Exhibition Review: When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, at Kunstmuseum Basel
Swiss-Cameroonian curator and cultural scholar Bansoa Sigam visits the Kuntsmuseum in Basel to see When We See Us, a massive travelling exhibition showcasing a century of how Black people have imagined themselves in figurative art.
Marc Padau’s "All the light on me" (left) and Amoako Boafo’s "Teju" (right)—Courtesy, Larkin Durey, London (Image credit: Gina Folly)
The Gegenwart—one of the three sites of the Kunstmuseum Basel, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland—sits on the banks of the Rhine. Situated ten minutes by foot from the main building, with large glass windows and a small stream flowing beneath it, the site is dedicated exclusively to contemporary art and is currently home to When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, a travelling exhibition first shown in 2022 at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa.
Co-curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama and adapted for the Kunstmuseum in 2024, When We See Us is massive. It features 208 works from 161 artists from Africa and its diasporas, a top-tier film archive selection, a curated soundscape, and a reading nook with an extensive book collection. The artworks are helpfully arranged across the museum’s four floors by theme: the everyday, joy and revelry, repose, sensuality, spirituality, and triumph and emancipation. As if that were not enough, there is also a fresco retracing 300 years of Black artistic, cultural, and political movements. It’s a lot to take in—almost overwhelming—and I had to visit twice.
On my second visit, I went with friends; a group of ten, mostly Black people. Being among the first to arrive, I witnessed the security guard raise her arm and perform what looked like a parada—a defensive move that I learnt in capoeira to prevent an incoming attack—to stop my friends before they entered. We wondered: did she feel threatened? And if so, why?
Remembering that we were there to experience the Black joy the curators said was on offer at an exhibition celebrating how Black artists have seen and celebrated Black people over the last 100 years, we laughed the moment off and turned our attention to the art. Ugandan artist Eria “Sane” Nsubuga’s 2019 portrait of Zora Neale Hurston as Marie Antoinette, queen of France; Michelle and Barack Obama taking centre stage in Congolese painter Chéri Chérin’s symbolic piece from 2009; and Cyprien Tokoudagba’s 2005 series depicting royalty from Dahomey (present day Benin) heading to war.
But less than thirty minutes later, our peace was again disrupted. Three of us were standing near a space with screens and headphones to watch the exhibition’s film selection. One screen was playing an interview of Chinua Achebe by fellow Nigerian author Wole Soyinka. On the other screen, we could see some scenes from the 1977 FESTAC festival in Lagos. Another guard approached and asked us to move out of the way. Bemused as we were not in anyone’s way and well-acquainted with microaggressions, we refused and waited for the rest of the group to join us.
When they arrived, we sat on the portable chairs that the museum had provided at the entrance. A photograph of that moment would show us seated in a circle, with most of us leaning forward to get a glimpse at the picture-filled catalogue one of us was holding. This photograph exists, in fact. It was taken by a woman who’d started photographing us. She did not ask for permission. She wanted “spontaneity”, she said. She thought us looking at our “ancestors, in a way”, was fascinating and then asked what we were talking about, without a worry in the world about our privacy or space.
Had we allowed them to, these surreal moments could have turned the exhibition on its head. Taking inspiration from African-American director Ava Duvernay’s miniseries, When They See Us, the curators had substituted “they” with “we” to signal a shift in perspective away from, as W.E.B du Bois wrote of the peculiar experience of double-consciousness under the white gaze, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” But we again refused distraction.
As we continued to ascend the exhibition, we saw in the portraits hundreds of ordinary people, celebrities, ethereal beings, and regal figures depicted in chromatic textures and layers, and often-vibrant paintings. We were introduced to key historic moments and ordinary scenes most of us could easily relate to. For instance, Marc Padeu’s 2021 painting in the repose section depicts six young people sitting around the open tailgate of a car parked in the driveway of a house that could have easily been a depiction of my grandmother’s home in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
In Edouard Duval-Carrié’s 2004 plexiglass mural, ‘The True Story of the Water Spirits’, we had to look closely, beyond the ornate lattice of leaves and flowers bearing different spirits, to see atrocities hidden here and there in small vignettes from archival images of lynching and torture. It took us to a moment of remembrance of the many who were sacrificed. We found a sense of comfort in sharing our grief and common experiences, relief in each other’s presence, and legitimacy, despite repeated attempts to make us feel out of place. It all made sense to us, then and there, why the perspective enabled by the exhibition—of us seeing ourselves seen rather than observed and surveilled—is so potent.
