National Museum of Natural History Unearthed

Reflections on The Beautiful Time

Erin Haney, Research Associate, National Museum of African Art/ Lecturer, George Washington University

At NMNH, don’t miss Sammy Baloji’s exhibition The Beautiful Time, on view until January 7, 2013. The Beautiful Time splices together two visual tracks, and sets off a powerful and haunting study in reverberation—cutting through space and across time. 

 

In this image, an archival photograph of a prisoner is placed at the center of the current industrial wasteland. The chain around the man's neck recalls the roping together of prisoners by colonial officers to prevent their escape. Untitled, Sammy Baloji, 2006, Digital C print.

 

Baloji’s photomontages illuminate monumental stories in an old mining center in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Amid slices of present-day landscape, spectral people interfere: migrant mine workers, Belgian families, Congolese officials. Within the panorama of photographic past and presences, Baloji summons the multiple relationships between workers and colonists, and and the conditions of work in the colonial era. He literally dredges up images, lost and found, in Katanga. 

 

After seizing power in 1965, President Mobutu Sese Seko often visited industrial sites, attempting to promote what was described as good management and hard work. Such events were the subject of wide coverage by the state-controlled media. This montage is composed of individuals from several archival photograph including Mobutu, television crews, and soldiers. Though it seems to depict Mobutu visiting a mine, Baloji is not re-creating a specific historical event, but rather evoking the era. Sammy Baloji.

The Beautiful Time is a set of projects to mark the gaping holes between moments in time. Photomontage offers the vivid mixing—of events and people freely, perhaps in tune with our own human senses memory and recall. President Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of what was then known as Zaire, appears to take a tour of the ruins.  Surveyors chart the lost future of the mining works, and military officials allude to the ties between lucrative enterprise and state security.

 

Baloji appropriated archival images, lifted from old photographs and glass plates that once circulated in Katanga. Placed according to creative demands and logics, the artist crafted an entirely new set of heart-grabbing fictional moments. While his camera pans across old warehouses and smelters, registering the sun’s path, the VIPs are ghosts that we can see as clear as day. 

 

In the Belgian Congo, Europeans were expected to dress formally for all official occasions, especially if they were to be seen by local inhabitants. Their attire was a sign of belonging to the elite, but was also justified as a means of leading by example. The placement of individuals atop a slag heap in this image evokes the grand life the Europeans were able to enjoy as a result of the mining economy below. Sammy Baloji.

 

Baloji’s magic links a generation of criticism leveled at the older generation, with sidelong observation of the institutions and governments which have failed and jeopardized their citizens. Mining wealth enriched Europeans and Congolese unequally. Working for the company that itself was a prime generator of capital was, to be sure, an ambivalent situation, well-paid and tightly controlled. So, in the face of that well-remembered golden age and its aftermath, ‘Beautiful Time’ meditates on those ambivalent absences. 

The reverb effect, captured by Baloji and other young activists and artists working in Africa, drives out those missing things. Using lost archives and troves of photographs cinematically, they tackle how the past and present collide. The stories matter, critically. Those old pictures belong neither wholly to the Congo nor to Belgium, to individuals or a single community. Lubumbashi-born Baloji plays them back into view, to electrifying, magnifying playback effect. 

The Beautiful Time: Photography by Sammy Baloji

The Beautiful Time opened on January 7^th, in the Focus Gallery of the permanent exhibit, African Voices.  It will be on view through 2012.

The archival photographs in this montage were probably taken in the early twentieth century. Porters, carrying loadsof firewood, are dressed in prioson uniforms and are attached to one another by rope. Baloji has placed the prisoners along the tracks of a now useless railway, signaling a loss of potential. Untitled, Sammy Baloji, 2006, Digital C print.

I first saw the Baloji exhibition, which was organized by the Museum for African Art, when it opened in New York over a year ago.  I was immediately struck by the beauty and the visual power of the work and by the stories Baloji’s works tell of history and memory, home and landscape, and work and wealth in the Congo.  These are all important themes in Africa today and they are themes of so many of the stories from around the continent that are told in African Voices.  I was delighted that we were able to bring the exhibit here to NMNH.

Baloji’s haunting photographs evoke the memory of the generations of Congolese whose labor built the vibrant copper mining industry—now lost—in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Throughout the first half of the twentieth century these mines were the second largest producers of copper in the world.

Baloji’s photographic collages juxtapose black and white archival photographs of Congolese mine workers against the background of color photographs of panoramic landscapes of the contemporary ruins of factories and copper mines.  Although the early workers—who wear prison garb and in chains in some of these photographs—came to the mines as forced labor for the colonial state, they had within a few decades become highly skilled and valued mine workers.  Their labor created Congo’s modern industrial era and in his artwork, Baloji’s celebrates these mine workers’ essential role in Congo’s prosperity.  At the same time that they celebrate this history, these photographs convey the dramatic power of tragedy—the loss of the hard earned prosperity that has been squandered over the past decades through mismanagement and corruption.

Baloji is part of a generation of young Congolese who were born nearly two decades after the end of the colonial era in 1960.  His work aims to understand and reconnect for contemporary Congolese and for us two strikingly different time periods –the colonial and the post colonial era.  His photographs give voice to those forgotten African workers who built Congo’s mining industry in the early part of the 20^th century, and they cry out against the recent deindustrialization in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa.

Last year, I had the opportunity to meet Sammy and his colleague Patrick Mudekereza, in Brussels. Patrick is a writer and a long time artistic collaborator with Baloji in the Congo.  I asked Patrick to share his thoughts on these photographs and we have included his commentary in the exhibit.  Asked about the meaning of the phrase, The Beautiful Time, Patrick explained, “Sammy’s photographs are not nostalgic celebrations of The Beautiful Time, a phrase we often hear the older generation use when referring to the golden age of the colonial mining industry.  Rather, Sammy’s pictures speak to today and imply a failure by our leaders to provide our people with a means to create a more beautiful time than before.”

Mary Jo Arnoldi, Curator, African ethnology and arts, Department of Anthropology, NMNH