Yesterday we had a field trip to Antwerp! It was a busy day with different kinds of photography and a bit of painting
First we went to the FoMu to see two exhibitions on the Congo, a country with which we have strong historical ties. The Congo was colonized by Belgium in the 19th century and became independent in 1960, now 50 years ago. Our colonial history isn't something Belgium is particularly proud off and at school, we hardly learn anything about it. People like to believe that the atrocities that happened there are not our responsibility, but the king's. Leopold II owned it as his private property from 1885 till 1908 and ruled it as an emperor, enslaving a huge portion of the population to work in the rubber or ivory industry. In 1908, Belgium took over the colony probably because the king's rule was getting too damaging for the country's image. I don't really know how bad it was. Whenever I meet Brits, they ask me questions about it. In their history books it's a genocide (in ours it's a foot note). I also don't know if it got any better afterwards. The exhibitions defenitely raised more questions than answers. The first exhibition shows 80 photos from the archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa: the Belgians bringing prosperity and civilization to the primitive peoples of the Congo? It's an impressive selection of images and they're just shown: the background or context in which they were taken is usually unknown. You see a pygmee without hands, a corpse on the side of the road, Belgians being pulled up a mountain, road works, carnaval, men, woman and children in their daily life.
Second one is a registration of what't left now in the Congo: the traces of Belgium. Photos are made by Carl De Keyzer, one of the biggest names in Belgian contemporary photography. What he tried to do was travel through the Congo using a 1950's travel guide, going to places that are marked as interesting for a visitor to the area in the time of the independance. A lot of the places were not accessible: the roads haven't been maintained and were taken back by the jungle or it was just too dangerous because of the civil war in the area which is now going on for more than 10 years. What you see is ruins of churches and colonial houses, decayed pools and other facilities, schools and prisons (but you have to read the signs, they don't look very different). So we get to the questions: what did we do there? Did we bring knowledge and civilization to the Congo? Certainly not education: only 4 congolese had a university degree when the country got independent. How can a country maintain its infrastructure without engineers, organize a legal system without judges and lawyers, hospitals without doctors? Is it any wonder that the only thing that's left, is catholocism? Is the life of the Congolese any better now than before the independance or the colonization?
An impressive collection of photos and highly recommended! I need to read up on this as well.
http://www.fotomuseum.be/tentoonstellingen/
http://www.carldekeyzer.com/
I've taken the photograph in that other colony of ours, Ruanda: it's a grave from unknown people who died during the genocide in 1994
After the exhibition, we wondered through the city to a few other art galleries.
First to see some work of Filip Naudts: not my cup fo tea, but fans of images photoshopped to perfection probably will like it!
http://www.filipnaudts.be/
Then to Zeno X where there was an exhibition Dutch painter Kees Goudzwaard who makes realistic paintings of paper taped together
http://www.keesgoudzwaard.org/
Finally to Gallery Fifty One where they were showing photos from German photographer Christopher Thomas: New York Sleeps.
Quite nice, but maybe my mind was still too far away in Africa to appreciate it.
http://www.christopher-thomas.de/
And I went to the movies too!
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