Zurich Exhibition Reframes Colonial-Era Photography Through Contemporary Art
At Museum Rietberg in Zurich, a new group exhibition is asking viewers to look again at photographs long treated as historical evidence. A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, on view through September 6, brings together 20 artists whose work examines how colonial images shaped memory, authority, and erasure — and how contemporary art can unsettle those inherited narratives.
The exhibition begins from a simple but unsettling premise: photographs do not merely record the world. They also organize it, selecting what is visible and what is left out. That tension runs through the show, which gathers artists from the diasporas of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Oceania. Their works engage colonial-era photography and related visual material through satire, redaction, recontextualization, and speculative reconstruction.
The exhibition is organized into four thematic sections. “Shapeshifters” considers how unequal access to cameras and preservation systems stripped historical photographs of context. Works by Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino (b. 1967), Vietnamese-French artist Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2020), and Ivorian artist Cédric Kouamé make those absences visible, restoring historical pressure to images that might otherwise read as fixed documents.
“Confrontation” takes aim at the stereotypes circulated through early photographs of colonized peoples. Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop (b. 1980), New Zealand artist Yuki Kihara (b. 1975), and South African-Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo (b. 1986), among others, use irony and recontextualization to reclaim subjectivity from the colonial frame. In “Care,” artists including Swiss artist Sasha Huber (b. 1975), American artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter (b. 1987), and Indian artist Zenaéca Singh work through shielding, layering, and partial concealment to resist the exploitative gaze of the camera.
The final section, “In the Photo Fantastic,” turns absence into a generative space. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, artists such as French-Beninese artist Raphaël Barontini (b. 1984), Jamaican-American artist Andrea Chung (b. 1978), and Brazilian artist Aline Motta (b. 1974) imagine what the archive cannot fully supply.
Museum Rietberg’s own nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs from Asia and Africa are interwoven throughout the exhibition, grounding the contemporary works in the museum’s collection. The project also extends beyond the galleries through Do you remember?, which invited Zurich residents to share personal photo albums and stories, as well as public programming that includes a conversation on May 9 and a cyanotype workshop on July 4.
In a moment when museums are under growing pressure to confront the politics of their collections, A Kind of Paradise offers a careful model: not to preserve colonial photographs as inert relics, but to read them against the grain, where memory, violence, and possibility remain in tension.
