Nugent Gabriella Nugent Colonial Legacies

Annotation

The colonial past in photography and video art of contemporaryartists born or based in the CongoIn Colonial Legacies,Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based inthe Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations ofBelgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and oneartist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, MichleMagema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a differentperspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In theirphotography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redressarchival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominantnarratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial andimmediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical andspeculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how theirpractices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that atteststo the ramifications of colonialism across time.This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).IASBook Launch: Colonial Legacies - 26 April 2022, 6:00 pm-7:30 pm"Arthistory has been undergoing a process of reckoning, from calls to address thelegacies of slavery and colonialism to concomitant surveys of decolonsiationpublished in some of the discipline's foremost journals.", Gabriella Nugent