#fearured

Nektarianna Saliverou

Phd of Contemporary Art –  Historian – Author

 

SAMMY BALOJI, History’s gestural reenactment evidence                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               The crucial individuality of contemporary artistic expression perceives and essentializes the historical condition, its continuities and discontinuities as a significant formulation that collaborates with the indisputable, a priori truth, ultimately transforming it into a deciphering and reorientation of the manifestations of the multisensory present.

The interactive relationship of objective reality, which often seems controversial, with the expressive component of each artist, establishes the personal dialogue with the universal. Reflections, researches, explorations and innovative approaches, redefine and hint at various interpretations of historical space-time.

Contemporary artist Sammy Baloji, born in 1978 in Lumbumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, is presented for the first time in Athens, at the initiative of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) under the light of the dynamics of personal interpretation and subjective connection with the changing historical conditions and circumstances of his homeland. Sammy Baloji, through a process of personal conceptualization, converses with the memories, experiences, myths and traditions of the African land, all of which are directly related to the transformations that were indeed determined by the colonial regime. The reshaping of identity and collective memory has been the focus of Baloji’s research since 2005. The cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga province of Congo is highlighted through the investigation o’ the consequences of Belgian colonialism and on a morphoplastic, depiction’s level through Installations, objects and audiovisual material that balance between distinctness and a synecdochical coexistence.

Sammy Baloji’s sensory and pictorial language visualizes historical experience by recording and illustrating memories and testimonies through different morphologies that constitute a kind of problematic of a changing world.

Photography as a means of capturing an edgy reality, clearly marking a spatiotemporal dimension, captures and records either the separation between Europeans and natives in Essay on Urban Planning (2013, fig. 1) or snapshots and faces which contributed to an extensive socialist revolution in the mid-1960s in the Congo as depicted in Triga Mark III, 2024 (fig. 2). Reality constitutes the effect of collusion with the idea, heading towards radicalism and the ab initio starting point of decolonization.

 

Fig. 1: Section of 12 framed prints inkjet on paper innova Ultra Smooth Glos, 285 gr.

Archival photograph mounted between two glass plates in a wall frame perpendicular to the wall, Courtesy of the artist and of the Gallery Imane Farès, Paris.

 

Fig. 2: Triga Mark III, 2024, Ιnstallation from prints on prepared paper, Courtesy of the artist and of the Gallery Imane Farès, Paris.

 

The reconstruction of the historical narrative and the History’s synergy with Art and urban planning, epitomizes the sharpness of Baloji’s expressive means. Blueprint for Toads and Snakes (2018, fig. 3) touches on the coexistence of otherness that is made impossible through the reference to the play Chura na Nyoka (the Toad and the Snake), thus reflecting racial segregation. The scenographic formulation and urban aspect converse with the collection of 136 surviving family portraits (fig. 4), evidence of the violent displacement of the Kasai communities during the secession from Katanga in 1960. Objective reality encounters personal and collective experience in the light of the reformation of historical space-time and its discontinuities.

 

Courtesy of National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.

 

Fig. 3: Chura na Nyoka (the Toad and the Snake), 2018, wood and canvas.

Map of the indigenous city, woodblock print Ekoplex with the original manuscript in a red square, KANAL Foundation, Brussels.

 

Fig. 4: Paintings of Kassai: selection of 136 portraits from the collection of folk painters of Léon Verbeek, digital photo print on paper, KANAL Foundation, Brussels.

 

The socio-political and cultural connotations of the present and the past, co-constitute intertexts and documents substantiating the historical condition. Baloji’s film, Aequare. The Future That Never Was (2023, fig. 5), reveals the enduring effects of colonialism, focusing on the environmental destruction as a consequence.

 

Fig. 5: Aequare. The Future That Never Was, 2023, Single-channel video, color with sound 21’042, Courtesy of the artist and the Gallery Imane Farès, Paris/ KANAL, Centre Pompidou.

