Congo Art Works: Popular Painting

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Our Congo playlist opens with a track by rapper Baloji&mdash;a cousin of one of the Congo Art Works curators Sammy Baloji&mdash;and cult ethno punk anarchist band Konono №1.
What follows is a compilation of popular Congolese music that has got people dancing across Africa: Papa Wemba, brought to the West by Peter Gabriel; the great Franco, whose portrait with a red guitar is featured in the exhibition; and even Vampire Weekend&mdash;an American band heavily influenced by African music. This is a garden where each path could lead to new discoveries and hours of dancing.
<iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/323977991%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-yKT8a&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true" width="100%" height="450" frameborder="no" scrolling="no"></iframe>

A Playlist for Congo Art Works: Popular Painting

This summer Garage examines the phenomenon of popular art in two very different places, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chukotka. Garage curator Valentin Diaconov describes how the exhibition came about.
Life is tough on the little man. Climb a tree for a leaf&mdash;he meets a poisonous snake. The lion haunts him on the ground, and the crocodile lies in wait in the water. Congolese inakale are traditional proverbs in the form of drawings or paintings. The term can be translated as &ldquo;tough luck&rdquo;&mdash;something that the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has seen a lot of in the twentieth century.
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_HO.2013.57.1474_PR3245325O_01.jpg" alt="" width="1006" height="640" />
Edisak Inakale. Bunia, Ituri, DRC, 1992 Oil on canvas Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren 
First, Congolese workers were exploited by Belgian colonial officials focused on the production of rubber. Towards the middle of the century, after decades of discrimination and racism, Belgium slightly relaxed the regime. Independence was proclaimed in 1960, but was soon followed by the murder of the first Prime Minister of the DRC Patrice Lumumba and the drift towards totalitarianism under Joseph-D&eacute;sir&eacute; Mobutu. The overthrow of Mobutu in 1996 sparked a civil war. Congolese popular painting, which developed as these events were unfolding, was first noticed by ethnographers working in the country. One of them, Africanist Bogumil Jewsiewicki, gathered a collection of 2,000 popular paintings dating back as far as the late 1960s and transferred it to the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Brussels in 2013. Jewsiewicki&rsquo;s collection served as the starting point for the exhibition Congo Art Works: Popular Painting, created by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji and anthropologist Bambi Ceuppens. Looking for authentic art that meant something for the people of the DRC, and was not merely exotic souvenirs for European collectors, they focused on examples of free creative expression in works produced before and after independence, reaffirming the right of Congolese people to be modern.&nbsp;
<h2>Chukotka Carvings</h2>
Although Russia is hardly ever referred to as a colonial empire, its history is awash with annexations. The Russian anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan (1865&ndash;1936) compared the Cossacks who fought in Siberia on behalf of the Russian crown to the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico. The colonization of new territories did not stop after the Revolution: Chukotka became Russian in the 1920s, and in the 1930s the Soviet State launched a major campaign against the American presence in the region, which included forced industrialization, collectivization, and political repression. Chukotka&rsquo;s earliest walrus ivory carvings were made as souvenirs for Russian and American sailors.
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_DS004551.jpg" alt="" width="1006" height="671" />
Courtesy of The Sergiev Posad State History and Art Museum-Reserve
Carvings produced during the Soviet era reflected the ideology brought in from Moscow. A common motifs of that time is the juxtaposition of old and new Chukotka: one side of the tusk shows the great achievements of civilization, for which the people of Chukotka should thank the new regime, while the other depicts traditional rites, which had lost their meaning in the world of apartments, collective farms, and airplanes. This appendix to the exhibition of Congolese popular painting shows how folk art from Chukotka evolved into a form that rarely reflected the everyday life of the local population. The Russian version of &ldquo;popular art&rdquo; is quite different to the Congolese. This exhibition was prepared in collaboration with four Russian museums: the Sergiev Posad State History and Art Museum and Reserve, the State Museum of Oriental Art, the State Historical Museum, and the Museum of Applied and Folk Art.
Valentin Diaconov, Garage curator
<hr />
The material was first published in Garage Gazette 2017 issue.
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Garage Curator Valentin Dyakonov on Congo Art Works: Popular Painting

