Bathtub Lecture, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
A radical new model turns the NFT into a tool for decolonization and digital restitution. Martens plays an organisational role in CATPC's reclamation of power over the long-lost Congolese Balot sculpture and buy back their land.
The six-part series Plantations and Museums follows CATPC members Matthieu Kasiama and Ced'art Tamasala as they travel to the battleground of the Pende rebellion and to the American museum that holds the Balot sculpture.
White Cube marks a new beginning:
how the concept of the white cube – with all the privileges it stands for — can be repurposed by plantation workers as a vehicle to buy back their land and begin a new inclusive and egalitarian world
The first exhibition of the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers’ Art League or CATPC) in the United States. Martens co-produced the exhibition and accompanying conference.
On 21 and 22 April 2017, a quintessential White Cube was repatriated on the site of Unilever’s first ever plantation of the D.R. Congo. Designed by OMA, the White Cube is the centre of CATPC's art program.
Human Activities organised the international conference series titled The Matter of Critique, referring to the material conditions of critical artistic engagement.
The art institute Human Activities, that Renzo Martens founded in 2012, aims for the ‘reverse gentrification’ of rural Congo in close collaboration with the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC).
In an epic journey, the film establishes that poverty is the Congo’s most lucrative export product, generating more revenue than traditional exports like gold, diamonds, or cocoa.
In Episode I, which was shot in Chechnya during the Russian invasion in 2000, Renzo Martens reveals the mechanisms behind the visual economy of war. The film forms a metaphor for an economy of images, roles and emotions.
On 30 November 2024, during the third Bathtub Lecture at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Renzo Martens and Ced’art Tamasala from CATPC outlined a shared future for the Stedelijk in which the museum is by and for everyone. Before the Bathtub Lecture, Renzo Martens dug into one of the corners of the Stedelijk Museum. Martens’ partial re-enactment of Jan Dibbets’ historic work from the 1969 show Op losse schroeven, aimed to dig deeper into the museum’s foundations – how it’s built on profits derived from forced labour and speculation on potential future earnings.
Renzo Martens, CATPC, and curator Hicham Khalidi provided the Dutch entry for the Venice Biennale 2024. The exhibition took place from
20 April to 24 November 2024 at the Rietveld Pavilion in Venice and simultaneously at the White Cube in Lusanga, the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC). The sculptures travel to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL) for the exhibition Two Sides of the Same Coin,
from 21 December 2024 until 2 March 2025.
For more information about the work of Renzo Martens, see humanactivities.org