In Sammy Baloji’s practice, the extraction of natural resources in Congo serves as a lens through which to examine the afterlives of colonialism. Exploring how colonial structures have shaped the contextualisation of African art, he revisits and reappropriates traditional Congolese artefacts to enact a form of cultural restitution.
In the Biennale Arte 2026, Baloji presents three sculptures and sixteen collage prints. He scanned and enlarged existing Congolese artworks and integrated cubic forms that reference the crystalline structure of uranium. These crystals “contaminate” the sculptures through their allusion to radioactivity, violent extractivism, and atomic weaponry.
Each sculpture is based on a work that was present in a different collection, serving distinct ideological narratives. A large outdoor sculpture is based on a work once held in a Renaissance cabinet of curiosity, while two sculptures exhibited inside the Central Pavilion reference works from a nineteenth-century Belgian colonial museum and Mobutu’s 1970s national museum collection, which promoted a return to “authenticity”.
In sixteen collage prints, Baloji blends images from ethnographic catalogues and other sources with his own diagrams of mineral crystals and scans of Congolese artefacts held in ethnographic museums. Scanning these sculptures, he argues, is a kind of scientific voyeurism: the information it reveals cannot compensate the loss of meaning it underwent when removed from its context.
—Heidi Ballet
