Sammy Baloji’s recent exhibition broadly addressed Congolese nationhood and American and European expansionism from the nineteenth century onward. The show continued the artist’s long-term exploration of “extraction” as interpreted through photographs, botanical samples, audio and video recordings, and archival literature sparsely laid out in vitrines. These items included stamped workers’ documents from a Congolese mining district; propagandist flyers on uranium production; and, incredibly, an itinerary for the “first uranium world tour” of mining sites in Australia, South Africa, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo that ends with sightseeing in Cairo, Rome, Paris, and London.
The archives Baloji researched for the works in this show include those of the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, now in the Sound Archive of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, and the Institut National des Etudes et Recherches Agronomiques (INERA) in Kinshasa, Congo, as well as Brussels’ Center for the Archives of Communism in Belgium. The exhibition included four works that have been previously exhibited in international exhibitions and two new commissions. Still Kongo I–V, 2024, is a set of five monochrome aerial images of the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve (said to be the second largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon), framed with heavyset wood in a design inspired by Belgian Art Nouveau. Triga Mark III, 2024, is an extension of an earlier work, Shinkolobwe’s abstraction, 2022, first commissioned for the Sharjah Biennial 2022 and consists of fifteen screen prints that are composed of red and yellow color patterns abstracted from Congolese uranium samples and layered over photographs of atomic clouds.
Both works are the product of an ongoing dialogue between Baloji and Pedro Monaville, a Canada-based Belgian historian and author of the study Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo (2022). A text by Monaville is offered as a handout to visitors, as if to press home any historical consequences not apparent elsewhere in the exhibition. Titled “Abstraction and a Capricious Sinuosity” (2024), the text is largely an intellectual buttress for Baloji’s interests in the Congolese archive of the Cold War. Monaville’s stated aim, in relation to Shinkolobwe’s abstraction, is to “reclaim abstraction as a strategy of historical illumination.”
But the problem is that, when displayed alongside a wealth of archival literature, Shinkolobwe’s abstraction takes the form of a commemorative work in service of the research that birthed it, rather than an autonomous source of illumination. Furthermore, the work recalls what Okwui Enwezor described, in his 2008 essay “Archive Fever,” as the “excess of the seen,” thanks to an overfamiliarity with the work’s real-world sources (in this case American abstraction and images of the atomic clouds in Japan) that limits our engagement with it.
Among the previously exhibited works on view here was Aequare. The Future That Never Was, 2023, a collage of archival and recent documentary footage about the research activities at Yangambi, which was the largest of more than thirty experimental complexes created by what was then the National Institute for the Agronomic Study, Belgian Congo—the predecessor to INERA—in 1933. In one sequence, staffers are shown consulting a physical archive as we watch them through archival film. A telegraphic power emanates even within reels of staged laboratory experiments, labor, and everyday social life that falsely present Belgian imperialism as progressive on scientific advancement and inclusive on matters of race and power balance. Baloji’s sensitive handling of the footage lays bare the artifice of filmmaking and its use as a manipulative tool. Although, as Shinkolobwe’s abstraction suggests, Baloji’s method has its limits, this survey demonstrated that his career-long engagement with some of the most important issues of our time—from nuclear power to climate change, from environmentalism to the epistemological violence of colonialism—has much to offer.
