A Kind of Paradise. Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art
Museum Rietberg, Zurich
How to depart from the manifold entanglements of colonialism and photography? Countless archives hold photographs capturing unspeakable horrors of the colonial past in all its facets, herewith fostering the question of how to revisit those archival materials without replicating the grammar of violence. What could it mean to look at colonial photography otherwise? How to live on with all the haunted images? Several years ago, with the acquisition of two significant archives of early African (studio) photography, the Museum Rietberg felt the urge to address related questions in an exhibition context. The museum’s collection houses art from all over the world and states that “early photography serves as an important, even necessary, complement.”1 With this understanding, the curator Nanina Guyer picks up on Saidiya Hartman’s observations made in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts” and brings together twenty international artists working with colonial-era photography. The question of ways to “make a place for the living” in the exhibition strongly resonates with the following two proposals: “[O]ne is attending to and recruiting the past for the sake of the living, establishing who we are in relation to who we have been; and the second entails interrogating the production of our knowledge about the past.”2
Throughout the exhibition, carefully selected photographs from the museum’s archive hang in dialogue with contemporary works. Archival portraits foreground less the unequal power relations and narratives of oppression than the self-determined and empowered sitters. Women with traditional hairdos wear magnificent robes and sit with their legs apart, gazing confidently out of the picture; or, in a work by Jonathan Adagogo Green, considered one of the first African professional photographers, exhibition visitors see the Oba of Benin, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, portrayed in 1897 on his way to exile aboard the steam yacht Ivy. This portrait lends him a timeless sense of agency: in a self-assured, relaxed posture, the ruler sits in a wicker armchair; with a smirk in his face and his left eyebrow raised, he is commenting on the situation.
The exhibition itself starts with counter-archives held by artists: Dinh Q. Lê has built loose webs made of vernacular images. As a child, the artist and his family had to flee from Vietnam in 1978, and after his return in 1996, he bought countless photographs by other families, who had shared the same experience. The artist took on the role of caretaker for these images, as have all other institutions where this project is stored or shown. In dialogue with Crossing the Farther Shore (2014) is Cédric Kouamé’s work entitled The Gifted Mold Archive (2012). The founder of the Baoulecore Archive Center displays around fifty color reproductions in a large white frame. He rescued the vanishing images—originating from and stored in the hot and humid climate of the Ivory Coast—from oblivion. On the back wall, Rosana Paulino’s Parede da Memória (Wall of Memory, 1994/2015) confronts the viewer with a missing community in the official narrative of Brazil’s history. In Zurich, pictures of eleven members of her own family have been printed on carefully handcrafted patuás, a traditional amulet, resulting in an installation of 750 portraits of Black Brazilians—symbolically offering protection against the risk of forgetting the experienced suffering and violence.
The exhibition’s dramaturgical narrative thus moves on to the chapter “Confronting,” which focuses on artistic investigations of colonial wounds. For instance, exclusion and segregation are examined more closely by Omar Victor Diop, who worked through Lee Shulman’s archive of vintage photographs of North American middle-class families from the 1950s and 1960s. The Senegalese artist rewrites history in Being There (2023) as he reworked those photographs by digitally mounting himself into the image. Ironically, this act by a Black person of joyfully claiming a place in various private scenes—at a time when, for Black people, it was impossible to be an equal member of the American society— elevates the cheap amateur snapshots to the art context. In contrast, Yuki Kihara draws from the art-historical canon by investigating colonial erasure in their native culture. In the fivepart episodic talk show First Impressions: Paul Gauguin (2018), a group of cheerful nonbinary people examines these Postimpressionist paintings through the lens of the third gender: fa’afafine, meaning in the manner of a woman. Although deeply rooted in Polynesian culture, this gender identity was erased in the official records during colonial rule.
The following section “Care” contributes to the process of healing from colonial violations, with some projects linking colonialism’s entanglement to Switzerland. Sasha Huber’s work contributes to the activist campaign Demounting Louis Agassiz, which redresses the legacy of the racist eugenicist, a Swiss native, on many levels.3 For example, the naming of places, which extends in Agassiz’s case even into the universe; or, in recent years, his daguerreotypes have been the focus of a legal dispute in which a descendant of the sitters sued Harvard University for unlawful appropriation. Huber’s presented Tailoring Freedom series (2021–23) has been expanded to include a portrait commissioned by the museum.
Invited for a residency was David Shongo, who worked with a photograph taken by the German ethnologist Hans Himmelheber in 1939. In the museum’s archive, the artist found a portrait of a young woman with her upper body bare, taken in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo: as a gesture of protection, Shongo covered her breasts. He chose a barcode, alluding to commodification and the related largescale extraction that is still ongoing today. In the accompanying film, Shongo brings the photograph to Kinshasa and invites people to speculate on the girl’s story. For this polyphonic narrative, the curator Nanina Guyer uses Hartman’s expression of “critical fabulation” where “gaps, ruptures, and silences in the history of marginalized peoples are made visible, and their voices and experiences are reconstructed.”4 In the end, Shongo’s work has returned to the museum’s collection.
The final chapter, “In the Photo Phantastic,” is devoted to an exploration of a wide range of critical fabulations. Andrea Chung’s large-format cyanotypes revolve around the Drexciya myth, an Afrofuturist science-fiction narrative centered on an underwater nation in the Atlantic, populated by the descendants of pregnant slave women who were thrown overboard during the crossing. Tshepiso Moropa works with Se Tswana folktales, also using archival images in her collages and videos, whereas Raphaël Barontini reverses the perspective. In The Golden Ladies (2026), his heroine Nobosudru, who became a symbolic representation of African women in Europe, slips from the object of study into a researcher. This closing chapter sets out to further imagine powerful histories where the records remain silent. The enormous and overwhelming resonance this exhibition has received so far demonstrates the urgency to revisit the photographic legacy from the colonial era, in order to look at the unspeakable and to unfold different stories—or, to say it along the lines of Hartman: we must simultaneously “recruit the past for the sake of the living” and interrogate the conditions under which that past became knowable.
1 Annette Bhagwati, “Preface,” in A Kind of Paradise: Artistic Counter-Narratives to Colonial-Era Photography, ed. Nanina Guyer, exh. cat. Museum Rietberg (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2026), pp. 89– 90, esp. p. 90.
2 Saidiya Hartman, referring to Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1985), in “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), pp. 1–14, esp. p. 14.
3 A detailed chronology of the overall project Démonter Louis Agassiz can be found here: https:// louverture.ch/agassiz/.
4 Nanina Guyer, “Storytelling as Political Gesture: David Shongo,” in A Kind of Paradise, pp. 138–39, esp. p. 139.