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

Abstract

Congolese contemporary creation invites contrasts. The Congo's history of precarity and war in the past thirty years explains why terms like “resilience” often surface in response to inventive and stirring works by musicians, choreographers, photographers, painters, and sculptors. In Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo, art historian Gabriella Nugent centers on a small segment of the Congolese contemporary art scene. Her pointed and carefully researched study explores artworks by three contemporary artists (Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga) and one collective (Kongo Astronauts). The book contributes to the growing scholarship on photography and visual art in Africa through the lens of artists who engage with colonialism and its legacies. Because it specifically explores artworks that display complex representations of the past, it also suggests understandings of Congolese artistic practices that go well beyond celebrations of beauty and creative force in the face of adversity.Students of memory and historical imagination in postcolonial Congo have long found a source inspiration in visual arts. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians and anthropologists like Tshikala Kayembe Biaya, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, and Johannes Fabian began writing about paintings that mostly self-taught artists produced for local clienteles in Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, and other urban centers. The vernacular quality of popular painting, as it was known, appealed to these scholars. Popular painters, through the conversations and exchanges that their paintings encouraged, crystalized widely shared experiences of colonial and early postcolonial modernity. Researchers eagerly turned to these artworks that embraced popular urban energies and articulated subtle critiques of state-sanctioned narratives at a time of economic downturn, military dictatorships, and generalized disappointment with the course taken by African governments since the era of independence. Fast forward to our present moment: The contemporary artists featured in Colonial Legacies differ significantly from the painters that inspired earlier researchers. Most importantly, this new generation of artists lacks the organic connection to a Congolese public that characterized popular painting. Even when their practices are rooted in the thick of contemporary Congolese lifeworlds, their work tend to circulate in galleries, museums, and biennales that are located abroad or otherwise out of reach to the ordinary Congolese who patronized the popular artists of yesteryear. Yet, they challenge established historical narratives in a way reminiscent of the critical interventions carried on by painters in earlier decades.Born well after the Congo's independence, Baloji, Magema, Senga, and the members of Kongo Astronauts belong to a generation that experienced colonialism as “secondary trauma. ” It is on that account that Nugent explores their engagement with the durability and legacies of the colonial period. Yet, there might be another important reason to focus on this generation of artists working with visual archives and creating new images and narratives about the past. They were born, grew up, and came of age during the period of the downfall of General Mobutu's regime and its chaotic aftermath. Many Congolese experienced these long years of economic hardship, political violence and social anomy as a crisis that affected the collective apprehension of time: the past seemed increasingly irrelevant; the future, obstructed; and the present, mostly intelligible in eschatological terms, as what anthropologist Filip De Boeck (2005) called an “apocalyptical interlude” marked by the “demonization of everyday life. ” It is also this crisis of temporality that illuminates the efforts at reconnecting and reordering past, present and future in the artworks discussed in Colonial Legacies.Nugent's book is composed of four chapters, each dedicated to one main artistic project. The first chapter revisits Mémoire, Sammy Baloji's 2006 photomontage series; Michèle Magema's 2002 video installation Oyé Oyé is the focus of the second chapter; Nugent then turns to Une vie après la mort, Georges Senga's 2012 photographic series; and in the last chapter, she analyzes a series of performances and videos by the Kinshasa-based Kongo Astronauts collective. In each chapter, the author integrates artworks by other artists as counterpoints to the main project under examination. These include works by painters, photographers, and filmmakers, such as Marlene Dumas, Guy Tillim, Santu Mofokeng, Alain Gomis, Raoul Peck, Vincent Meessen, or Kader Attia. By bringing these various artworks in conversation (in a way that recalls the practice of juxtaposition so central to the works of Baloji, Senga, Magema, and Kongo Astronauts), Nugent crosses multiple boundaries of genres, artistic disciplines, and geography. Doing so, she notably challenges the dichotomy between contemporary and popular art, as the chapter on Sengas Une vie après la mort integrates a long digression on postphotographic aesthetic in the work of 1970s popular painters Burozi and Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu.Colonial Legacies does not seek exhaustivity in its presentation of Congolese contemporary art. It occasionally references museums, biennales, or curators, but it has relatively little to say about the broader domestic and international institutional and social contexts that have channeled Congolese artistic creation. Instead, the book's forte lays in the author's careful method of close reading. Nugent rightfully prides herself for her attention to visual details. She reads artworks both along and against the grain, by zooming in on images, paying attention to their materiality, tracking their transformations and alterations, looking at the margins. Her book's argumentative power also comes from its careful consideration of the historical scholarship on the Congo, as well as its rich theoretical apparatus. These foundations enable Nugent to contribute both to Congolese studies and to current scholarly conversations, on questions including visuality, memory, violence, technopolitics, and the body.Many readers already familiar with the works examined in Colonial Legacies will look at them under a new light after reading the book. This is certainly true for Baloji's Mémoire, the focus of the first chapter and probably the most well-known of the projects analyzed by Nugent. Mémoire is a series of photomontages of Congolese recruits for Katanga's colonial mining industry—some of them stand naked for medical examinations, others take part of chain gangs, the vast majority are men and boys (in a later chapter, Nugent comes back to the gender composition of these images). Baloji shows these protagonists cut out from black-and-white colonial archival photographs and collaged onto postindustrial landscapes captured in contemporary Lubumbashi. The series speaks to the violence of colonial extraction and its visual appendix on the one hand, and to the state of ruination that followed the collapse of Katanga's formal economy in the post-Cold War, poststructural adjustment era on the other hand Nugent argues against the reduction of this juxtaposition to what she calls a narrative of loss. She rejects a teleological