Memoire & The King’s Order to Dance

Sammy Baloji

21 sep – 26 oct 2024
Galeria do Paço

  • Exhibitions
  • Opening Weekend
  • Legacies of Colonialism
  • Braga

Curator: Elina Heikka

Memoire, 2004-2006 & The King’s Order to Dance, 2023

“I’m not interested in colonialism as nostalgia, or in it as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system,” Sammy Baloji says. In his series Mémoire past and present collide. Baloji juxtaposes colour photographs of today’s bleak, industrial landscapes with historical images drawn from the archives of the local mining company, which memorialise African and European colonial actors, who toiled for and benefited from the mine.

Lubumbashi was a vital regional centre for centuries before the Europeans arrived and became a major industrial centre thanks to the mining of copper under Belgian colonial rule. In 1885, Belgian King Leopold II had established the Congo Free State by brutally seizing the African landmass as his personal possession. Nowadays, Lubumbashi casts a pale shadow of its former glory. While the resulting images are indictments of the lasting legacies — social, political, environmental — of colonialism, they also recall the economic benefits made by the mines and their ruin after independence in 1960.

The King’s Order to Dance is a series of photographs taken during Baloji’s residency in Ypres, a Belgian town on the front line between Germany and the Allies, whose surrounding landscapes still bear the scars of the First World War. By revealing the holes left by the shells, the artist evokes both the Congolese volunteer soldiers who fought alongside the Belgian army as well as the exploitation of the local population in the minerals also put at the service of the war, thus denouncing the indispensable nature of Congolese resources — both human and material — for Belgium in the context of this international conflict.

Galeria do Paço – UMinho
Reitoria, Largo do Paço, 4704-553 Braga

Opening Hours:

Tuesday – Saturday
10:00–12:30/14:00–18:30

Sunday and Monday
Closed

© Sammy Baloji