Artist: Coumba Samba
Exhibition title: Capital
Curated by: Milika Muritu and Adomas Narkevičius
Venue: Cell Project Space, London, UK
Date: March 28 – June 2, 2024
Photography: Jonas Balsevičius (installation views), Anne Tetzlaff (Performance) / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Cell Project Space, London
Capital, the first major UK solo exhibition by Senegalese-American artist Coumba Samba, features a room-sized mud enclosure, photographic prints, and a commissioned performance titled ‘FIFA’ produced in collaboration with École Des Sables (Dakar, Senegal), and artist Gretchen Lawrence (UK/Estonia) to produce a permanent soundscape for the exhibition. The project revolves around the circulation of objects, forms, materials and ideologies between the West and West Africa; a feedback loop of defined futures, economic suppression, and the event of hope.
In Capital, Samba explores the act and structure of recycling Euro-American trash, shiny in its amassed grandeur. Junk is a direct material representation of the logic of capital, its colonial underside, and the failed prophecies of progress that come with it. Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s ill-famed corruption case findings mark how these ideological fantasies shape individual aspirations, and spill out into the arena of global politics and finance, where the desire for symbolic power drives underhanded flows of capital globally.
The choreography of ‘FIFA’, co-developed by Alesandra Seutin (Artistic Co-Director, École Des Sables) and Coumba Samba, is informed by a mixture of repetitive body motions and gestures found in football, Senegalese Laamb wrestling, and the South American game Queimada. The imprints of the dancers’ movements, hardening in the drying dirt, are a double agent: a promise of elusive agency and a desire machine for absent living bodies.
Gretchen Lawrence’s sound composition echoes in every part of the gallery space during and after the performance, through a loudspeaker installation reminiscent of those found in public spaces and mosques. The sound features field recordings from Senegal and distorted kicks and sirens taken from royalty-free loops.
The large-scale installation of stainless steel, plexiglass, and industrial plywood continues and builds upon Samba’s artistic language and attitude, noting their invisibilised production, intentionally irreverent to the historicity and fetishistic value of these materials. The artist plays with (art) historical tropes and idioms, creating sharp contrasts, a bricolage of ideas and matter that sit together awkwardly. Perhaps they were never supposed to touch or beautify each other.
Curators Milika Muritu and Adomas Narkevičius
In response to Capital, a one-day public programme event inviting artists, professionals, and academics from a range of fields to discuss critical aspects of African diasporic practice today, will be hosted by Coumba Samba alongside Galerina (Niina Ulfsak, Mischa Lustin), and Infinite Fxx (Côvco).
