GATESHEAD.- We have all taken part in some sort of procession. People assemble and move together to celebrate, worship, protest, mourn, escape or to better themselves. Hew Locke’s The Procession evokes all such endeavours, it is populated by imagined people who move through Baltic’s vast Level 4 gallery, claiming it for themselves.

Commissioned by Tate and originally presented in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2022, Locke’s installation takes as its starting point the history and character of Tate Britain’s building and its original benefactor, the sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. More broadly, with The Procession, Locke invites visitors to ‘reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power’.

The figures travel through space but also through time. They carry historical and cultural baggage: the evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellishes their clothes and banners. Images of the colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood Guyana emblazon the flag and their bearers, its flooded fields and rotten wooden walls vanishing under the rising sea level. Despite this, their attire and stance suggest power and self-assertion.

The Procession carries Locke’s own past artistic journey, with imagery linked to his previous work incorporating statues, rising sea levels and the military. Now housed within Baltic’s landmark industrial building on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, the exhibition marks a timely moment for the institution and the end of its 20th anniversary year. At Baltic, The Procession takes a significant new meaning, in a region at the core of the Industrial Revolution, which was subsidised by the British Empire’s wealth extraction and trade from faraway places like Guyana and other former colonies.

While being marked by history, The Procession’s participants are not constrained by it. Its fragments come together to usher new meanings and sensations, stirring collective memories, fears and desires. The work evokes real events and histories, and yet presents them as aesthetic fiction. As we join the procession, and Locke’s artistic imagination begins to work on us, the figures invite us to walk alongside them for a while, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.