Nanina Guyer, the curator of images at Zurich’s Museum Rietberg, began noticing one thing stunning. The very images she was researching in archives—many from the colonial period—started showing within the work of up to date artists, “which is very strange, considering the millions of photos that are online available in these archives”. The new exhibition she has curated at Museum Rietberg, A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, explores this eager curiosity of artists in images from previous occasions, and the multiplicity of makes use of they’ve put it to.
It was not troublesome for Guyer to seek out examples—this 12 months’s Venice Biennale options many artists who use such images of their work, and a number of other are represented within the Rietberg exhibition, together with Sammy Baloji and Rosana Paulino. A longlist of round 50 to 60 names was centered down to twenty. “I was looking for depth,” Guyer explains, “or multiple layers in the scenes or the stories that these artists were telling through their art.”
Many of the artists additionally broaden the medium, weaving images collectively into three-dimensional sculptures, turning them into movies, or recontextualising the unique photographs. “It turned out that the practice, the process of creating this art was so meaningful,” Guyer says. “The gestures were always such an important part of the whole meaning of the artwork.” For instance, the Swiss artist Sasha Huber takes the pictures of bare enslaved individuals from American plantations commissioned by the naturalist Louis Agassiz to prop up his idea of a hierarchy of races, and reclothes them in shimmering armour created from piercing the pictures with a staple gun. Her fury at injustice is was safety and care.
The exhibition is split into 4 sections. The first seems to be at how artists have acted as archivists. “In this section, all of the artworks have a very strong link to the artists’ biographies,” Guyer says. “They are looking for who they are, finding missing links.” One such artist is the late Dinh Q. Lê, who went again to his native Vietnam to search for household images that had been misplaced when he escaped the nation as a toddler. Instead, in junk outlets he discovered the misplaced images of different households, which he was mosquito-net-like shapes like these he slept below throughout his journey to security.
Sasha Huber’s “reclothed” previously bare portrait Tailoring Freedom—Delia, profile (2023) © 2026, ProLitteris, Zurich; Harvard University, courtesy of the artist
The second part is on confronting the stereotypes propagated by colonial-era images. Several of the artists right here use humour and satire, together with Wendy Red Star who presents herself in vibrant dioramas replete with the clichés of “Native American” life, much like these present in some pure historical past museums. Meanwhile the Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop, in collaboration with the British film-maker Lee Shulman, drops himself into on a regular basis scenes from white, middle-class American households from the Fifties and 60s, an at-ease however incongruous presence.
The therapeutic energy of artwork is the main focus of the third part. Here artists handle the parallel exploitation of physique and land that occurred below the colonial system, counteracting the historic photographs with “radical empathy”. As effectively as Sasha Huber, this part contains the artist Zenaéca Singh, whose ancestors had been delivered to South Africa from India to work on sugar plantations. She hints at this historical past by setting her household images in sugar glass, the photographs blurred and obscured by the murky orange panes.
Museum Rietberg is dedicated to the artwork of Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, and has a big archive of colonial-era images in its collections. Some of the artists within the exhibition have used this archive of their work, however Guyer was deliberate in not displaying the originals alongside as that may be “undermine the intent of the artists. They want to repair or erase these photos.”
The present ends in a bit referred to as In the Photo Fantastic, impressed by the 2022 exhibition In the Black Fantastic at London’s Hayward Gallery. Here artists use “critical fabulation” to fill in gaps of historical past, to create tales not informed usually sufficient. They embrace Andrea Chung, who retells the story of Drexciya, a legendary land populated by individuals who had been thrown from the slave ships throughout the Middle Passage. Faces from the Rietberg assortment are printed on to leaves, which can be step by step coated in salt throughout the course of the exhibition.
Why does Guyer assume so many artists are utilizing archival images of their work? “I think there are pragmatic reasons—archives have become more and more easily available, especially digital ones. And then there is the reason that photography is such a wonderful tool. It collapses time, it allows you to reach to a time long gone and a place no longer existing. And with artistic engagement you can bring those stories back from the time gone to now, because all of them are still ongoing.”
• A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, till 6 September