Art collectors come in all shapes and sizes, but you don’t often come across a crucified collector

“Do you know this man?” asks Congolese artist Céd’art Tamasala as he walks on a plantation in Sumatra. He shows the people on the plantation a photo of an Indonesian worker, early 20th century. “We saw him in a photo in the Van Abbe Museum and no one could tell us much about him.” The photo that Céd’art Tamasala shows appears to be of a foreman, Sumo. “The group he led disappeared without a trace of them. The term Missing Sumo is famous here,” says a man on the plantation.

The video conversation can be seen as part of the exhibition Two Sides of the Same Coin where the Congolese art collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) – which represented the Dutch entry at the Venice Biennale this year – enters into a dialogue with the permanent collection of the Van Abbemuseum. To enter into that conversation, three members of the collective traveled to the plantation in Sumatra where museum founder Henri van Abbe (1880-1940) sourced a large part of the tobacco for his Eindhoven cigar factory. “The Van Abbe Museum was built with the profits made from the tobacco industry and thanks to the work on this plantation,” say the Congolese artists. “Without you, we would never have known that a museum was built in the Netherlands thanks to the work of our ancestors,” answer the Indonesian men on the plantation, which is now no longer used for tobacco but for palm oil.

With this dialogue and the ‘permission’ to exhibit in the Van Abbemuseum, CATPC not only portrays the history of the plantations in Eindhoven, but also pays tribute to some plantation workers from Van Abbe’s factory and those who resisted the circumstances. went. The result can be seen at the exhibition Two Sides of the Same Coin.

Bandages

“We have been discussing a possible collaboration for a long time,” says Charles Esche, the director of the Van Abbemuseum, the day before the opening. This exhibition – the last before Esche’s departure on January 1 – is part of the research project Hidden Connections which was started in 2018 to look for the museum’s colonial past.

As far as Esche is concerned, the basis of the museum lies in modernism, with Picasso, for example, who again found inspiration in images of the African continent. That side of modernism has never really been properly developed, he argues. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam did this a few years ago by placing the works of the German expressionists Kirchner and Nolde next to non-Western images. The fact that the two had drawn extensively on images from the African continent and islands of the Pacific Ocean was a relationship that was not appreciated by many art lovers, because the genius of the two Germans would thus be disputed and they would be dismissed as artists with a ‘exotic look’. The Van Abbemuseum, together with CATPC, opted for a different approach. The images created by the collective are displayed in the museum galleries, which automatically puts European works in a different perspective.

“We enter into a conversation with the art collector,” says artist Céd’art Tamasala in a room where the work The Art Collector states that the CATPC artists Djonga Bismar & Jérémie Mabiala created in 2015. Céd’art Tamasala refers to the imbalance between the collector who reaps the benefits of owning art, and the workers on plantations worldwide who are still paid too little to meet basic needs. With bulging eyes, ‘The Collector’ sits with his arms on his sides among other works where labor and factories are central. And he sits with his back to, among other things The convicts (1953) by Karel Appel, an equally scary figure with a wide open mouth.

The ‘collector’ type of person appears several times, including in The crazy art collector (2020) by Emery Muhamba. Here a man tries to stay seated on an angry bull like a rodeo rider. The bull here represents looted art in the collections of Western museums. The call to return that art is getting louder and louder, but the ‘crazy art collector’ continues to ignore it.

Humor

Where in one room the art collector is mad, in another room he is crucified. Crucifixion of the Art Collector is the image that Matthieu Kasiama & Céd’art Tamasala made in 2023 from the idea that with the end of the collector, the plantations that have become monocultures for the benefit of capital can again become plantations, where everything grows to ensure a self-sufficient existence build. “The exploitation of people and the exhaustion of the earth has been ignored for a long time, just like the important role that non-Western artists played in modern art history,” the gallery text explains the image.

The dialogue is conducted with dark humor in the ‘New Vision: harmony’ room. This contains the image The White Cube (2020) by Jean Kawata & Céd’art Tamasala. A square block shows the walls of a museum, but skeletons can also be seen on the side. They refer to the deaths that cost the building of museums. The whole tells the different stories from Lusanga’s history – the plantation where the artists of CATPC work – from the felling of the original forests for monoculture plantations, to replanting on the plantation in Lusanga.

The full image, where no surface is unused, stands in the middle of the art of the Zero movement from the Van Abbe collection, the movement in which artists in the 1960s reduced art to a white surface. A work by Schoonhoven, Large Square Relief (1964), has 35×25 white cubes. The contrast between the reduction of images and the multitude of stories behind the Congolese White Cube could not be greater. Yet the images rhyme in unexpectedly great harmony, and thus, as is the case with dialogues, the best outcome has been achieved.

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