Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Gabriella Nugent

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This captivating book explores the links between art and temporality. Analysing artworks by Congolese figures such as Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga, and the artist collective Kongo Astronauts, Gabriella Nugent demonstrates how this generation of photographers and video artists — all born well after the independence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — have creatively reassessed the after-effects of Belgian colonialism. One of the most distinctive features of these artists is their tapping into the stylistic possibilities offered by video and photography to disrupt teleological ideas of chronology, create transhistorical connections, and produce collages in which (neo)colonial archives are invited to cohabit, and dialogue, with the here-and-now of the DRC. Chapter 1 focuses on Baloji’s Mémoire (2006) and examines how this artwork explores the commodification and consumption of black bodies by colonial mining industries and the factors that have perpetuated imperial extractivism in the Congolese present. Whilst arguing that the material explored by Baloji forces us to take stock of what Achille Mbembe has famously called ‘necropolitics’, Nugent convincingly highlights the shortcomings of this theoretical approach because Mémoire also sheds light on less documented but equally powerful small acts of resistance which have the ability to rewrite history and ‘complicat[e] conceptions of temporal progress’ (p. 44). This focus on overlooked voices and everyday figures also informs Chapter 2 and its close reading of Magema’s double-screen video installation Oyé Oyé (2002), in which Congolese gender politics during the Mobutu-led ‘authenticity’ era is shown to replicate colonial patriarchal models ambivalently. Here, too, Nugent challenges a tendency amongst commentators, for example Thierry Michel, to focus on Congolese violence and grand politics at the expense of ‘small details of the everyday’ (p. 84). By examining the state-sponsored cultural policy of ‘animation politique et culturelle’, and the role played by female singers and dancers at public events organized to honour Mobutu, Nugent contends that these women’s ‘minute actions’ render visible hitherto unseen aspects of Congolese political life (p. 84). Chapter 3 examines Senga’s photographic diptych series, Une vie après la mort (2012), in which Senga couples historical press images of Patrice Lumumba with colour photographs of Kayembe Kilobo, a Lubumbashi-based schoolteacher who since the 1950s has consciously lived his life as a Lumumba lookalike. In addition to examining the role of Lumumba in Congolese iconography since independence, this chapter explores how Kayembe Kilobo used his appearance and sartorial style during Mobutu’s reign to subtly critique ‘authenticity’. Chapter 4 engages with Kongo Astronauts’ brand of ‘artivist’ (and situationism-inspired) performances in Kinshasa, arguing that the collective’s focus on the space age and digital globalization fosters a much-needed sense of optimism and ‘Kongofuturism’ (p. 121), by which the capital city reappropriates its cultural agency. Nugent shows here that their ‘playfulness’ brings about ‘another vision of the city’ and one that resolutely breaks away from the idea about ‘the omnipresence of death in Kinshasa’ (p. 126). This book constitutes an outstanding contribution to the study of contemporary African art and historiography of the DRC. In its painstaking analysis of past and present images, it offers a timely analysis of Congolese culture and politics.