Uproar at 'white man's' human zoo

He is acknowledged as a unique voice in post-apartheid South African theatre and has won a host of accolades at home and abroad, but director Brett Bailey's Exhibit B, described by the British press as the "most controversial show" at this year's Edinburgh festival in Scotland, is under fire.

The show references the ethnographic 19th-century human zoos in which indigenous people from Africa were exhibited as exotic rarities for the entertainment of European audiences.

The exhibition has been decried in an online petition calling for its cancellation at the Barbican Centre in London.

Exhibit B features black actors in the roles of characters from the history of human zoos, who stand silently in dioramas, encased in glass boxes and their eyes steadfastly fixed on audiences in front of them.

They include a black man in a cage, a topless black woman shackled to a bed and a revolving silhouette of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus.

Bailey received predominantly positive reviews for the work, which was displayed in a university library in Edinburgh for the duration of the festival. It has also been shown in a number of European countries, including Poland and Germany, since it was first exhibited at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, in 2012.

The online petition, started by British journalist Sarah Myers, calls the show "an outrageous act of complicit racism" and accuses Bailey of being a "racist white man taking the opportunity given to him on the platform that the Barbican is providing to repaint a picture that puts black African people back into a space which we are superficially encouraged to believe we have been 'freed' from".

The petition charges the Barbican with "exhibiting institutional racism" and demands that the venue cancel the exhibition or face protests against its opening on September 23.

In a response, the Barbican's head of theatre, Toni Ranklin, said that Exhibit B "aims to subvert and challenge racial or cultural otherness, not to reinforce it".

In a further response from the show's partners, UK Arts International, director of the organisation Jan Ryan told Myers that Bailey's work was driven by an "impetus to unearth not just the injustices of apartheid, but to hold a mirror to the effects of European colonisation throughout the continent".

In a statement, Bailey described Exhibit B as a "piece about humanity; about a system of dehumanisation that affects everybody in society, regardless of skin colour, ethnic or cultural background, that scours the humanity from the 'looker' and the 'looked at'".

It seems from Myers's petition that her objections are based predominantly on a Guardian article about the piece and not her actual viewing of the work. The petition has attracted 500 signatures so far.