 

The redefinition and the perception of the concept of cultural heritage defines the core for Baloji’s problematic that intertwines the dialectic between Europe and Africa, especially with regard to the classifications of African objects during the colonial period. The film Of The Moon and Velvet, recalls memories of Galileo likening the relief of the Moon’s surface to velvet, a term used to describe Congolese textiles of the same era. The historical and political dimension of Baloji’s references is highlighted through the exchange of gifts, luxurious fabrics, at a diplomatic level, however, the aesthetic significance of the motifs that influenced European artistic production is found almost exclusively in ethnographic collections.

As part of Sammy Baloji’s research project, Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues, the process of producing bronze sculptures is underscored through the revival by the artist of a pre-colonial style, which was largely lost during the slave trade to America.

The materiality of copper, as a component in shaping the local economy of Congo, is transformed into a sign (Untitled 2018, fig. 6) emphatic of the transmutation of historical formulation into linguistic weft. The usage of shell casing as a decorative object redefines the essence of collective, individual memory and experience through connotations of the colonial past and of the present.

 

Fig. 6: Untitled 2018, 40 shell casings, indoor plants, Courtesy of the artist and the Gallery Imane Farès, Paris.

 

The exploration of the interplay of Tradition with Contemporaneity in the light of the designation of cultural diversity signifies for Baloji the importance of reading history, especially social history. The embossed copper templates (Untitled 2015) narrate the practice of scarification, widespread in adulthood ceremonies. Baloji reinterprets the images, carving and forging scarification patterns by hand, obviously and associatively touching on the forms of inscription on the human body and the land and by extension the exploitation of natural resources by the colonialists. The metamorphosis of the object into an ethnographic marker clarifies the artist’s intention to engage with heterogeneity as a given and necessity in the spatiotemporal continuum.

The visual realization of historical truth through pictorial language, inaugurates new functions of gesturality for Sammy Baloji. Mfuba’s Extract – Wunderkammer (2020, fig. 7) as an extension of Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues, reconceives the historical objects of the Museo della Civilità in Rome through Op Art motifs. The reinterpretation of African culture contributes to the reappraisal of intercultural exchange but also to the prominence of the uniqueness of the cultural product.

 

 

Fig. 7: Mfuba’s Extract – Wunderkammer, Work in progress 2020, acrylic painting on paper, Frédéric de Goldschmidt Collection, Brussels.

 

The dialectical correlation between historical evidence – archival material and artistic expression, in Shinkolobwe’s abstraction (2022, fig. 8) reexamines the geopolitical significance of the homonymous mines in Upper Katanga, of Democratic Republic of Congo in an attempt to emphasize the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States of America to secure control of Congolese uranium in the 1940s and 1950s. The creation of new visual values ​​meets the multidimensional reality of colonialism, through a free creativity that nevertheless reflects the condition of history. Sammy Baloji’s approach speaks to truths both personal and universal, unifying the past with the present and eternity.

 

Fig. 8: Installation consisting of 15 silkscreens on white paper, 250 gr. with matte coating, Courtesy of the artist and the Gallery Imane Farès, Paris.

 

The assessment of the multi-meaningful Tradition and Memory for Sammy Baloji initiates the mirror of a changing world, transformed through external contradictions and confrontation, denials and affirmations, but at the same time it underlines the necessity for the re-evaluation of the cultural values ​​that dictate uniqueness.

The associations of the Portuguese explorer, Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460-1533) for the cultural identity of Africa, which seems to be receding like the Moon, in his words, make more noticeable than ever the significance of highlighting its polymorphic and multifaceted particularity.

The Congolese artist, Sammy Baloji, approaches the history of his special native land, wishing to record, narrate, reflect, and awaken through a morphoplastic dimension that balances between document and authenticity, a gesture that inaugurates the de profundis redefinition of all those elements that make up compose the character of the Congo, of yesterday and of today. The imaginary line that eternally and perpetually unites these two temporalities, allows the de novo approach to the cultural geography of the Congo which, through experiences and evolutions, conceptualizes a form of resistance against all kinds of internationalism and globalization.