“A Kind of Paradise”

Let’s start with the key visual: Wendy Red Star’s Spring – Four Seasons (2006). The artist sits in Apsáalooke dress on a grassy knoll before a limpid lake with a pretty island, mountains rising behind her. But the grass is astroturf, the animals gathering around her are cardboard cutouts, and the landscape is a vinyl backdrop, folds still crisp. The first glimpse of a show promising to interrogate and reframe “colonial-era photography” from today’s perspective posits that paradise is artificial. Yet the title’s quote of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is in turn quoting Alice Walker, is celebratory: a paradise is to be regained from a multitude of new viewpoints.1

The works are presented in four chapters: “Shapeshifters,” “Confrontation,” “Care,” and “In the Photo Fantastic.” The first addresses the imbalance in photographic archives, both personal and institutional, between the authors and subjects of the Majority World, to use Shahidul Alam’s term, and the West. Rosana Paulino’s Parade da Memória (Wall of Memory, 1994/2015), for instance, insists on a place for images of Black Brazilians, by repeating each of eleven portraits several hundred times in small patúas, hand-stitched packets that could fit in the palm of a hand. The artists in “Confrontation” practice pointed critiques of stereotype or misrepresentation, including Red Star and Omar Victor Diop’s photographs made in collaboration with Lee Shulman, in which he inserts himself with apparently brimming self-assuredness into photographs of white, post-war US leisure.

In “Care,” artists re-imagine roles and presence for subjects once consumed by colonial viewers. Among them is the searing Consecration to Mary (2021), miniatures by Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter in which the artist’s own body is inserted into historic photographs of an unnamed, naked Black girl taken by Thomas Eakins in 1882; Baxter shields the girl and loosens the bonds of Eakins’s rapacious gaze. The final chapter is inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, taking omissions and absences as lacunae to be filled creatively. Here Andrea Chung, for example, uses historic photographs to manifest the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya, an underwater kingdom created by the children of pregnant women thrown overboard from slave ships. Her chlorophyl prints on leaves of photographs from the Rietberg collection will be sprayed with a saline solution throughout the exhibition, encrusting and potentially obscuring the portraits. Each of the four chapters also includes a modest display of photographs from the collection selected by curator Nanina Guyer, often outliers that countered the dominant modes of historic recording by foreign photographers.

Dan Hicks’s 2020 book The Brutish Museums, which examines the provenance, presentation, and nascent restitution of the Benin Bronzes, ably demonstrated how a curator’s work might come at the expense of their institution, at least in the short term. The appendix lists six Swiss museums, including Rietberg, as holding artifacts. Museums were established in Europe to display objects and documentation from across empires, but while reparative actions emerging from within and without those institutions often falter today, Rietberg is actively engaged. In 2021, for example, the museum initiated the Benin Initiative Schweiz, a collaboration between eight Swiss museums and Nigerian partners investigating the provenance of the Benin works in their collections.2 Earlier this year, ownership of eleven pieces held at the museum was transferred from the City of Zurich to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This exhibition therefore forms part of a larger institutional reckoning, and though it does not offer restitution of artworks, it shares authorship and authority and concedes that expertise may lie outside the museum.

Rietberg seems earnest in the endeavor to reconfigure what a museum might be, and the institution needs this show as part of the work of remaking its collection—both how the existing collection is regarded and future acquisition of contemporary art. Nonetheless, in the same way as today’s curators can only hold so much responsibility for previous malpractice, must contemporary artists shoulder the institution’s task of correcting historic misrepresentation of the Majority World? All twenty artists grapple with the exhibition’s theme, but displaying their work en masse in this context does it a disservice.

To stake a claim for new archives in the museum is logical, but the specificity of works becomes dulled by their sheer volume, in the same way as the passing references above scarcely mediate complex artworks. Evident care has been taken not to instrumentalize the work, Guyer’s curatorial role is discreet, the artists’ voices are heard directly via audio guide in the galleries, and in the catalog their work is contextualized by external experts. Yet in these surroundings, with the site’s baggage of collection, categorization, and display, several recent works feel pinned and petrified like butterfly specimens. The catalog, in contrast, escapes the framing and allows the work to speak directly; common ground does not overshadow individuality. At Rietberg the paradise of manifold perspectives is not yet regained, but worth striving for.