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Sammy Baloji: When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues

Wex Commissioned Project

A gallery containing a glass and wood display case, an architectural model of an open structure with curved roof supports, and images of a building and building plans.

Explore  Sammy Baloji’s first solo exhibition in the US and consider the entangled legacies shaping today’s world. 

Sammy Baloji’s work across media focuses on the enduring impact of extractive economies—exploiting natural resources, labor, and information for profit—and their effects on land, people, and cultural forms. In When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues, he researches the physical and symbolic remnants of colonial powers and economies in architecture and the decorative arts. Baloji focuses on the complex relationships among Europe, Central Africa, and the Americas. Viewers can explore how these relationships are translated in the design of our everyday surroundings. 
 
Baloji, who is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, collapses the past and present in photographs, films, and sculpture. Key works, including Aequare: The Future That Never Was, Still Kongo, and Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues, invite visitors to look closely at Western architecture, exhibition environments, and ornamental vocabularies, revealing their connections to and dependence on land, labor, and resources from colonial territories, including the Congo. 
 
In addition to Baloji’s individual works, visitors to the exhibition will encounter two new collaborative commissions. Rethreaded Indies, created with art historian Cécil Fromont, draws from the visual language of textiles in early modern Europe and Kongo. It was produced in the Netherlands in the TextielMuseum’s TextielLab using a technologically recreated hand-woven technique. The work responds to the colonial ideologies of 17th and 18th century Old Indies French tapestries and reclaims the history that these earlier weavings misrepresented. Suspension (Debris of History, Matters of Memory), made with Fromont and architect Gloria Cabral specifically for this exhibition, transforms construction and mining waste into a large-scale suspended structure that viewers can experience from multiple vantage points. Contemporary architecture and historical Kingdom of Kongo design systems inform the work. Baloji’s, Cabral’s, and Fromont’s choice to use a zero-waste building method reflects on extraction’s material legacy. It also shows the possibility of transforming it.  

"Baloji attempts to unravel a legacy that is as unwieldy as it is problematic, reweaving a new climate-conscious narrative in the process."

In the press

  • “Fragments and Futures: Sammy Baloji’s Congo and the Afterlife of Empire,” by Nektarianna K. Saliverou, ART AFRICA magazine
  • “Sammy Baloji shows us the frame,” by Maanav Jalan, STIRworld
  • “The Brutal Exploitation Behind the Belgian Art Nouveau,” by Anna Souter, Hyperallergic
  • “Profile: Sammy Baloji” by  Elizabeth Fullerton, Art Monthly
  • “Sammy Baloji,” by Joe Lloyd, studio international
A gallery containing a glass and wood display case, an architectural model of an open structure with curved roof supports, and images of a building and building plans.

Sammy Baloji, Aequare. The Future That Never Was, 2023. Installation for the Venice Architecture Biennial 2023. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. Photo: Minne De Meyer Engelbeen.

A table with an architectural model of an open structure with concentric curved roof supports, and images of a building and building plans.

Sammy Baloji, Aequare. The Future That Never Was, 2023. Installation for the Venice Architecture Biennial 2023. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. Photo © Andrea Avezzù.

Aerial view of a waterfront with small, one-story buildings, a dirt road, and trees

Sammy Baloji, Aequare. The Future That Never Was, 2023 (film still). Video, color, sound; 21:04 mins. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris.

Bronze plate with a pattern of alternating diamonds and horizontal lines separated by strips of fine horizontal lines. The corners feature semicircular stippled patterns.

Sammy Baloji, Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues, 2017—...Copper Negative of Luxury Cloth Kongo Peoples; Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo or Angola, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Century, 2017. Bronze, approx. 28 15/16 x 39 1/2 x 3/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. Photo © Pauwels.

Black-and-white aerial photo of buildings and forest with a brown wood frame that has a carved diamond and square pattern on the bottom edge.

Sammy Baloji, Still Kongo II, 2024. Engraved wooden frame with prints glued on Dibond, approx. 59 1/16 x 59 1/16 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. Photo: Rob Harris.

Brass-colored metal cylinders on a gallery floor contain a variety of green plants.

Sammy Baloji, Untitled, 2018. 41 mortar shells and interior plants, dimensions variable. Installation view of Notre Monde Brûle (Our World is Burning) at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. Photo © Aurélien Mole.

A man with medium brown skin, short black hair, and a mustache leans against a wall with crossed arms. He wears a maroon sweater over a collared shirt.

Sammy Baloji, photo © Kevin Faingnaert.

More about the artists

Sammy Baloji

Since 2005, Sammy Baloji (b. 1978, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)) has traced the entangled histories of the DRC. He delves into the cultural, architectural, and industrial legacies of the mineral-rich Katanga region while scrutinizing the enduring structures of Belgian colonialism. 
 
Baloji lives between Brussels and his hometown and is pursuing a PhD on contemporary Kasala (a ceremonial poem) and Lukasa (a memory board used in ritual performances) as forms of geopolitical knowledge. A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, founder of the Rencontres Picha/Biennale de Lubumbashi, and participant in major biennials worldwide, he is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists working today. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (2025); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2024–25); Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC (2017); and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015–16); among others.

Gloria Cabral

Gloria Cabral (b. 1982, São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian-Paraguayan architect known for her work as a partner at the firm Gabinete de Arquitectura in Asunción, Paraguay, and her commitment to sustainable design and social impact. Cabral, who studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción in San Lorenzo, Paraguay, has received international acclaim for her design approaches, particularly her focus on resource economy and material reuse. She was the project leader for the Teletón Children's Rehabilitation Center in Lambare, Paraguay, which won first prize in the rehabilitation category at the 2010 Pan American Biennial for Architecture. Along with her partner in the firm, she was also awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the Venice Biennale’s 15th International Exhibition REPORTING FROM THE FRONT (2016). She received the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture in 2018.

Cécile Fromont

Cécile Fromont is a French-born (Martinique) American art historian and educator. She specializes in the visual, material, and religious cultures of early modern Africa, Latin America, and Europe (1500–1800). After earning her degrees from Sciences Po Paris and Harvard University, she held professorships at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Yale University, and she is currently a professor at Harvard University. Fromont’s scholarship examines the cross-cultural exchanges in the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic world, particularly related to the historical Kingdom of Kongo. Her research has garnered multiple awards, and she has authored several books, including The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022). 

Program Support

Sammy Baloji: When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Head of Visual Arts Julieta González.

SAMMY BALOJI’S PRESENTATION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY

Ohio State’s Global Arts + Humanities
Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY

FotoFocus

WEXNER CENTER PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY

Greater Columbus Arts Council
The Wexner Family
Ohio Arts Council, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts
CampusParc
The Columbus Foundation
The Ohio State University
Wexner Center Foundation Board
With special thanks to our members
 

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