Sammy Baloji Mines Congo’s Hidden Histories

The history of colonial violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may call to mind the atrocities of rubber extraction under Belgian rule inscribed onto the bodies of Black laborers and their families. The video “Aequare. The Future that Never Was” (2023) by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji is a centerpiece of the artist’s current exhibition, Echoes of History, Shadows of Progress, at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. “Aequare” displaces the violence onto a majestic tree, shown in archival film as it is taken down by fire and the axe. That act of foundational brutality is followed by the preparation of herbarium specimens, in which cut plants are pressed between sheets of paper for the purposes of classification and economic botany. The video splices 1950s propaganda material produced by a Belgian agronomic research center in the town of Yangambi, in the province of Katanga, with recent footage of its crumbling colonial architecture, to connect two central themes in Baloji’s practice: the transformation of place into territory for surveillance, control, and exploitation; and the role of the archive as an instrument of empire and repository of memory.

These themes come across clearly in “Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction (2022), which traces the global circuits of extractivism in a mineral-rich region scarred by colonial and postcolonial greed and conflict. Named after a uranium mine in the area, the work includes 15 screen prints that superimpose Congolese uranium samples over images of nuclear explosions, a reminder that the American bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained uranium from the Congo.

*Sammy Baloji, “Aequare. The Future that Never Was” (2023), single-channel video, color, sound, 21:04 min.*

Another work features plants from the DRC potted in copper casements from World War II repurposed in Belgian households as flowerpots. The installation embodies the enduring lives and transformations of Congo’s mineral resources as they pass through global circuits of violence, domestication, and repression. Throughout the show, Baloji sets up a productive tension between memory and forgetting, colonial histories and their erasures. The materiality of mined copper transmuted into military supplies and, later, domestic appurtenances shows how archival research comes alive in the artist’s practice to create complex and layered experiences for the viewer.

Traces of forgotten splendor are also evoked in Baloji’s copper and bronze negatives of 17th- and 18th-century textiles from the Kongo Kingdom. The luxury cloths were finely woven from raffia palm fibers, producing a velvety texture. These extraordinary objects found their way into cabinets of curiosity and early modern European taxonomies that ultimately converted prized rarities into ethnographic artifacts. The artist draws on the mobility of textiles to show how local cultural forms become decontextualized and amenable to global circulation, while also recasting — and memorializing — them as sculpture in metal. The textile motifs tie together different elements of the show as they are also found in the patterns of “The Crossing” (2022) and “Meandering” (2025), two installations composed, respectively, of a carpet and a raised metal walkway that occasionally intersect.

In his indictment of the colonial future that never was, Baloji guides us through the methodical and relentless scientific extractive technologies of the Belgian colons and their aftermaths. By incorporating the colonial archive in his works — herbarium specimens, film reels, urban plans — he shows how the sinister apparatus of the “civilizing mission” led to the negation, and ultimately the erasure, of Congo itself, its people and history reduced to the titular shadows of the show. The archive retains its uncanny fecundity because of the melancholy grip of imperial pasts.

*Installation view of Sammy Baloji: Echoes of History, Shadows of Progress at National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ) (photo Paris Tavitian)*

*Sammy Baloji, “A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes” (2018) (© Framer Framed / Eva Broekema)*

This review was Published in Hyperallergic November 4th, 2025