Sammy Baloji is a prodigiously talented young photographer whose work shines a powerful spotlight on contemporary Congolese reality. Having studied literature and human sciences at Lubumbashi University, he was drawn to photography and video as expressive mediums for representing the environment of Katanga, a locus for colonial and post-colonial exploitation of its wealth of minerals essential for Western technologies. Baloji’s remarkable series entitled Memory (2006) is a sequence of collaged images combining subtle coloured panoramas of today’s landscape – a wasteland of industrial ruins and vast slag heaps – with black-and-white archival images of the Congolese workers whose labour produced such great wealth for the colonial powers. These moving depictions of environmental destruction and human suffering – the first major photographic works to emerge from Katanga Province – won an award at the 2007 Bamako Photographic Biennale and are being exhibited internationally. Infused with provocative attention to detail and a depth of intellectual content, Baloji’s work interrogates abuse of power and its legacy, revealing the devastating impact that exploitative cultures have on both society and the environment. It calls for greater awareness of the local consequences of ‘development’ and highlights the rights of local people. In collaboration with Africa’s young choreographers, Baloji creates videos that investigate the body, and, despite restrictions on photographing public sites, he produces images of the Congo’s urban architecture. His work is raising social consciousness and stimulating artistic development in the Katanga region.
Sammy Baloji is awarded for his highly original inscription of the painful history of human and environmental exploitation into the present-day landscape, for bringing Congo’s current realities to an international platform, for his important contribution to the memory of the Congo providing a new reading of the present, and for his challenging demonstration that development can only be realised after duly taking into account the traumas of the past.
Sammy Baloji
Photo by Sammy Baloji from the series Memory 2006
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From the Series Avenida Vladimir Lenine 2007 Av Vlad Lenine by Sammy Baloji
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Sammy Baloji was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet 2009
http://www.prixpictet.com
and his work is exhibited in
the Passage du Retz in Paris
website of Sammy Baloji
www.photosapiens.com
Biography online
