Twenty international artists working with archival images come together to form a polyphonic reinterpretation of history, drawing out stories of belonging and identity that resist colonial-era narratives.
Situated above the blue waters of Switzerland’s Lake Zurich in a lush green park, sits the Museum Rietberg, home to an extensive collection of art from across Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The majority of objects found within the museum were acquired in the 1920s and 1930s by Swiss banker and art patron Baron Eduard von der Heydt and gifted to the city of Zurich.
The collection includes Indian miniature paintings, Chinese porcelain, Himalayan Buddhist figures, Tlingit masks, Dogon sculptures, and over 44,000 photographs, including ones from Asia and Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like many institutions, the Rietberg has been addressing the origins of its collection through provenance research and questions of representation.
Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art
In 2026, Zurich, alongside the Museum Rietberg, returned ownership of 11 Benin bronzes after a restitution claim by Nigeria and the Kingdom of Benin.
The museum’s recent exhibition, A Kind of Paradise – Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, featured 20 contemporary artists whose works uncover hidden narratives, pursue restorative justice, and envision alternate possibilities.
Divided into four sections—Into the Photo Fantastic, Care, Confrontation, and Shapeshifters—the artists explore how images shape identity and history, and who controls access to historical photographs.
Photography as a Tool of Imperialism
Photography emerged during the colonial era. From its inception, the camera was used as a tool of imperialism to document, categorize, and label people as ‘different,’ reinforcing a worldview of expansionism, exoticism, and exploitation.
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Scenes were staged to serve imperial narratives. The subjects in these images were often flattened, confined to a consumable framework.
The exhibition confronts this history through photographs, installations, textiles, and video works, blending humor, rage, care, and questioning. In Tailoring Freedom, artist Sasha Huber uses a staple gun on portraits by a Swiss-American naturalist who employed photography to support a demeaning racial hierarchy theory.
With force and tenderness, the subjects’ bodies, marked by enslavement, are adorned in gleaming armor.
Family Archives and Collective Memory
Some artists draw from family archives. In Cédric Kouamé’s The Gifted Mold Archive, the decay of photographic materials becomes a visual language.
Family and found photographs, transformed by Côte d’Ivoire’s damp climate, capture both past gatherings and present environmental conditions. The missing or smudged sections of portraits highlight the need to preserve collective memory.
In Along the South Coast, Zenaéca Singh uses sugar to encase family photographs, symbolizing her ancestors’ experience as indentured laborers in South Africa.
The late Vietnamese-born photographer Dinh Q. Lê’s work, Crossing the Farther Shore, began with his search for lost family photographs. Draped in mosquito net-like constructions, the found images create protective structures of candid moments from the past.
Lê described the work as a “sleeping, dreaming memory of Vietnam.” Alternating between image fronts and backs, viewers glimpse everyday life, countering the war-focused media images of the 1960s and 70s.
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In Four Seasons, Wendy Red Star, a member of the Apsáalooke Nation, poses herself amidst a fantasia of nature—soaring mountains and clear blue lakes on painted and creased backdrops, inflatable and cut-out animals, fake grass, and plastic flowers.
In these four works, Red Star playfully critiques the stereotyped view of the “authentic Native American” in popular culture.
In her grid and audio installation, Let Them Have Their Voice, she cuts out silhouettes of Apsáalooke chiefs, originally posed and photographed in the early twentieth century by Edward S. Curtis. In his original photographs, signs of the present, such as wrist watches, were removed to portray what he called a “timeless tradition.” Red Star’s silhouettes leave a trace of the sitters while filling the surrounding space with traditional Apsáalooke songs.
Perhaps one of the most striking moments in the exhibition is easy to miss. In a 20-minute video, artists, curators, and researchers sit around a table discussing a selection of photographs from the Rietberg’s collections. A black-and-white image of a photographer posing a group of people is picked up. The group is seated, in ceremonial dress, as three young boys are motioned out of the frame—they are spoiling the image in their Western shorts and t-shirts. This small fragment underlines, clearly and concisely, one of the exhibition’s main points: Who decides what we see? And how and where should we look to learn more? What sits just outside the frame?
Displayed alongside are images from colonial expeditions and studios of African and Asian photographers, featuring family and individual portraits where subjects posed as they wished to be seen.
In an arresting photograph from 1897 by the Nigerian photographer Jonathan Adagogo Green, the Beninese Oba (King) Ovonramwen Nogbaisi sits bound in chains, on his way to exile, addressing the camera with a slight grin of resilience and resistance.
One is repeatedly reminded of the broadness of a photograph; it lives beyond the image borders, threaded through with more than one interconnected story.
