Image: Sammy Baloji, ‘Aequare. The Future That Never Was’, 2023, installation for the Venice Architecture Biennial 2023, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. Photo: Minne De Meyer Engelbeen.
‘Sammy Baloji: When Extraction Becomes Form It Speaks in Borrowed Tongues’ opens in the galleries of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, on 20 September 2026 and runs until 14 February 2027, free for all audiences. The centre organised the exhibition, curated by Head of Visual Arts Julieta González, and describes it as Baloji’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Baloji, who is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, works across photography, film and sculpture on the lasting effects of extractive economies — the exploitation of natural resources, labour and information for profit — on land, people and cultural forms. In this exhibition he follows the physical and symbolic remnants of colonial power and economy in architecture and the decorative arts, across relationships between Europe, Central Africa and the Americas. Named works include ‘Aequare: The Future That Never Was’, ‘Still Kongo’ and ‘Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues’.
Two new collaborative commissions join them. ‘Rethreaded Indies’, made with the art historian Cécil Fromont, was produced at the TextielMuseum’s TextielLab in the Netherlands using a technologically recreated hand-woven technique, and answers the colonial ideologies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Old Indies French tapestries. ‘Suspension (Debris of History, Matters of Memory)’, made with Fromont and the architect Gloria Cabral for this exhibition, turns construction and mining waste into a large suspended structure that can be seen from several vantage points, informed by contemporary architecture and Kingdom of Kongo design systems and built by a zero-waste method.
The exhibition is one of four autumn presentations introduced at the centre’s Fall 2026 Exhibitions Opening Celebration on Friday 18 September, 4–8pm, for which free tickets are offered. Baloji’s presentation is supported by Ohio State’s Global Arts + Humanities and the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts, with additional support from FotoFocus. The Wexner Center is at The Ohio State University, 1871 North High Street, Columbus.
