| Sammy Baloji, Kibawa's Little Boy, 2025 Photo credits: Marijke T Kindt |
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In May this year, we’ve installed two new sculptures by Sammy Baloji that will be permanently on view. A new art and science route has opened in Leuven, called And So, Change Comes in Waves. Eight artworks and eight poems can be found along a route that criss-crosses the whole of Leuven. Sammy's new work, Kibawa's Little Boy, is on display in Arenberg Park and shows us a splited, human-sized uranium crystal which links historical exploitation with contemporary geopolitics. In the early 20th century, uranium was mined in Congo with the cooperation of the Belgian authorities, including the uranium used for the Little Boy atomic bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. By carving out the shape of a Mayombe figure in the sculpture – one brought to Belgium by missionaries from Brussels – Sammy draws attention to parallels with the expropriation of cultural heritage. The title Kibawa refers to a powerful earth spirit of the Congolese Luba people. Her presence floats like a ghost over history. Kibawa is depicted with a piece of quartz on her head, and cults of possession are ascribed to her. |
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Another new artwork, Le sculpteur de sanza n’y mangea que des écorces, tandis que le joueur de sanza y mangea une femme, is now on view in the Philharmonie in Paris. Following on the collection of Sanzas preserved at the Cité de la Musique / Philharmonie de Paris, Sammy designed a sculpture for the museum's permanent collection. This sculpture places the reserve, a space that is usually invisible to visitors but nevertheless central to the functioning of the institution, at the heart of the exhibition space. With this work, he questions the museum system and the treatment of objects. Since the installation of the new permanent work, an already existing work by Sammy has been installed in the entrance hall of the Philharmonie, namely Johari Brass Bands (2020). Visitors will now be able to discover two artworks by Sammy during a trip to Paris.
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Preview of one artwork from the Herbariums series, 2025
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In 2024, an artwork called Série I A, Bijebié: Cambretum Camporum, Herbarium Horti Botanici Bruxellensis, was created for the solo exhibition by Sammy in CCA Goldsmiths, London. Now, one year later we’ve decided to continue the series and create 8 more herbarium works in collaboration with artist Beau Disundi. The newly made production will be on view for the first time in Berlin in the context of a project by Filipa César, Mû Mbana, Anna Jaeger, Hajra Haider and Billy Fowo. The project is called DESACTA. COUNTER-SPELLS TO UNRAVEL 140 YEARS OF THE BERLIN CONFERENCE and works as a laboratory for counter-spells against committed injustices, and an inquiry into the ideology and roots of the West’s ongoing effort to desacralize Earth and its contents in pursuit of a treacherous extractivism and elemental displacement. The project anchors itself in two locations: Berlin, Germany, the seat of power and the site of the Conference, and Malafo, Guinea-Bissau, powered by the force of resistance against European colonialism. The manifestation of the project is envisioned in five acts: One of them is the exhibition, which will take place at SAVVY from 14/11/2025, – 12/01/2026 and invites creative practitioners – artists, musicians, healers, and environmentalists – to display a series of offerings stemming from their (art) work and research responding to this proposed invocation. In this manner, the exhibition is staged as an altar with an offering of plants, minerals, and archives (as film, sound, print material, resource object, etc). This altar will act as the site of departure and vessel to perform counter-rituals, or Sublimations/ Re-enchantments. It is in this exhibition that the Herbarium series will be shown for the first time.
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Sammy Baloji and Cécile Fromont, Rethreaded Indies, 2025 Photo credits: Ben Yau |
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Framer Framed just opened their newest exhibition, called Shapeshifters: On Wounds, Wonders and Transformation. This group exhibition brings together works by al-yené, Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic, Georges Senga, Kader Attia, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leah Zhang, Pei-Hsuan Wang, Sammy Baloji & Cécile Fromont, Mirelle van Tulder and Anna Safiatou Touré. Together, their practices examine how colonialism has shaped the ways museums, archives and other institutions of knowledge are perceived and understood, revealing the (im)material scars imposed by systemic violence. For this exhibition, Sammy collaborated with Cécile Fromont to create a new textile work entitled Rethreaded Indies. It is a tapestry that draws from the visual language of textile arts in early modern Europe and Kongo, and from the archive documenting the role and standing of the central African kingdom in the Atlantic world. It is a spirited response to the colonial ideologies of the 17th and 18th century French Old Indies series with a scrupulously documented set of historical images centering Africa and Africans and putting to work an eloquent formal mix of Kongo and European designs. Produced in the Netherlands in the TextielMuseum’s TextielLab in the Spring of 2025 using a technologically recreated Gobelins technique, the Rethreaded Indies is a powerful reclaiming of the history presented from a strongly biased perspective in the Old Indies. The tapestry was produced at the Textiellab in Tilburg and we worked in close collaboration with textile designer Silvana de Bari for the design of the tapestry itself.
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Photo credits: Verberke Foundation |
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Now that summer is well and truly behind us, a new series of exhibitions is beginning to embrace autumn and winter. On 16 November, a new winter exhibition will open at the Verbeke Foundation. Three artworks by Sammy, which were recently added to the Verbeke Foundation's collection, will be on display here. One of these works is the artwork Kombwelo 504 created for the Abu Dhabi Biennale 2024. It has not been exhibited anywhere else since then and will now be given a permanent place in the Verbeke Foundation. The other two works are the series ...and to those North Sea waves whispering sunken stories (I & II) from 2021. The first solo exhibition in Greece by Sammy baloji, at EMΣΤ entitled Echoes of History, Shadows of Progress has been prolonged till February 2026. It brings together installations, video works, and photographic series from the past twelve years of Sammy Baloji’s practice, including a new commission: The Meandering (2025), is a site-specific installation that builds on Baloji’s research into the exchanges between the Kingdom of Kongo (1390-1914) and Europe, as well as the colonial European systems of classification and knowledge production that followed.
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Installation view, Sammy Baloji, Echoes of History, Shadows of Progress, EMST, 2025 Photo credits: Paris Tavitian |
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Apart from the new productions, we invite you also to see the previous works of Sammy that are already on the view now: - MACAAL Marrakech, Kasala. The Slaughterhouse of Dreams of the First Human, Bende’s Error until 31/12/2025
- El Kazma, Tunis, La Boîte x Gabes Cinéma Fin, Aequare. The Future that Never Was, from 13/11/2025 - 08/01/2025
- Photo KTM, Nepal, Lalitpur, Mémoire, 14/11/2025 - 14/12/2025
- Villa Empain, Brussels, Of the Moon and Velvet, 25/09/2025 - 01/03/2026
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And last but not least if you happen to be in Paris, you should definetely pass by Galerie Imane Fares, for recently opened exhibition co-curated by Sammy Baloji: Toxic Lands, Living Narratives that extends the research developed during recent editions of the Lubumbashi Biennale, organized by the Picha association in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The exhibition brings together artists whose works question colonial legacies and their lasting impact on bodies, territories, and collective imaginaries. With the artists: Nilla Banguna, Sixte Kakinda, Godelive Kasangati Kabena, Lafleur & Bogaert, Mickaël-Sltan Mbanza, and Pendezâ Mulamba. |
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Lafleur & Bogaert, J’aime RD Congo, 2024. Courtesy de l'artiste. |
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More news from Sammy Baloji’s art studio: new productions and openings during upcoming months! Have a great autumn! |
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