Come on a free tour of the exhibition Congo Art Works: Popular Painting with Artur Vodolagin, a participant in Garage’s training program for deaf museum guides.
Popular painting emerged in the aftermath of the Congo’s independence from Belgium, in 1960. The exhibition at Garage features works by Congolese popular painters from the collection of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium), as well as a selection of film posters, books, and photography from the colonial period that seeks to challenge the established way of looking at African peoples as “underdeveloped” and therefore excluded from Western modernity or progress. A section in the exhibition, developed by Garage, looks into the art of Chukotka and its colonization by Soviet Russia.
Artur Vodolagin will speak of Congolese popular painting, culture and the traditions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and look at the similarities and differences between the colonization of the Congo and the way Chukotka became part of Soviet Russia.