Sammy Baloji
Born 1978 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Lives and works between Lubumbashi, DRC, and Brussels, Belgium.
A photographer, visual artist and filmmaker, Baloji explores the history and memory of the DRC, particularly the cultural and industrial legacy of Katanga and the effects of Belgian colonization. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally.
In France, his work has been exhibited at Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac (2015), Grand Palais (2020) and the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021). His works have been acquired by several public collections, including the CNAP and the Musée de la Musique at the Philharmonie de Paris. In 2026, Baloji is serving as visiting artist-professor at Le Fresnoy—Studio national des arts contemporains. In 2017, he co-founded Twenty Nine Studio & Production with Rosa Spaliviero, a studio dedicated to research, creation and production in the fields of visual arts and cinema.
Since 2005, Sammy Baloji has explored the tensions between traditional society and the colonial modernity that shape urban space in Katanga, examining how colonial systems of classification continue to shape how the region is represented.
In 2017, he traveled with anthropologist Filip De Boeck to retrace the Katanga secession, drawing on both his own family history in the region and the anthropologist’s research conducted between the DRC and Angola.
The exhibition centers on the Hotel Impala in Kolwezi, once owned by the artist’s great‑uncle. Requisitioned twice during conflicts in Katanga, this family property—claimed by history—becomes the point of departure for a broader narrative. Like termite mounds, constantly under construction and marking the landscape, Landscape Lens unfolds as a layered temporal field in which Western archival images meet vernacular archives, the voices of Katangese women and men, and contemporary photographs.
Baloji’s work examines the status of images themselves: how they are used, how people represented themselves, and how we read them today. In Landscape Lens, photographs of environments, landscapes and portraits are set alongside autobiographical narratives and family and European archives—including Paris Match—to challenge dominant narratives about Congolese history and the country’s colonial‑era borders. Baloji thus stages an evocative and subjective encounter between large‑scale history and micro‑histories: those of the artist’s family, those of the actors and victims of the Katanga secession and the two Shaba wars, and contemporary accounts of the DRC confronting the extractivism of global capitalism.
This artistic research project was made possible in part by the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, a fellowship established by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.
Venue
Église des Trinitaires
Exhibition produced by the Rencontres d’Arles.
With support from Flanders State of the Art.
In collaboration with Imane Farès Gallery.
Prints
Processus, Paris
Mounting and framing
Atelier Image Collée, Montreuil
Practical Information
Festival dates: July 6 July – October 4, 2026
Opening Week: 6–12 July, 2026
All-exhibitions pass: €42 (reduced: €33)
www.rencontres-arles.com/en
