Sammy Baloji

What can images and objects tell us about how colonialism shapes our understanding of the past and the present?

Colonialism is a violent system of control achieved through the exploitation and extraction of labour and resources. Growing up in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a region rich in natural resources, Baloji’s work explores the drain on human and natural resources that shape ongoing colonial legacies. As Baloji has stated, ‘I am not interested in colonialism as nostalgia, or in it as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system.’

The installation is centred around the mining and circulation of copper, a mineral that is central to the country’s economy and political conflicts. Nearly all copper from DRC was extracted and exported for large-scale industrial use, impacting local infrastructure and livelihoods. Arranged to look like classified museum objects on a plinth, the mortar shells are displayed here as planters. Baloji has filled them with plants indigenous to central Africa’s copper belt, now commonplace in botanical gardens across Europe. The title of the work refers to phrases from the Vocabulary of Elisabethville (1965) by André Yav, a book documenting the contribution of African soldiers and communities to the First and Second World Wars.

The work also includes archival photographs found in a Belgium ethnographic museum. Taken during the colonial era, the images document the scarification of the body – a practice commonly used across Africa during initiation rites as a means of identifying a person’s community. These photographs show the common colonial practice of othering African subjects through scientific and ethnographic studies. Commenting on the connection between scarified skin and mined copper, Baloji hammered each photograph by hand and inscribed the copper plates and wallpapers with scarification patterns.

Baloji reclaims the material and embodied histories of his home country in order to change the ways in which we see the past and the present. He says, ‘It was interesting for me to find these traces of the pre-colonial system. There was a whole cultural, social, aesthetic and meaningful system in place before, and working with copper was a way to re-direct the system, denouncing the political and economic impact that colonialism had in the Congo.’

Tate Modern
Natalie Bell Building Level 2 West

Getting Here

9 May 2022 – 6 November 2023

Free

Jackson Hlungwani, Throne 1989

This work is one of a series of seven thrones made for the artist’s retrospective The Neglected Tradition Towards a New History of South African Art (1930–1988) at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1989. This unnumbered Throne 1989 was subsequently included in the exhibition Art from South Africa at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1990, the year it was acquired by its former owner, the collector Robert Loder. Constructed from pieces of driftwood, the seven thrones retain the original shapes of the tree trunks, which the artist either left rough or carved and sanded to appear smooth. The thrones differ from traditional southern African wood sculptures, as they are assembled rather than being made from a single piece of wood or shaped into a recognisable ‘figure’. While most carved African stools are usually without a back, Hlungwani’s Throne 1989 more closely resembles a high-backed chair.

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John Mburu Njenga ‘Meek’ Gichugu, Funny World 1997

Funny World 1997 is a large-scale oil painting depicting a fantastical world of hybrid creatures who parade across the canvas in a carnival-like procession. It demonstrates Gichugu’s distinctive visual language that consists of images of beasts, machinery, fruit and animals crowded into the picture plane. The composition is centred around a group of animalistic creatures who perform various acrobatic movements and gestures, while the flattened landscape is populated with exotic fruits, flowers, strange birds and dismembered body parts that appear to be floating in the air. As the title suggests, the work refers to a comical or parodic vision of the world, with various symbols referring to daily social and political realities in the artist’s home country of Kenya. Gichugu brings together the real and fantastical in ways that reveal a pointed yet subtle use of symbolism and allegory.

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