Museum Rietberg’s A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art is Balm for the Scars of European Conquest

A new group exhibition in Zurich surveys the state of global photographic heritage through the work of twenty renowned artists.

“There is something predatory in the act of taking a picture,” writes Susan Sontag in her pivotal 1977 volume, On Photography. “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves… it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”

Colonialism operates in a similar manner. It’s an act of mythmaking — objectification of a land or its people, not merely through infiltration but the assertion of a single story, a flattened image.

By this token, it’s unsurprising that for European colonizers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the most potent instruments of mythmaking was the camera.

A new group exhibition entitled A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, currently on view at Museum Rietberg in Zurich, seeks to pierce this veil of myth. The exhibition challenges audiences to excavate layers of meaning behind these visual documents to reveal the myriad stories muted by a dominant colonial narrative.

“Photography shapes memory by fixing what is seen and what is silenced,” says Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, one of twenty artists featured in the exhibition collectively representing the diasporas of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Oceania. “When images are missing, absence becomes evidence of erasure, violence, and control, demanding that history be reconstructed through fragments, scars, critical imagination, and active engagement rather than passive remembrance.”

A Kind of Paradise highlights renowned artists who have undertaken this reconstructive work in their practice. By engaging with colonial-era photography and other visual material through oblique and incisive methods, these artists illuminate previously obscured narratives, and in doing so, offer a kind of healing from the deep wounds of colonialism.

The exhibition comprises four thematic sections, each corresponding to a different approach to elevating these multivalent stories.

The first, “Shapeshifters,” examines how a historical disparity in access to photography equipment and preservation systems across cultures has erased context from existing photographs. Works by Paulino, Dinh Q. Lê, Cédric Kouamé make this void unignorable, and offer the missing piece by filling it with historical perspective or focusing the viewer’s attention to close the gap.

“Confrontation” takes aim at the mythologies perpetuated through the dissemination of early photos depicting people from colonized lands. In this section, artists Wendy Red Star, Omar Victor Diop, Yuki Kihara, Frida Orupabo, and Dimakatso Mathopa mine the tropes and cliches borne of these images, and through satire and recontextualization, offer works that center their own empowerment and subjectivity.

Sasha Huber, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, and Zenaéca Singh treat the subjects of these photographs as vectors for compassion in the exhibition’s third section, “Care.” Their pieces challenge entrenched narratives of injustice through redaction and superimposition, shielding subjects from the exploitative gaze of the camera’s lens. Works by Daniel Boyd, Tuli Mekondjo, Sammy Baloji, David Shongo, Wendy Red Star, and Rosana Paulino complete the collection.

As a counterpoint to the first section, “In the Photo Fantastic” interprets missing portions in the historical record — or photographs themselves — not as a gap to be filled, but as a launchpad for imaginary interpretations. Drawing upon Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation, Raphaël Barontini, Andrea Chung, Aline Motta, and Tshepiso Morop offer works that don’t so much reconstruct the truth as embroider the space around it with dreams of possibility.

Museum Rietberg’s own collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs taken in Asia and Africa are also interwoven throughout the exhibition — unadorned reference points that serve as nodes between which the artists’ refractory works resonate.

The curators have enhanced the exhibition’s empathetic overtones by incorporating the voice of the general public. For the participatory project “Do you remember?,” people from Zurich were invited to share their personal photo albums and offer their own stories and reflections upon these personal artifacts.

Several public events have also been planned around “Do you remember” and the exhibition as a whole, including a conversation between Swiss artist Sasha Huber and Bindi Vora, senior curator at Autograph Gallery in London, on May 9, as well as a workshop on experimental cyanotype with South African printmaker Dimakatso Mathopa on July 4.

Despite its sober premise, the curatorial approach of A Kind of Paradise strikes a definitively hopeful tone. “Critically engaging with colonial-era imagery does not magically undo injustice… but it does matter,” note photographer Omar Victor Diop and artist Lee Shulman in their book Being There, excerpts of which appear in the exhibition. “It exposes silenced histories, unsettles dominant narratives, and keeps awareness alive.”

If some viewers find Sontag’s assessment of photography cynical, then they might find a corrective in Edgar Degas’ aphorism that “art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” The artworks on view in Kind of Paradise suggest just that — by adjusting the prism of memory to reveal a whole spectrum of stories, perhaps one can catch a glimpse of a more just, equitable world.

A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art is on view at Museum Rietberg in Zurich through September 6.