Sinzo Aanza

Sinzo Aanza’s series The Irregular Line explores the invention of colonial art in Congo through the notion of the regularity of the line. The line acts as a temporal barrier between precolonial artistic practices, culturalised, folklorised and reinvented to become an art of representation for international exhibitions and colonial fairs on the one hand, and on the other a modernism referencing the ordering of all things and all practices according to the will and control of the colonial project.

The regularity of the line refers to the ethnological intent to classify, assign and fix everything that the new political order deemed illogical, primitive, disordered, uncontrollable or rebellious. Thus, an absolute border is drawn between what was, what is and what must be. The regularity of the line goes beyond the framework of ordering the space and its representations, notably through art, to be the racial charter and the hierarchisation of cultures and bodies.

The drawings also refer to the history of heads that were brought from the colonies to the capitals to be studied, to accelerate the understanding of local populations and their integration into the colonial order. The artist addresses the fragile preciousness of preserved objects as well as the duality of beauty and meaning that draws aesthetic considerations alongside the historical gravity of heritage. The heads draw our attention to the primitive history of museums established through conquests and the submission of enemies, who were then put on display through their belongings.