Terence Gower: Enemies and Rascals review – so was US freedom born bad?

Artangel at the Maughan Library, London
Drawing a line from the battle of Quebec to Trump v Carney, the Canadian artist’s takedown of rapacious US thuggery is strangely lacking drama

Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. The United States of America wants to annexe Canada. It starts by inviting Canadians to join the Greatest Nation on Earth but soon becomes more aggressive and strident. Canada, uninterested and baffled, stands up for itself. War looms.

But this is not about Donald Trump and the bullying threats to Canada he has been making since the start of his second term. Except, of course, that it is, even though he isn’t mentioned by name in Canadian artist Terence Gower’s Artangel commission Enemies and Rascals – monstrous rascal though Trump is. Gower has created a sound installation deep inside a neogothic Victorian library to revisit the first time the US made proprietorial moves towards Canada – in 1775-76 during the American war of independence. George Washington – introduced simply as a “Virginia plantation owner” and Benjamin Franklin (“printer”) are among the US founders whose quoted words make them sound like rapacious thugs desperate to get their hands on Canadian land, particularly that belonging to Indigenous peoples.
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