The artist Khaleb Brooks has won the competition to create a Memorial to Victims of Transatlantic Slavery due to be unveiled in London in 2026. Brooks’s work, entitled The Wake, will be located in West India Quay in London Docklands.
The memorial, announced on Unesco International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition (23 August), will take the form of a bronze seven-metre-high cowrie shell. US-born Brooks’ work was chosen from a shortlist of six proposals by an artistic advisory panel comprising Zoé Whitley, the director of Chisenhale Gallery, and the artist Glory Samjolly, among others.
In an Instagram post, Brooks writes: “The Wake represents the perseverance, prosperity and beauty rooted in African and African diasporic heritage. Simultaneously it represents the cowrie as a site of commerce, used historically to purchase and enslave black people.
"The influential abolitionist and formerly enslaved author, Oluadah Equiano, describes being sold for 172 cowrie shells in his memoir. Through the dichotomy of this history, the cowrie shell has evolved into a multifaceted symbol of resilience.”
Brooks gives further details, adding: “The ramp itself is engraved with poems of recognition and lined with small golden sea shells. Inside, the walls are covered with lists of names of people enslaved, those we could name and identify and also redacted names of those we could not.”
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is partly funding the piece, providing £500,000. The planned memorial falls under the remit of Khan’s diversity commission, known as the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which was established in 2021 to address monuments dedicated to controversial historic figures. The same year, a statue of the slaveholder Robert Milligan was removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands by the Canal & River Trust; the new memorial will be sited nearby.
Who is Khaleb Brooks?
According to a statement on the artist’s website, Brooks is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and writer exploring blackness, transness and collective memory. “Prior to working as an artist full time, Khaleb was an international development practitioner working with the United Nations and a multitude of NGOs throughout Africa,” adds the statement.
In 2022, Brooks presented a solo exhibition at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, inspired by the Earle collection of documents linked to the 18th-century slave trader, William Earle. The artist is represented by Gazelli Art House in London.
