Past
Sammy Baloji
Sammy Baloji’s participates in the inaugural edition of the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennale with his work “Kombwelo 504″—a new piece created in collaboration with Jean Katambayi.
It is a 1:1 scale Peugeot 504 car — a 1970s and 80s status symbol for mining administrators-rendered in copper wire. The car references kombwelo, miniature wire cars crafted by Congolese children from discarded materials where commercial products are scarce. In Kombwelo 504 (2024) black irrigation tubes-reminiscent of Abu Dhabi’s irrigation systems-symbolise the lifeblood that sustains the desert city and transformation due to oil extraction. The work juxtaposes the Congo where resource extraction still shapes the land with Abu Dhabi’s relationship to water and oil, highlighting the connection between industry, environment, and survival in resource-driven economies.
Sammy Baloji
In his artistic work Sammy Baloji investigates the history of mining in his home city of Lubumbashi, located in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He contrasts the profound destruction of the environment and social structures to the memories and hopes of people in the Katanga region. Key elements of his artistic practice are to encourage collaboration between art producers, activists, and academics as well as bringing together many different kinds of knowledge and production. His invitation to 12 artists in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Europe with whom he regularly interacts is a continuation of this development of collective structures that he views as a strategy of resistance to extractivism, an economic model in which raw materials are “extracted” from nature.
Sammy Baloji
Titled choreographies of the impossible and bringing together diverse artistic practices from different parts of the world, the 35th Bienal de São Paulo “wants to build spaces and times of perception that challenge the rigidity of western time linearity. What we see in this choreographic horizon are the strategies and policies of the movement that these practices have been creating in order to imagine worlds that confront the ideas of freedom, justice and equality as impossible achievements”, say Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel, the curatorial collective of the exhibition.
For the curators, “the impossible refers to the political, legal, economic and social realities in which these artistic and social practices are set, but also to the way in which these practices find alternatives to circumvent the effects of these same contexts. The term choreography also helps us reflect on how the idea of moving freely remains at the core of a neoliberal conception of freedom. In line with the very paradox created by the title, we seek not to walk around a motif or to place thematic cores, but rather to make room for a continuous dance which we can choreograph together, even in difference.”
Sammy Baloji
“What does it mean to be ‘an agent of change’? (…) Over the past nine months, in hundreds of conversations, text messages, Zoom calls and meetings – stated Lesley Lokko – the question of whether exhibitions of this scale — both in terms of carbon and cost — are justified, has surfaced time and again. In May last year, I referred to the exhibition several times as ‘a story’, a narrative unfolding in space. Today, my understanding has changed. An architecture exhibition is both a moment and a process. It borrows its structure and format from art exhibitions, but it differs from art in critical ways which often go unnoticed. Aside from the desire to tell a story, questions of production, resources and representation are central to the way an architecture exhibition comes into the world, yet are rarely acknowledged or discussed. From the outset, it was clear that the essential gesture of The Laboratory of the Future would be ‘change’.”
