Since 2005, Sammy Baloji has explored tensions between traditional society and the colonial modernity that shape urban space in Katanga, examining how colonial systems of classification continue to shape how the region is represented. In 2017, he traveled with anthropologist Filip De Boeck to retrace the Katanga secession, drawing on both his own family history in the region and the anthropologist’s research conducted between the DRC and Angola.

The exhibition centers on the Hotel Impala in Kolwezi, once owned by the artist’s great-uncle. Requisitioned twice during conflicts in Katanga, this family property—claimed by history—becomes the point of departure for a broader narrative. Like termite mounds, constantly under construction and marking the landscape, Landscape Lens unfolds as a layered temporal field in which Western archival images meet vernacular archives, the voices of Katangan women and men, and contemporary photographs.

Baloji’s work examines the status of images themselves: how they are used, how people represented themselves, and how we read them today. In Landscape Lens, photographs of environments, landscapes and portraits are set alongside autobiographical narratives and family and European archives—including Paris Match—to challenge dominant narratives about Congolese history and the country’s colonial-era borders. Baloji thus stages an evocative and subjective encounter between large-scale history and micro-histories: that of the artist’s family, those of the actors and victims of the Katanga secession and the two Shaba wars, and contemporary accounts of the DRC confronting the extractivism of global capitalism.

EXHIBITION PRODUCED BY THE RENCONTRES D’ARLES

WITH THE SUPPORT OF FLANDERS STATE OF THE ART

IN COLLABORATION WITH IMANE FARÈS GALLERY.