ATHENS — The historical past of colonial violence within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) might bring to mind the atrocities of rubber extraction beneath Belgian rule inscribed onto the our bodies of Black laborers and their households. The video “Aequare. The Future that Never Was” (2023) by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji is a centerpiece of the artist’s present exhibition, Echoes of Historical past, Shadows of Progress, on the Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork. “Aequare” displaces the violence onto an impressive tree, proven in archival movie as it’s taken down by fireplace and the axe. That act of foundational brutality is adopted by the preparation of herbarium specimens, during which reduce crops are pressed between sheets of paper for the needs of classification and financial botany. The video splices Fifties propaganda materials produced by a Belgian agronomic analysis middle within the city of Yangambi, within the province of Katanga, with latest footage of its crumbling colonial structure, to attach two central themes in Baloji’s observe: the transformation of place into territory for surveillance, management, and exploitation; and the position of the archive as an instrument of empire and repository of reminiscence.
These themes come throughout clearly in “Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction (2022), which traces the worldwide circuits of extractivism in a mineral-rich area scarred by colonial and postcolonial greed and battle. Named after a uranium mine within the space, the work contains 15 display prints that superimpose Congolese uranium samples over photographs of nuclear explosions, a reminder that the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained uranium from the Congo.
Sammy Baloji, “Aequare. The Future that Never Was” (2023), single-channel video, shade, sound, 21:04 min.
One other work options crops from the DRC potted in copper casements from World Struggle II repurposed in Belgian households as flowerpots. The set up embodies the enduring lives and transformations of Congo’s mineral sources as they go via world circuits of violence, domestication, and repression. All through the present, Baloji units up a productive pressure between reminiscence and forgetting, colonial histories and their erasures. The materiality of mined copper transmuted into army provides and, later, home appurtenances exhibits how archival analysis comes alive within the artist’s observe to create complicated and layered experiences for the viewer.
Traces of forgotten splendor are additionally evoked in Baloji’s copper and bronze negatives of Seventeenth- and 18th-century textiles from the Kongo Kingdom. The luxurious cloths have been finely woven from raffia palm fibers, producing a velvety texture. These extraordinary objects discovered their manner into cupboards of curiosity and early trendy European taxonomies that in the end transformed prized rarities into ethnographic artifacts. The artist attracts on the mobility of textiles to indicate how native cultural varieties develop into decontextualized and amenable to world circulation, whereas additionally recasting — and memorializing — them as sculpture in metallic. The textile motifs tie collectively totally different components of the present as they’re additionally discovered within the patterns of “The Crossing” (2022) and “Meandering” (2025), two installations composed, respectively, of a carpet and a raised metallic walkway that often intersect.
In his indictment of the colonial future that by no means was, Baloji guides us via the methodical and relentless scientific extractive applied sciences of the Belgian colons and their aftermaths. By incorporating the colonial archive in his works — herbarium specimens, movie reels, city plans — he exhibits how the sinister equipment of the “civilizing mission” led to the negation, and in the end the erasure, of Congo itself, its individuals and historical past decreased to the titular shadows of the present. The archive retains its uncanny fecundity due to the melancholy grip of imperial pasts.
Set up view of Sammy Baloji: Echoes of Historical past, Shadows of Progress at Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork Athens (ΕΜΣΤ) (photograph Paris Tavitian)
Set up view of Sammy Baloji: Echoes of Historical past, Shadows of Progress at Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork Athens (ΕΜΣΤ) (photograph Paris Tavitian)
Sammy Baloji, “A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes” (2018) (© Framer Framed / Eva Broekema)
Sammy Baloji: Echoes of Historical past, Shadows of Progress continues on the Nationwide Museum of Up to date Artwork Athens (Kallirrois Avenue and Amvr. Frantzi Avenue, Athens, Greece) via February 15, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Ioli Tzanetaki.
