‘Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art’ Opens At The Smithsonian featuring ‘Untethered/Retethered’ (2025)
- Jan 30
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 31
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC USA, 23 January – 23 August 2026.
I'm deeply grateful and honored to be a part of this show, which has taken us on a long, winding road for preparation. Comprising nearly 60 objects created by LGBTQ+ artists from Africa and the diaspora, you may recall that Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art was originally scheduled to open in May 2025 but was postponed until now. An interesting article about the postponement was published in The Washington Post last year, while I was still in DC and you can read it here→.
Displayed in a section of the exhibition titled ‘Family’, Untethered/Retethered is a video installation depicting the verbal accounts of USA and Lebanese soldiers talking about some of the intimacies that exist between them and their ‘battle-buddies’. Sometimes humorous, other times poignant, they offer a glimpse into the military cultures of both countries and are layered over landscapes of Iraq and Afghanistan. The video is projected onto a US military paratrooper’s harness, splayed open and hovering in the suspended opening of its disconnected parachute. You can watch the 8 minute video of the installation below:
The video installation is accompanied by a framed diptych of a ‘hand portrait’ of a Lebanese infantryman scratched into gunpowder residue and a ‘foot portrait’ of a US paratrooper scratched into boot polish. Luckily, the museum allowed me to install my work while I was still in DC and below are some pics from that week. It was such a pleasure to work with this extraordinary team of professionals!
Thank you to the curators Kevin Dumouchelle and Serubiri Moses and the indomitable management and staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art for their resilience and conviction for putting up this show! If all goes well, I plan to be in DC for the launch of the fabulous Here book planned for launch later this year ...
Connect to the National Museum of African Art website here→
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Critical Commemorative Practices in The Lost Men France by Paul Emmanuel
New academic journal article by Associate Professor Irene Bronner, University of Johannesburg published in De Arte, Taylor and Francis. 17 November 2025.
This article examines South African artist Paul Emmanuel’s The Lost Men France (2014), part of his ongoing Lost Men project, as a critical intervention into dominant forms of memorialisation and public art. Installed adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Picardy, France, Emmanuel’s ephemeral installation challenges the nationalist ideologies and racialised exclusions of conventional war memorials, such as the erasure of Black South African servicemen from First World War histories. Drawing on Mechtild Widrich’s concept of performative monuments and on James E. Young’s framing of the counter-monument, The Lost Men France is interpreted as a work of art that resists permanence, instead activating memory through vulnerability, absence, and embodied witnessing. This article argues that Emmanuel’s installation establishes a dialogical relationship with the Thiepval Memorial, both supplementing and unsettling its monumental authority. The installation foregrounds haunting and witnessing not as passive acts of remembrance, but as active, critical modes of engagement with the historical violence embedded in memorial forms. In doing so, it offers a reparative aesthetic grounded in fragility and contingency, proposing new forms of commemorative practice beyond the logic of state-sanctioned heroism. While #RhodesMustFall frames recent calls to decolonise public monuments, Emmanuel’s long-standing performative interventions demonstrate a prescient critique, even with their ambivalences, of how patriarchal and racialised structures shape what and who is remembered.
Read and download the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043389.2025.2563405