Colonial photography and contemporary art: an exhibition in Zurich on images of power

From April 16 to September 6, 2026, the Rietberg Museum Zurich presents Almost a Paradise. Photography of the Colonial Era in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition that brings together twenty international artists called to confront the visual legacy produced during the colonial period. The exhibition offers an investigation into how photographic images continue to influence the construction of identity, memory, and history. Through photographs, textiles, films and sculptures, invited artists reread historical materials and interrogate the narratives derived from them. The project focuses on a phenomenon increasingly present in contemporary global art: the use and reinterpretation of colonial-era photographs by artists from, or belonging to, diasporas in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Oceania. The exhibition addresses questions related to the capacity of images to construct worldviews and the possibility of telling plural stories through artistic practices that intervene on historical archives. The works presented seek to reformulate the relationship between past and present, highlighting how images can be re-read and transformed.

The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections that reflect different ways of confronting colonial photographic heritage. Artists sometimes act as archivists, sometimes as critical interpreters of a colonial gaze sedimented in visual culture. In other cases they take on the role of storytellers or figures who attempt to protect and restore dignity to the people portrayed in historical images. The collection of works highlights the unstable nature of memory and suggests how photographs can generate new interpretations over time.

The first section, titled Mutations, begins with an observation: millions of images have been taken since the invention of photography, but the distribution of that heritage remains uneven. In many contexts outside Europe, there is a lack of photographs documenting the history of local communities, leaving grey areas in the reconstruction of origins and collective memories. The artists featured in this section react to this absence by constructing new visual archives or reworking recovered photographs. Among the authors presented appears Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê (1968-2024), who tracked down in Ho Chi Minh City markets numerous photographs belonging to families forced to flee South Vietnam before the war. In the work Crossing the Farther Shore, these images are woven into large-scale cubic structures that restore a visual dimension to stories of daily life often excluded from the official narrative.

In contrast, Brazilian Rosana Paulino, born in 1967, addresses the lack of visual documentation related to black people in Brazil’s cultural memory. In the monumental work Parede daMemória (Wall of Memory) eleven portraits are repeated seven hundred and fifty times, producing a visual surface that makes clear the historical gap in the representation of Afrodescendant communities. Ivorian artist Cédric Kouamé, born in 1992, focuses on the materiality of photographs. In The Gifted Mold Archive project, he observes how the lack of proper storage conditions in Côte d’Ivoire has caused many images to deteriorate. However, the processes of decomposition become an integral part of the work, generating unexpected compositions and new interpretative possibilities.

The second section of the exhibition, Comparison, examines the relationship between photography and colonization. Indeed, the spread of the camera around the world coincided with the expansion of colonial systems, and many images helped to represent colonized peoples as “other,” fueling stereotypes destined to spread through magazines and postcards. The works assembled in this section analyze such representations and question their visual authority. U.S. artist Wendy Red Star, born in 1981 and a member of the Apsáalooke Nation (USA), makes a series of staged self-portraits that mock historical photographs of Native North Americans in her series Four Seasons. Artificial settings with plastic flowers, synthetic grass, and inflatable animals replace the natural landscapes typical of romantic depictions of natives, highlighting the constructed character of such images.

Senegalese Omar Victor Diop, born in 1980, participates with the project Being There, made in collaboration with Lee Shulman. The artist digitally inserts himself into photographs depicting scenes of everyday life of the white population in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Diop’s presence in social contexts from which a black man would have been excluded due to racial segregation highlights the dynamics of exclusion present in American visual history. Samoan Yuki Kihara, born in 1975, on the other hand, addresses the theme of colonial stereotypes through her video First Impressions: Paul Gauguin. The work takes the form of a satirical talk show in which various participants discuss Tahitian representations made by Paul Gauguin, addressing gender implications and proposing queer readings of the painter’s iconography.

The third section, Care, examines how historical photographs have documented situations of exploitation of bodies and natural resources. The invited artists intervene on such images with gestures intended to protect or restore dignity to the subjects represented. Sasha Huber of Switzerland, born in 1975, works in the series Tailoring Freedom on photographs taken in 1850 by Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz. The images depicted enslaved people photographed nude in an attempt to support the “hierarchy of races” theory. Huber intervened on the photographs with a stapler, piercing the surface of the image and creating a kind of symbolic armor that removed the subjects from the colonialist gaze.

Another case concerns photographs taken in 1882 by U.S. painter and photographer Thomas Eakins, who portrayed a little black girl naked. U.S. artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, born in 1981, intervenes in those images by using her own body as a protective element, creating a symbolic barrier between the viewer and the figure of the little girl. In contrast, South African Zenaéca Singh, born in 2000, works with materials related to family history. Her ancestors were brought from India to the colony of Natal, in present-day South Africa, as indentured laborers on sugar plantations. In her works, the artist incorporates family photographs into sugar glass, producing bright, fragile images that connect private memory to the history of colonial labor.

The final section of the exhibition, titled In the Photo Fantastic, takes off from the gaps in the historical record. The artists adopt a method close to critical fabulation, a concept developed by scholar Saidiya Hartman, according to which the shadowy areas of history can be explored through imaginative practices. From visual and documentary fragments, the artists construct speculative narratives that interweave memory and invention. French artist Raphaël Barontini, born in 1984, presents a work dedicated to Nobosudru, a woman from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her portrait was taken during a trip organized by Citroën to Africa between 1924 and 1925 and became in Europe a symbol of the figure of the “African woman.” Barontini reworks that image by imagining the episode from the point of view of the woman portrayed, transforming her from an object of representation into a narrative subject.

U.S. artist Andrea Chung, born in 1978, confronts the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya, according to which pregnant African women thrown into the sea during the slave trade gave birth to children capable of living underwater. In her works, the artist imagines a museum dedicated to the people of Drexciya, populated by female figures from historical photographs held in the Rietberg Museum’s collection, who are given new visibility.

Indeed, historical photographs from the museum’s collection form a central element of the exhibition. The Rietberg Museum maintains an extensive archive of images taken in Africa and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection includes ethnographic records, photographs taken in colonial settings, and studio portraits produced by African and Asian photographers. Many of the works on display take their start from these very materials, used as a starting point for revealing hidden meanings and interrogating how images helped construct visual memory.

A film made especially for the exhibition presents some of the questions and perspectives that emerged during the curatorial research. The video documents moments from a workshop held at the Rietberg Museum in March 2025, during which artists, researchers and curators worked together on the museum’s photographic collection. The exhibition also engages the public in a reflection on the relationship between photography and personal memory. Visitors are invited to question the role of images in the construction of memories and individual history. A number of Zurich citizens have contributed to the project by sharing their own family photo albums, which are presented as part of an ever-growing visual archive during the opening period of the exhibition. Almost a Paradise is accompanied by a catalog published in German and English by Spector Books, available at the museum bookshop. The publication brings together contributions and in-depth materials related to the themes addressed by the exhibition.

Colonial photography and contemporary art: an exhibition in Zurich on images of power

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