This comes as an important and timely commemoration, notwithstanding its limitations. Ideally, it might have been upgraded from the present dispersal in which, through the museum's rooms, relevant objects are highlighted. Again, ideally, if British society was so minded, a major exhibition could have been dramatically mounted, whether say at Somerset House, or at the Barbican Art Gallery - opportunities lost in this country. So the necessary expedient of the present series of 'themed' interventions at the Victoria and Albert Museum seems especially inappropriate in 2007. The net effect on the visitor here is one of disorientation. Anyone who knows this museum can understand that the layout, and the resultant series of trails over three levels, however well mapped out in the information sheet, produces a growing sense of disorientation. The objects and exhibits are just literally too widely dispersed in this way, and produce a growing sense of dislocation. The objects simply cannot really coagulate to form any kind of critical mass. It may be that the exhibition dispersal mode (also followed by other museums today) is deliberate when an argument can be made that this enhances the sense of disorientation experienced by the victims. The Jewish Museum in Berlin notably used this device, with the Hoffman Garden, to make the point about the captives' state of mind. But it is a difficult argument to sustain with museum visitors.

This very well researched exhibition does, however, raise numerous 'uncomfortable truths'. The first is the continuing prevalent sense of denial shown over two centuries that such atrocities were ever perpetrated by one society over another. The second case of denial is that the slave trade ever ran significantly beyond the 18th century; of course it did. The third is more widespread in Britain - the denial by the gentrified descendants of such merchants that their wealth derived from such an undesirable trade. The fourth is a denial of the scale of the atrocities, in Africa, en route, and in the West Indies. Up and down the Western half of the British Isles, superb mansions and carefully developed estates were husbanded on such wealth, from Bristol to Liverpool to Glasgow. This was no profit from an agricultural boom or at least from good husbandry. And much of what is attributed to the expanding culture of the Enlightenment in fact derived from this trade. That is why, even today whenever the subject comes up, many of the portrait painters commissioned to immortalise such paragons of society could find themselves financed by the trade and not by Caribbean sugar.

The range of contemporary artists enlisted by the exhibition curators has successfully borne out the extent to which such apparently background factors loom over the creative output of today. The artist Anissa-Jane excels in skilfully worked brown paper artefacts. Her scene includes shackles and furnishing fabrics studded with coffee beans. Her message, benignly delivered, is 'How things can change over time'. This body of work offers, as it were, a tight-lipped smile to the visitors. From Michael Paul Britto in Brooklyn comes, by contrast, a challenging piece of video of female black slaves dancing to a Britney Spears number, 'I'm A Slave 4 U'. In the John Madejski garden a very large sculpture is planned to be located by Romuald Hazoumé who works out of Berlin, making brilliant use of the eponymous plastic jerry can that is used all over the African continent to carry not only that vital resource, water, but also explosive substances in liquid form. Haunting also are the works about children by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui; he employs dried driftwood to define the fate of such young victims, from any time in the past 200 years or more. They exude a spirit of innocence in the midst of accelerating hardship.

There can be no redemption for the so-called freed descendants today, any more than an exorcism of the collective ghosts that pervade European society now. The same awesome taxonomy of violence runs over contemporary politics, but it has inspired some remarkable art here. We can only surmise that the new wave of London teenage gun crime will subside. Society cannot blame others. That is what this remarkable exhibition is about.

Michael Spens