstruct the slave markets, 'curiosity shops' and even the bedrooms of the past (and, horribly, the present.) Audiences are brought face to face with humans behind the bars of twelve cages. These cages are both literal and abstract. But each tableau is occupied by a living, breathing actor, performing a character's story.

A hugely disruptive and lauded feature of this year's Edinburgh Festival, Exhibit B now takes up residence in the underground vaults near Waterloo, consisting of long graffiti-covered galleries. It's an incredibly atmospheric installation. The performers are asked by their director not to express anger but find compassion for their audience. 

Each tableau took Brett Bailey (who has worked as a theatre maker extensively in South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Haiti and across Europe) up to three months to assemble. The images include a half-dressed African woman chained by the neck to a bed, based on the true account of a French colonial officer who used to exchange food for sexual favours. In another, modern asylum seekers are described as "found objects." A man sitting in a cage is accompanied by a sign reading "The blacks have been fed." All with scrupulous attention to detail. 

Bailey's works in the past have divided audiences and this is no less controversial. A petition has already been mounted against the show's very opening in London. One part of Exhibit B's ensemble, Cole Verhoeven, believes though that the work is 'monumental.' "And Brett's whiteness," he adds, "Perhaps gives him a degree of distance necessary for wading around in this intensely painful material."

It is a dark mix of museum, prison and scientific gallery. In defence of the production, the actors themselves released a joint statement, which we think speaks volumes for the power and need of Exhibit B: "For a moment, particularly for the first few, we are objects. Then, our eyes meet. In that moment when our eyes meet, we cease to be objectified and become human....As audiences move through the exhibit, we watch them and witness anger, grief, pity, sadness, compassion. Above all, we witness a dawning of awareness. This is why we keep doing this, and would keep on doing it, if we could."