Public defence of the doctoral disseration of Sanne Fleur Sinnige:
“Re-Presenting the Past: The Time-Based Return of Belgian Colonial History in Contemporary Art and Cinema (1986-2016)”
Monday 23 May 2022 at 10:00, VUB Campus, Promotiezaal (D.2.01).
Abstract
Contemporary art and cinema contains multiple references to Belgium’s colonial past. This study is devoted to building on a growing body of art- and film-historical research that investigates artists’ and filmmakers’ return to colonial histories through time-based media, including film and photography. In this dissertation, I add to these studies through a focus on Belgium’s colonial past. Through the adoption of an anachronistic approach to the artistic appearance of what I define as time-based unsettlements, I develop the thesis that the studied artworks and films perform an artistic gesture that I term ‘re-presenting the past.’
Through the consideration of history not as a linear force and the embrace of anachronism, I discuss in this dissertation how artists’ and filmmakers’ time-based return to Belgian colonialism points at an intermingling of past and present. This mixture of time is suggestive of the relevance of Belgium’s colonial past to study the present in multiple ways. In addition, some artists and filmmakers complicate this ‘presence’ through an entanglement of temporality and existentialism, pointing to a human existence.
Through close readings of these temporal unsettlements in a selection of artworks and films, including Sammy Baloji’s video-installation Pungulume (2016), Ria Pacquée’s photo-series Confronting a Colonial Past (1994) and Renzo Martens’ film Enjoy Poverty (2008), I demonstrate that filmmakers and artists have wrestled with continuities of Belgian colonialism after its official end in 1960 and re-emphasized Congolese figures as a major presence within historical narratives of the Congo, by means of a time-based return to history.