Africanist Bogumil Jewsiewicki spent many years working in Congo and amassed a huge collection of popular paintings, which was later acquired by the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. This is an edited version of his text from the catalogue Congo Art Works: Popular Painting (Brussels: Racine, 2016), published to mark the exhibition of the same name.
It should be easily apparent to readers that what I am doing here is paraphrasing Denis Diderot, Ren&eacute; Magritte, and Michel Foucault. I trust that the subsequent text will persuade them that this is not a pointless exercise in erudition. Magritte&rsquo;s The Treachery of Images reveals the glaringly apparent fact that the image of a pipe is not a pipe at all, while Diderot makes it clear that a story needs someone to listen to it in order for it to exist. A written story is not strictly speaking a story, a figurative representation on a piece of fabric is not strictly speaking a painting unless there is a specific venue for it to be put on display, an agent to judge how aesthetically successful it is, a specific market. Various types of media for figurative representations are not a collection if there is no collector whose aim is for it to become a personal or collective asset, to stand out in some way.
My scholarly digression here is intended to show that my efforts to create a visual whole could at times be described as an archive, a library, or an image library, but not a collection. As far as I am concerned, the meaning of the object, let us define it as a painting or canvas, changes the more I learn about who produced it, for whom and for what purpose it was produced, put into circulation, exhibition and, sometimes, rejected.
It was in 1968 that I bought the first painting, a leopard with a porcupine in its mouth painted on an unframed piece of cardboard. I was then teaching at the Mbandaka Pedagogical Institute, having recently arrived in Congo from Poland. I was giving lessons to future teachers on the subject of European history. In the wake of this first painting, which was hanging on the wall of a bar I entered to enjoy a beer, I purchased several works by a painter of street scenes and slices of local life. He expressed himself only through the medium of his paintings and even with the help of my students I never managed to get him to say a single word about the paintings I bought. I thought he was a bit simple-minded, for one thing because of the unusual images he dared to use, such as a man with his trousers around his ankles defecating in the street. Unfamiliar as I was with certain aspects of Congolese culture I was shocked by the physiological act itself rather than an adult male showing his naked buttocks.
Congolese society regards a painting as a temporary property both from a tangible and representational perspective, as it has to have some bearing on people&rsquo;s day-to-day concerns. Placed in the living room of a dwelling or a bar, the painting&rsquo;s visibility is required to spark off a conversation, encourage an exchange of personal memories flowing into social memory. Accessibility, also in terms of its price, is the key to its success, as it is not considered a status symbol but the sign of the presence of a shared past or a concern with the present. This meant that different homes would have lots of similar paintings. In order to be able to sell a painting for a low price, the painter had to skimp on the materials and work quickly, to produce a number of paintings. However, painters would not make copies in the strict sense of the term, as they were repainting the same theme from memory, tailoring the works to the customer&rsquo;s requirements, if need be, by adding details or an inscription.
In the 1970s and 1980s, popular painting played a key role in forging Congolese popular culture as a national culture. However, unlike Congolese music, which has gradually gone global, the painting community&rsquo;s output has largely remained local.
Bogumil Jewsiewicki
<hr />
The material was first published in Garage Gazette 2017 issue.
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This is not a Collection by Bogumil Jewsiewicki

Artist Sammy Baloji&rsquo;s <a href="/en/research/field-research">research</a> explores the Belgian Congo's transition to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the role of Patrice Lumumba in the country's independence, and the subsequent dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
Baloji is examining the role the Cold War played in Congo, although his research is not limited to politics. His main interest is Congo&rsquo;s culture and way of life during the period of Zairianization, the official state ideology of the Mobutu regime.
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_HO.2013.57.1715_PRO_2524501.jpg" alt="" width="1006" height="642" /> Ch&eacute;ri Ch&eacute;rin (b. 1955) Flight of Mobutu. Kinshasa, DRC. Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga, DRC, 2004 Oil on canvas Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren 
Taking place in Brussels, Kinshasa, Lisbon, and Moscow, Baloji&rsquo;s research includes interviews with international specialists such as a Congolese historian and writer Kivilu Sabakinu, Belgian historian and cultural anthropologist Jean Omasombo, and Russian filmmaker and Soviet cinema expert Alexander Markov, as well as a visit to the Portuguese&nbsp;National Archive of Torre do Tombo. In his project Baloji tracks a historical parallel between the 1970s Zairianization movement &mdash;which promoted the return to African place and family names&mdash;and contemporaneous political developments in Eastern Europe. In particular, the artist is making comparisons between cultural and agrarian revolutions, and the imposition of an authoritarian, one-party regime in both Eastern Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Baloji also aims to examine the influence of communism on Congolese culture and analyze the development of local artistic practices during the three-decade period of Mobutu's regime.
Started in July 2016, the research project will last for two years and result in an artist&rsquo;s book that will incorporate photography, historical video footage, news articles, excerpts from political speeches (c. 1920&ndash;1990), and other archival materials.
<img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_SammyBalojiportraitROLEX_TOMASBE534737RTELSEN.jpg" alt="" width="792" height="528" /> Sammy Baloji &copy; Rolex/Tomas Bertelsen 
Sammy Baloji was born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. He lives and works between Lubumbashi and Brussels. In his practice he uses photography, film, montage, and archives to confront the complex relationship between his native country&rsquo;s colonial past and its political present.

Sammy Baloji: The Influence of the Cold War in Congo

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A Playlist for Congo Art Works: Popular Painting

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