Friday 9 October, 20:00
Artist Talk Younes Baba-Ali
Followed by a conversation with Sandrine Colard (Lubumbashi Biennale), Pascal Nicolas (Het Betere Boek, Willemsfonds) and Danielle van Zuijlen (Kunsthal Gent)
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Friday 9 October, 18:00
Opening of the exhibition at Liberas, Kramersplein 23, 9000 Ghent — PLEASE MAKE YOUR RESERVATION FOR THE OPENING AT LIBERAS SEPARATELY
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Younes Baba-Ali is currently part of the Development Programme at Kunsthal Gent. His work period overlaps with the exhibition Arrival/Departure at Liberas in Ghent, as part of the festival Het Betere Boek 2020: Unthink Africa (04÷10 to 29/10). For this exhibition, initiator Pascal Nicolas and the artist are bringing the three works that Younes Baba Ali made for the 2019 Lubumbashi Biennale from Congo to Ghent, despite international restrictions in times of corona. One work from the exhibition, the installation Arrival/Departure (from which the exhibition derives its title), will be shown in Kunsthal Gent.
On Friday 9 October, Pascal Nicolas, but also curator Sandrine Colard (Lubumbashi Biennale 2019) will join us in Kunsthal Gent for an artist talk by Younes Baba Ali and a conversation about his work.
Arrival/Departure at Kunsthal Gent, 9 — 29 October 2020
The installation Arrival/Departure consists of a video, fake Belgian passport covers and a sales booth. In Lubumbashi, Baba-Ali recreated Belgian passport covers, which he distributed to a group of Congolese artists. In addition to the fictitious passports and a vending booth from which the covers were sold, a video is part of the installation. In this video, the Congolese artists testify to their experiences of travelling and using their own Congolese passports, disguised behind a Belgian façade. The passport covers present an ideal vehicle for questioning higher-order questions of state security, individual freedom, mobility, and personal and national identity, revealing not only national borders, but also borders between social and interpersonal systems of all kinds.
Arrival/Departure at Liberas/Het Betere Boek, 9 — 29 October 2020
The other 2 works made by Baba Ali for the Lubumbashi Bienale can be seen at Liberas, together with an artistic reflection on their Congo archive. Liberas owns a very extensive collection of photographs on Congo, of both fauna and flora, daily life, the colonial period, independence and so on from the then propaganda service InforCongo. The exhibition is a reflection on the (im)possibilities of (international) exchange; it concentrates on departure and arrival and how this is perceived differently from various perspectives.
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Younes Baba-Ali - check bio here
Sandrine Colard is Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Newark (USA) and an independent curator. She was the curator of Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age (Wiels, Brussels, 2019) ; The Way She Looks : A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture. Photographs from The Walther Collection (Ryerson Image Center, Toronto, 2019). She was also the curator of the 6th Biennale de Lubumbashi, Future Genealogies : Tales from the Equatorial Line (Lubumbashi, DRC, 2019). Her most recent exhibition project, Congoville, opened at the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, in May 2020. Based on research conducted in Belgium, Kinshasa and Lubumbashi (DRC), her current book project examines the history of photography in the colonial Congo (1885−1960).
Pascal Nicolas is a recognized psychologist and coach. He supported diverse international artists and managed intercultural projects in their strategic development. Currently he also coaches the literary festival Het Betere Boek.
