Paul Emmanuel, Untethered/Retethered, 2025. Installation view in progress, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2025. On Thursday, June 18, 2026, I’ll be taking part in a public panel discussion at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., as part of Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art. Speakers for the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art panel discussion for Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, June 18, 2026. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The panel brings together curator Kevin Dumouchelle and artists Mikael Owunna, Tyna Abebowale, Leilah Babirye, and myself, whose works are included in the exhibition. It offers a chance to speak about the works and the wider questions of visibility, history, identity, and belonging that move through the show. For me, this moment is also connected to a slower form of attention: looking closely. The panel is free and open to the public. Book a ticket to the panel discussion through the Smithsonian event page. Looking Closely at Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art Alongside the exhibition and panel, I’ve also been involved in the design and editing of the Tour de Force Foundation Close Looking Guide: Queer African Art, developed with texts by Mark Auslander and his students. The guide was created as a mobile-friendly way for viewers, students, and audiences to spend more time with selected artworks from the exhibition, whether before visiting, while moving through the galleries, or after returning home. I’m interested in this kind of looking because it asks something different from us. It’s not only about seeing an artwork quickly, naming it, and moving on. It’s about noticing structure, material, image, gesture, absence, repetition, and feeling. It’s about allowing an artwork to unfold over time. That kind of attention has always mattered to my own practice. The guide can be viewed online here: View the Close Looking Guide. Field Notes: On View Untethered/Retethered, my installation in the exhibition, brings together a decommissioned U.S. military parachute and harness, severed suspension lines, and video projection. My hope is that the work creates space for viewers to spend time with vulnerability, masculinity, militarization, intimacy, and the ways bodies become tethered to larger systems of power. Installation process for Paul Emmanuel’s Untethered/Retethered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2025. These recent installation photographs from the Smithsonian show the work in the process of becoming public: lifted, suspended, adjusted, projected onto, and finally held in relation to the gallery and the viewer. I value these images because they document the people, scale, and care required to bring the work into the exhibition space. The decommissioned military parachute from Untethered/Retethered during installation at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2025. The suspended harness is central to the work. For me, it holds the absence of a body while also insisting on the body’s presence. I like the idea of video imagery projecting onto a piece of military hardware, potentially changing the meaning of an already loaded object. Projection detail from an installation-stage version of Paul Emmanuel’s Untethered/Retethered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2025. Paul Emmanuel with the suspended harness and parachute elements of Untethered/Retethered during installation at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2025. Field Notes: In the Studio Back in Johannesburg, Ex Unitate Vires has recently been placed in a new frame case. Seeing the work in this form has made me think again about framing, containment, protection, and the way an artwork changes as it moves between studio, archive, exhibition, and future collections. Paul Emmanuel, Ex Unitate Vires, shown in its new frame case at the framer’s studio, Johannesburg, 2026. I think Ex Unitate Vires and Untethered/Retethered are connected by questions that continue to move through my practice: how bodies are held by systems of power, how vulnerability is made visible, and how objects carry traces of history, violence, care, and repair. Side view of Paul Emmanuel’s Ex Unitate Vires in its new frame case at the framer’s studio, Johannesburg, 2026. Related studio note This visit to the United States will also allow me to participate in The Warrior’s Path / Talking with Monuments discussion work in Milwaukee, developed by Katinka Hooyer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I collaborated with Hooyer on the curriculum development for the NEH proposal and the final veteran-facing discussion guide. That work has been especially meaningful to me because it connects directly with questions that also move through Untethered/Retethered: militarization, moral injury, public memory, monuments, vulnerability, and the ways individual bodies are drawn into larger systems of power. The Smithsonian panel will be one public conversation around the exhibition. The Close Looking Guide offers another, quieter way in. The installation photographs, studio images, and related research all belong to the same unfolding field around the work. Each is an invitation to look more closely. Related content Exhibition Substance of Shadows, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2021 Exhibition Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, 2026

