Чтение и письмо: рецензия для аудитории (non-defining relative clauses)

«Suitcases»: an exhibition that lets objects do the talking
Leeds City Museum, until 3 March

The idea behind «Suitcases», which opened last week, is simple: forty families who came to Leeds from elsewhere — Kashmir, Poland, Jamaica, Ukraine, County Cork — were each asked to lend one object that travelled with them. The result, curated by Amara Khan, whose own grandparents arrived in 1962, is the most quietly moving show the museum has staged in years.
The objects are ordinary: a sewing machine, a prayer mat, a football shirt, a jar of soil. What makes the exhibition work is the labels, written by the families themselves and left unedited. A tin of tea sent from Galway in 1958 sits next to a note in which a daughter explains that her mother, who never went back, opened it every Christmas and never drank it. The central theme — what we carry and what we cannot — is never stated; it is simply there, in the objects, which is exactly the point.
The show is aimed at a general audience, and it succeeds: on the afternoon I visited, teenagers on a school trip were as absorbed as the pensioners. Children under ten may find it slow — there is little to touch and nothing that moves — although the final room, where visitors are invited to write what they would pack, was full of them.
If there is a weakness, it is scale. Forty objects fill two rooms, and one leaves wanting a third: the city has a hundred stories for every one told here. But that, perhaps, is the reaction the curator wanted. «Suitcases» will appeal to anyone who has ever moved — which, in Leeds, is nearly everyone. Go with someone from a different family, and read the labels aloud.