reading of the series and recovers traces of resistance to colonialism and ruination by focusing on easily missed details in the contemporary images of the postindustrial sites, but also by bringing precious insights about the original archival photographs used by Baloji and through a careful analysis of a video loop of the dancer Faustin Linyekula that served as a companion piece to the photomontages.In the first chapter, as in the rest of the book, Nugent aims to uncover layers of meanings hidden under what she calls the surface of violence. The artworks she studies all concur in their attention to suppressed and forgotten histories. In the second chapter, this materializes through Michèle Magema's video installation Oyé Oyé and its feminist critique of gender pohtics under the Mobutu dictatorship. The two-screen video installation juxtaposes archival footages of women and school girls dancing for Mobutu during a pubhc rally on the one hand, and a video of Magema executing marching gestures that mimic the choreography of military parades on the other hand. Nugent emphasizes Magema's critique of Congolese womens erasure from historical narratives, but she also stresses Oyé Oyes display of female labor as both constitutive of the history of state building and as a site of resistance and survival. In the following chapter, Nugent turns to Sengas series of photographic diptychs, which explores memories of the Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, among ordinary Congolese. Une vie après la mort developed as a collaboration between Senga and Kayembe Kilobo, a former schoolteacher in Lubumbashi who had been an ardent supporter of Lumumba and remained deeply attached to his memory in the many decades that followed his brutal assassination at the hands of the secessionist regime of Moïse Tshombe and its Belgian supporters in January 1961. The series juxtaposes various images of Lumumba's political life with Sengas photographs of Kayembe. Some of these photographs focus on memorabilia of Lumumba displayed in Kayembe's house; others are portraits of Kayembe wearing clothes and accessories reminiscent of the assassinated prime pinister. Sengas project outlines continuous dedication on the part of the old schoolteacher, and it extends in this way the interrupted trajectory of the struggle for liberation that Lumumba symbolized. Nugent contrasts attempts at suppressing memories of Lumumba under the Mobutu dictatorship with Kayembe's continuous devotion. Brought together by Senga, the photographs of Lumumba from the time of the Congo's independence and the portraits of an aging Kayembe who never stopped identifying with him suggest speculative memories and temporal collisions that command transformative potentialities in the present. The question of alternative histories is further explored in the chapter on Kongo Astronauts. Eléonore Hellio, a Kinshasa-based French artist and former professor at Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg, and Michel Ekeba, a performer and Helho's former student, created the collective in 2013. Since then, it has disseminated a variety of experimental videos that all eschew any attempt at straight narration. These videos offer variations on the theme of Afrofuturism. Most of them feature the performers dressed in self-made patched-up space suits that have inspired the collective's name, as they walk through the urban landscape of Kinshasa. The “speculative counter-archive” of the future created in these videos of K/Congolese space exploration, as Nugent demonstrates, carries specific resonance with the Congo's entanglements in global technopohtics, from the era of space exploration in the cold war to the digital present and its continuous dependence on Congolese minerals.In her introduction, Nugent presents Colonial Legades as a response to studies of colonial hauntings in contemporary art centered on European artists. While turning the spotlight to Congolese and Congo-based artists is an essential intervention, Nugent does not address the different resonance of the colonial past in Congo and in Belgium. The colonial period is often apprehended as a historical isolate in the former métropole, but in the Congo, it does not exhaust imaginations of Central Africa's past. Highly mobile artists like Baloji, Magema, Senga, and the members of Kongo Astronauts are not contained within one neatly demarcated field of remembrance of course. Yet, their works respond to the specificities of historical memory in the Congo. Nugent's approach in Colonial Legacies directly builds on postcolonial and decolonial critiques that have opened our eyes to the endurance of colonial structures of power and knowledge after the formal end of colonial rule. And the view that Baloji, Magema, Senga, and Kongo Astronauts all question the unfinished state of decolonization cannot be disputed. As Nugent convincingly argues, lens-based practices in themselves offer a way to work through the legacy of colonialism, given the inescapable associations between photography and European colonialism in the Congo (from the photographic activism of British missionaries during the campaign against rubber atrocities under King Leopold's Congo Free State, to bureaucratic colonial routines of control and racial- ized knowledge production entailing the use of cameras, and the ubiquity of studio photography in the making of the so-called évolué class of literate colonized subjects). Yet, despite the many reasons to associate these artists’ projects with colonialism, its actual figuration in their artwork is rather tenuous, which forces Nugent to dedicate complex developments reasserting its centrality. For instance, the chapter on Oyé Oyé argues that while Magema's video installation challenges the standing of women under the Mobutu regime, their dominated position at that time was a direct result of colonialisms undermining of female economic independence. This is a productive angle, but Mobutu's gender politics, as well as all other aspects of his rule, cannot be reduced to responses to the colonial past. Similar arguments could be made in relation to the works of Senga and Kongo Astronauts: When they revisit the cold war era or the Mobutu regime, they may not do so only from a desire to problematize the aftermaths of colonialism, but also as attempts at deploying a historicity not fully contained within colonialism. By contrast, while Baloji's Mémoire includes a photograph that specifically takes Mobutu and the postcolonial moment as the archival components of its montage, other images in the series construct exphcit dialogues between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, in an unmediated way that is absent from the projects discussed in other chapters of Nugents study. At the same time, it is worth noting that in several more recent projects, Baloji has worked with materials and forms associated to various precolonial traditions in Katanga, Kasai, and beyond These projects continue to engage with history and memory, but they interrogate legacies that seem to bypass colonialism. While Colonial Legacies may have further insisted on the idea that Congolese artists both center and decenter the colonial period in their practices, the book offers a highly stimulating study of critical artistic interventions nonetheless. It will appeal to readers interested in Congolese history, contemporary art, photography, and the making of new archives for the present.