Description
In this paper, we will present you the corpus of a Congolese artist Albert Lubaki. An artist/author/maker born around the 1890s in the Kongo-Central province, he produced watercolor paintings and carved ivory objects. At present, the only tangible remnants of his artistic legacy are the watercolor paintings he produced for three European patrons; These paintings, created with materials supplied by his patrons, were shipped to Paris, Brussels, and Geneva for display in art galleries, museums, and World Exhibitions.By means of a thorough analysis, we want to present you with a deconstructed version of a colonialist imaginary created around Lubaki’s art and life by analyzing words and phrases used by Gaston Denys Périer, the promoter of Lubaki’s art in Western Europe. At the same time, we will try to counterbalance this imaginary with a narrative grounded in hypotheses on how the artist –or his peers- may have experienced the different localities he visited and worked in. It will be done by employing three different case-studies.
Our goal here is not to retrace truth in the positivist sense but to craft an alternative narrative about the artworks and the artist.
| Period | 27 Jun 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 36th Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lyon, France |
| Degree of Recognition | International |