Sammy Baloji / Lotte Arndt

Vocabularies for counter-histories – THIS COURSE WILL NOT TAKE PLACE

3–15 August 2020

Sammy Baloji, Fragments of Interlaced
Dialogs, Installationsansicht, Cultuurcentrum
Strombeek, Grimbergen, 2017, Foto: der Künstler

Media
Mixed media, curating, writing

Location
Hohensalzburg Fortress

Teaching language
English (the teachers also speak French, Swahili, Lingála, German and Spanish)

What to bring
Any working material you might need. All practices are welcome; please let us know about any special needs.

Requirements
Interest in transdisciplinary processes, counter-hegemonic narratives and artistic research.

Maximum number of participants
20

Participation fee
€ 720.– (€ 560.–)

In this course we ask how, in times of political repression, artistic praxis can call into question monolithic narratives and unsettle their nationalist, colonial and gendered character. We are interested in artistic strategies that take their approach from archives, work with little-noticed protagonists or shift the perspective on some event believed to be well known. We will examine the possibilities of counter-hegemonic forms and try to build connections between geographically distant places and their often invisible interactions.

Artists, writers and curators are welcome to join, across disciplinary lines, in exploring the collaborative practices that can open the path to alternative scenarios, experimenting with speculative gestures, narrative fabulation and collage or montage. The border situation of a town and the properties of a material may interest us as much as an image, an archival document, a verbal testimony, a monument or an art collection.

The two-week course will be organised as active artistic or curatorial research by participants, including collective (discussions, visits, commented readings and film screenings, guest lecturers) and individual (research, exchange with teachers) components. On the basis of our respective practices (both separate and collaborative) as artist and theorist, we would like to accompany participants in their specic research.

Sammy Baloji, born in 1978, was raised in Lubumbashi (CD), a centre of colonial, post-colonial and contemporary entanglements related to resources. Colliding reality and representation, his photography and multimedia installations expose tensions between past and present. He mines the archive, traces social history in architecture and landscape, and probes the body as a site of memory and witness to operations of power. He is co-founder of the Picha Encounters, the Biennale in Lubumbashi.

Solo exhibitions
2020 Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C. Sammy Baloji, Lunds konsthall, Lund (SE). 2019 Congos, fragments d’une histoire, Le Point du Jour/Centre d’Art Editeur, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin (FR). Extractive Landscapes, Stadtgalerie Museumspavillon, Salzburg (AT). 2018 A blueprint for toads and snakes, Framer Framed, Amsterdam. 2016–18 Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck – Urban Now: City Life in Congo, WIELS, Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; Open Society Foundation, New York, NY (US); The Power Plant, Toronto (CA); Galerias Municipais/EGEAC, Lisbon. 2014 Hunting and Collecting: Sammy Baloji, Mu.Zee, Ostend (BE).

Group exhibitions
2020 Belgian Art Prize 2020, BOZAR, Brussels. Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (AU). 2019 FIKTION KONGO – Kunstwelten zwischen Geschichte und Gegenwart, Museum Rietberg, Zurich (CH). …And Other such Stories (with Filip De Boeck), Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago, IL (US). Africa State of Mind, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (US). Affective Utopia, KADIST, Paris. 2018 Congo Stars, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz (AT). 2017 documenta 14, Athens & Kassel (DE). 2016 11th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (CN). 2015/16 La vie moderne, 13th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (FR). 2015–17 Senses of time: video and film-based works of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; LACMA, Los Angeles (CA). 2015 All the world’s futures, 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (IT).

Writer and curator Lotte Arndt (Paris) accompanies the work of artists who critically interrogate the postcolonial present and the blind spots of modernity, and co-organizes cultural programmes, screenings and discussions. She co-curated Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (2017, with Lucas Morin at Bétonsalon, Paris, and 2018 at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, with Philippe Pirotte); Tampered Emotions. Lust for Dust, Triangle France ( June 2018); One Sentence Exhibition, Kadist (August 2018); and worked on the research programme The Vacation of the Museum. Decolonize Ethnographic Collections with Cinema (2016–2018). Her PhD is dedicated to postcolonial negotiations in Paris-based cultural magazines related to Africa (2013). She is a member of the artists’ and writers’ group Ruser l’image and the research group Global Art Prospective (INHA Paris), and publishes on artistic strategies that aim to subvert Eurocentric narratives and institutions.

Portrait photos Sammy Baloji and Lotte Arndt

Portrait photo Baloji: Dieter Tielemans
Portrait photo Arndt: private