Welcome to Congoville

As a contemporary heritage institution, the Middelheim Museum questions itself every day which stories and works of art can provide more insight into our cultural heritage. In this context, the Congoville exhibition explores the colonial traces on the Middelheim site. A growing awareness of the complex history of the remarkable Art Deco building just outside the fences of the Middelheim Museum was the immediate cause. Nowadays it is part of the University of Antwerp, but it used to house the Koloniale Hogeschool or Colonial College. The broader Middelheim site thus played a central role in the colonial organization and training in Belgium, but who even remembers that? Which colonial traces can still be found here? Who notices them? What do they mean today? How do we want to deal with them in the future?

The Middelheim Museum invited the Belgian-Congolese art historian Sandrine Colard to create an exhibition on these and other related questions. With an expertise in colonial and post-colonial visual cultures and arts, Colard explicitly investigates the elements that shape the current vision of the Congo and African and African diasporic people in Belgium. She gathered 15 artists who in turn invite the public to join them in Congoville.