Colonial photographs rarely remain inert in the hands of contemporary artists. At Zurich’s Museum Rietberg, they have become the starting point for works that probe memory, inheritance, stereotype, and repair.
Nanina Guyer, the museum’s curator of photography, noticed that archival images from the colonial era were surfacing again and again in contemporary practice. That observation became the basis for A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition that brings together around 20 artists selected from a longlist of 50 to 60 names.
The exhibition is organized into four sections. The first considers artists as archivists, with works shaped by biography and the search for missing family histories. One example is the late Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê, who returned to Vietnam looking for photographs lost when he fled as a child. Instead, he found other families’ discarded images in junk shops and transformed them into net-like forms that echo the mosquito nets under which he slept during his escape.
A second section addresses the stereotypes embedded in colonial-era photography. Here, humor and satire become tools of resistance. American artist Wendy Red Star (b. 1981) stages herself in brightly colored dioramas that echo the clichés of “Native American” life found in some natural history museums. Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop (b. 1980), working with British filmmaker Lee Shulman, inserts himself into scenes of white, middle-class American domestic life from the 1950s and 60s, creating a presence that is both calm and unsettling.
The third section turns toward healing. Swiss artist Sasha Huber (b. 1975) revisits photographs of naked enslaved people from American plantations commissioned by Louis Agassiz to support racist theories of hierarchy. By piercing the images with a staple gun and dressing them in reflective armor, she converts violence into a gesture of protection. Zenaéca Singh (b. 1988) takes a different route, setting family photographs in sugar glass to evoke ancestors brought from India to South Africa to labor on sugar plantations.
Andrea Chung (b. 1978) extends the exhibition’s inquiry into critical fabulation through her retelling of Drexciya and her use of faces from the Rietberg collection printed on leaves covered in salt over the course of the exhibition.
Museum Rietberg, which is devoted to the art of Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, holds a substantial archive of colonial-era photography. Guyer deliberately chose not to display the original photographs alongside the contemporary works, preserving the force of the artists’ interventions rather than allowing the archive to dominate the room. The result is an exhibition that treats photography not as a fixed record, but as a site where history can be re-entered, revised, and made newly legible.
