Does more than Scratch The Surface

With just five exhibits, Scratch The Surface appears to do just that. Yet read the text or watch the film and you soon realise just how tangled the web supported by the slave trade really was.

Two portraits (one T Johann's 1763 portrait of plantation owner Mrs Oswald Zoffany) hang alongside a portrait of John Julius Angerstein. His collection formed the nucleus of the gallery - a collection funded by Angerstein's shares in Caribbean slave plantations and his role in insuring slave ships for Lloyds.

Slavery's global reach is traced in the lives of the sitters in two more portraits - from Jamaica and Sierra Leone to Florida and Liverpool. Beneath the portraits are versions of the hats the sitters wear, created by 2004 Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare. They are adorned by fabric associated with West Africa but made by Dutch colonialists.

Shonibare is also responsible for an installation in which two headless aristocratic figures face each other, pointing shotguns at a pheasant exploding in mid-air. It's a reminder that 'civilised' pursuits are often brutal. Shonibare neatly links the sanitised violence of bloodsports to the sanctioned wealth-gathering of slavery.

Scratch The Surface
The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN