Theaster Gates review – shocking lament for the ransacked paradise of Malaga

A black architectural wedge angles up to the roof, its cut slate slopes glowering in the gallery. More slate – broken this time and reminiscent of a Richard Long sculpture – makes a black circle on the floor, where a plinth sits, topped by a revolving green neon sign saying “MALAGA”. There’s more: a huge blackboard chalked with notes about Liverpool’s and Bristol’s role in the slave trade; about brown babies and “half-castes”; about the state of Maine’s anti–race-mixing laws; that in 1973, Theaster Gates was born free.

There is an awful lot to take in, let alone unpack, in Gates’s Amalgam, a restaging of a show held earlier this year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Amalgam is a near-anagram of Malaga. Each of the works here is an amalgam of sculptures and signs, the real and the remade. There is music. There is video. There is dance and history. The difficulty lies in fitting its parts together, working out exactly what it is we are looking at.

The exhibition takes as its focus the small island of Malaga off the coast of Maine. Between the American civil war and 1911, the island was home to a self-determined, racially mixed community that the state came to see as degenerate and immoral, forcibly removing the inhabitants, many of whom it consigned to psychiatric institutions (though the phrase dignifies the kind of places they really were, given that people born to mixed-race parents were frequently deemed “feeble-minded”) or left destitute.

Even the island’s cemetery was cleared, the bones of the dead interred in a communal grave. In the early 20th century, there was a plan to develop Malaga for tourism, but it never happened. To this day, the island is uninhabited. Gates has made a fake office, called the Malaga Dept of Tourism, with more blackboards, and an empty display cabinet in which the phrase “In the end nothing is pure” glows in more green neon, a kind of invitation to multi-ethnic tourism.

Dance of Malaga, a 35-minute video, intersperses some rather static dance scenes among the trees on Malaga with borrowed footage, including a horrible scene from Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Hollywood drama Imitation of Life, in which a white teen beats up his girlfriend because he’s learned of her black heritage. Carmen Jones sings The Man I Love and a middle-aged white woman flaunts her racist attitudes. Dance of Malaga has great moments and juxtapositions, not least when Gates’s musical collaborators, the Black Monks, provide a musical commentary, but the film is a bit of a mess.

Using objects to convey feelings as well as meanings, to use real, replica and invented elements, and to lose us among them, is a risky undertaking. I pause before a 17th-century Anatolian Iznik plate, embedded in black concrete, and wonder why it is here, what its own story of migration might be. A row of fork-lift prongs, like some kind of minimal sculpture, pierces the wall above our heads, the regularity of the row oddly calm but full of implied violence. A small, white version of an African mask drowns, inverted, in tar.

The final room in the show presents So Bitter This Curse of Darkness, in which casts of African wooden masks, of various origins, sit on tall ash columns and plinths. Rounded, sawn, smoothed, split, each column is different. Right at the end, there’s a ledge running along a wall where you can sit, looking back at the forest of forms, the blank masks. The space is filled with music from the Black Monks, cries and deep-bass rumbles, rhythms, skittering drums, fragments of jazz and gospel. It is a great place to linger, a reminder of a wooded island, filled with cries and song, laments and beating hearts.

• Theaster Gates: Amalgam is at Tate Liverpool until 3 May.