Colonial Legacies
Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo
Gabriella Nugent
The colonial past in photography and video art of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo
In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redress archival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominant narratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial and immediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical and speculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how their practices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that attests to the ramifications of colonialism across time.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
IAS
Book Launch: Colonial Legacies - 26 April 2022, 6:00 pm–7:30 pm
“Art
history has been undergoing a process of reckoning, from calls to address the
legacies of slavery and colonialism to concomitant surveys of decolonsiation
published in some of the discipline’s foremost journals.”, Gabriella Nugent
Format: Monograph - ebook
232 pages
Illustrated, colour section (32 pp.)
ISBN: 9789461664273
Publication: December 15, 2021
Languages: English