An infinite woman, black archives in two acts @ Kanal - Centre Pompidou, Bruxelles: Roméo Mivekannin

In 1925, a Mangbetu woman from north-eastern Congo became the viral campaign image of La Croisière Noire, a colonial propaganda expedition across the African continent, sponsored by Citroën. In 1934, construction began on Citroën’s flagship garage in Brussels, marketing the idea of imperial conquest as much as cars. Converted into the museum Kanal, the building reopens with the exhibition An infinite woman, revisiting in two parts how the Mangbetu women functioned as a colonial symbol and how artists of African descent have reclaimed and subverted this imagery until the present day.

 

The first act is an archival investigation that traces how Mangbetus went viral as an "ethnographic fetish" consumed in the West as a pre-internet meme, through magazines, exhibitions and films. The second act shows how artists from the African diaspora – such as Raphaël Barontini, Sonia Barrett, Roméo Mivekannin, Faith Ringgold, Barbara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems – break the algorithm, reappropriating images and archives that generate new forms of knowledge and visibility. 

 

The subtitle of the exhibition refers to cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s essay Venus in Two Acts(2008). Inspired by this influential work about post-slavery society, it celebrates the limitless Black female imagination in resisting the toxicity of colonial imagery. Ultimately, An infinite woman is an exercise in defying gravity: recognising the full weight of the colonial past while refusing to let it continue defining our society today.