Installation View of A Kind of Paradise: Reclaiming Colonial-Era Photography Through Contemporary Art at Museum Reitberg, Zurich, 2026. Photo by Patrik Fuchs.
A Kind of Paradise: Reclaiming Colonial-Era Photography Through Contemporary Art
A Kind of Paradise, on view at Museum Rietberg, brings together twenty international artists who reinterpret colonial-era photography as a site of resistance, memory, and reimagination rather than as fixed historical evidence. Organized across four sections — Shapeshifters, Confrontation, Care, and In the Photo Fantastic — the exhibition examines how artists reclaim and transform archival images tied to colonial histories through collage, stitching, annotation, and speculative reconstruction.
A central focus of the exhibition is In the Photo Fantastic, a section inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” where artists imagine histories absent from the colonial archive. Here, Raphaël Barontini presents The Golden Ladies, 2026, a monumental 10-meter-long textile work, alongside pieces by Tshepiso Moropa and Aline Mottathat explore speculative narratives and alternate histories addressing archival gaps and historical erasure. The exhibition also incorporates photographs from Museum Rietberg’s own collection, taken in Africa and Asia between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as a newly commissioned film documenting artists, curators, and researchers engaging with these unresolved colonial histories.
