"How do I create a language in this violent environment?”: Sammy Baloji asks in an artist talk at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, currently hosting the artist’s first major solo exhibition of recent works in the UK (preceded by a smaller show curated by Mark Sealy at Autograph Gallery in 2018). Born in Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo and based in Brussels, Belgium, Baloji has been figuring a language of his own for decades now—using, mutating and going beyond photography to explore the history and legacy of Belgian colonialism in the DRC. His works emerge from the imposition of the colonial French language, of the surveyor’s camera, discourses of productivity and the devastating extraction of timber, copper and uranium from the country. In the CCA galleries, we see the artist playing with and recombining these very languages, tools and materials into new forms—reframing anthropological photographs of Congolese forests, editing Belgian colonial propaganda films, recomposing uranium’s schematic form into abstract prints—in an attempt to find new ways of looking through the cracks.

Baloji begins his talk at CCA, as he does most interviews, by disclosing that he was never taught Congo’s colonial history at school in Lubumbashi. As a result, his first foray into photography was as a researcher, seeking lost pieces of history in photographs. In Mémoire (2004-06), for example, Baloji recovered a set of archival photographs showing Lubumbashi’s copper mine workers and montaged them with photographs he took at the same sites around 80 years later. The choice of photomontage reveals Baloji’s early interest in rupturing the easy glossy form of a traditional photographic image. Since then and with each subsequent project, the artist has only become increasingly concerned with the medium’s limits and its implication in the colonial project of surveying and othering indigenous populations. “How could I, by using the medium [photography], deconstruct its history? It's not possible,” he says now, two decades since making Memoire. In the talk at CCA, he also recounts the experience of making another early work, Allers et retours (2009), large-scale “fetishistic” photographs of the skull of the murdered Congolese chief Lusinga held at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and not being allowed to photograph the skull in any way other than from a handful of prescribed angles. “I was pushed into a forensic way of thinking,” he says.

In the exhibition, we see Baloji’s attempts to loosen the camera’s tendency to fix and transfix. In the first room, we see enlarged medium-format photographs of Congolese forests taken by Belgian surveyors in the 1950s, set within wooden frames carved in the manner of the Belgian Art Nouveau movement. The aesthetic movement was popularly called ‘Style Congo’ at the turn of the 20th century, named for its use of materials and motifs from Belgium’s new colony of Congo. The large frames draw attention away from their contents, which is Baloji’s invitation for us to look at the edges of the photographs and the politics of their framing and display. The title of the series, Still Kongo is a pun, a homonym of ‘Style Congo’ in French and a way, perhaps, for Baloji to make the ‘style’ his own.

A video work, Aequare. The Future that Never Was, first shown at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, continues in this spirit, cutting together archival Belgian propaganda films created by the National Institute for Agronomic Study of the Belgian Congo (INEAC) and footage from its contemporary counterpart, the Institut National de l’Environment et de Recherches Agricoles (INERA). The film alternates between scenes of Congolese labourers during the colonial period and present-day agricultural researchers, 20th-century schematics of plant anatomy and overhead drone shots of deforested land — individual vignettes sequenced to create both a premonition and prediction of global environmental collapse, ‘The Future that Never Was’. Early colonial modes of agriculture and forestry and contemporary research methodologies are placed as part of the same discursive genealogy, in which extraction and production are supreme, be it of goods or knowledge. The voiceover of the closing propaganda clip declares, “Richness has to be created,” an attitude rendered comically hollow in the context of scenes of environmental destruction and collapse. Among Baloji’s preferred ways of describing his process is “mutation”. Such use of archival propaganda can be seen as mutation too, a way of pushing the logic of the source material to such an extreme as to make it deformed.

In the basement galleries of the CCA, the exhibition shifts focus from timber to ores and elements — copper and uranium. Tales of the Copper Cross Garden (2017) is a 43-minute film documenting a present-day Congolese factory, in which we see, in slow detail, workers transforming copper ore, one of the most important historical colonial exports from Congo, into copper wire for the global market today. The materials travel through time, into newer factories, but once again, are ruled by the same logic and models. In the adjacent room, display tables show documents mapping the extraction of uranium from Congo and its use in Cold War machinations in the mid-20th century, alongside critical academic work linking the rise of Abstract Expressionism and CIA-backed American cultural imperialism, as described by art historians including Eva Cockcroft. On the walls are 15 screen prints made by abstracting the scientific schema of uranium into vibrant geometric blocks of colour. In these rooms, Baloji pushes ahead in his investigation, not only of the contents of the colonial archive but how we have inherited its super-structures – from contemporary global capitalism to the neutral aesthetic languages of abstraction and expressionism.

Baloji was not able to travel to the UK before this year due to the limitations of his Congolese passport. His works are composed of (mutated) materials collected from archives such as the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. One of the works in the exhibition hall, a photograph of a group of choir boys holding copper crosses to their chests, is an enlarged reproduction from the former archive and its presence in this exhibition only reminds us that each work here too is similarly indexed, catalogued and restricted. The artist’s presence in the space and his works collated from and exhibited in contested institutions, does not address a resolved history of colonialism but rather its continued structuring of everyday contemporary life, from its copper wires to its art and everything in between. It would perhaps be more interesting to think of the exhibition as not an encompassing survey but a definitionally restricted one, with more work taking place in places beyond the CCA in London.