Trafalgar Square: Faces of 850 transgender people and anti-colonial rebels to be displayed on fourth plinth | Ents & Arts News

Casts of the faces of hundreds of transgender people will be displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Artist Teresa Margolles got the commission after winning the competition of four artists and her piece will be on display alongside a sculpture by Samson Kambalu.

Margolles’ work features casts of the faces of 850 transgender people from London and around the world.

The town hall said that Margolles, originally from Mexico, “Works in close collaboration with this marginalized community which sometimes does not have access to social care”.

“The ‘life masks’ will be arranged around the plinth in the form of a Tzompantli, a skull holder from Mesoamerican civilizations (an area spanning central Mexico to northern Costa Rica),” the statement added.

Margolles is known to portray the social causes and consequences of death in her work and her piece Trafalgar Square will be on display in 2024.

Kambalu’s work, titled Antelope, features a 1914 photograph of Baptist preacher John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley.

Chilembwe led an uprising against colonial rule and the sculpture shows the preacher wearing a hat, defying a colonial rule that prohibited Africans from wearing headgear in front of whites.

The Town Hall said that Kambalu’s work, which will be on display next year, reveals “the hidden tales of under-represented peoples in the history of the British Empire in Africa and beyond.”

The upcoming works by Margolles and Kambalu are part of an ongoing commission of public works of art on the plinth, which are chosen by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group after nearly 17,500 members of the public voted for them. .