National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC USA, 23 January – 23 August 2026. Untethered/Retethered, 2025, (تائه في العدم/مستعيد جذوره) (detail) Decommissioned, model T-10, U.S. military personnel parachute with severed suspension lines, detached harness with risers, 550 para-cord. High-definition video projection, stereo soundtrack, 7 min 26 sec. Parachute diameter: 35 feet. Harness dimensions: 30 x 30 inches (excluding suspension lines). Photographed by Mark Auslander. 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→ PREVIOUS NEWS POST 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. Figure 1: Paul Emmanuel. Installation view of The Lost Men France. 1 July 2014 to 1 October 2014, on privately owned land adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Photographed by Colleen Costick, 2014. Courtesy of Paul Emmanuel. 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

An absent image Screenshot from Holland Cotter, “Finding the Great America, 250 Years On. The Real One”, The New York Times, 16 July 2026. Installation photograph by Brad Simpson, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Reading Cotter’s recent essay in The New York Times, I was struck by how strongly it returned me to an image that isn’t present in the exhibited version of Untethered/Retethered. During the installation of Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, I’d developed three projection versions of the work. One combined landscapes in Iraq and Afghanistan, footage of a nighttime firefight, and Horatio Greenough’s monumental sculpture George Washington, 1840. Washington’s face was withheld from view. After further internal review, the museum and I agreed to use the landscape-only projection now on view in the exhibition. His essay places a group of Smithsonian exhibitions against a narrowed and triumphalist account of American history during the nation’s 250th anniversary. Within this wider argument, he describes Here as a globally minded exhibition, calls Untethered/Retethered an “ethereal installation,” and writes that it: “…might be read as a vision of safe landing in the supportive company of brotherhood across racial and affectional lines.” I believe that his reading suggests that the historical and political questions carried by Greenough’s monument hadn’t disappeared when the image was removed. It seems they remained active in the decommissioned military parachute and its severed suspension lines; the detached harness; the juxtaposition of bodies marked by different histories; and the work’s movement between violence and care, detachment and attachment, falling and the possibility of safe landing. An image can be absent while the social pressures that produced it remain. For me, the installation-stage projection and Cotter’s essay resonate strongly with one another in this archive. Each approaches, from a different direction, the unsettled historical field from which Untethered/Retethered emerged. Read Holland Cotter on Untethered/Retethered in The New York Times. Related content Newspaper article Holland Cotter, “Finding the Great America, 250 Years On. The Real One,” The New York Times, 16 July 2026. News post Untethered/Retethered at NMAfA, installation-stage projection, 2026 Exhibition Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2026

Group exhibitions featuring Paul Emmanuel’s artworks, including museum, gallery, biennial, public art and institutional exhibition contexts. Installation view of Untethered / Retethered by Paul Emmanuel in Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., 2026. ‘If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future’, Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 10 March – 20 June 2025 ‘MICA Grad Show 3’, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 12 – 28 April, 2024 ‘In Uncertainty We Trust’, Sheila and Richard Riggs and Leidy galleries, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 27 September – 13 October 2023 ‘Cartographies of Becoming’, The Sylt Foundation, Sylt Island, Germany. 24 December 2021 – 30 December 2022 ‘Holding Tension’, Sheila and Richard Riggs and Leidy galleries, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 2 – 10 December 2022 ‘Reviewing the Past’, Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery, Montserrat College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 18 January – 19 March 2022 ‘Cure’, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa 14 September 2020 – ‘Bag Factory 30 Years: So Far, The Future’, FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, 30 June – 4 July 2020 ‘Ampersand Foundation 21 Years Celebration Exhibition’, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa 11 September – 9 October 2019 ‘Regards: Photographie Camerounaise / Digital Africa’ – Casablanca Biennale Internationale de Casablanca Project Space, Morocco. 18 April – 15 June 2019 ‘Sway: A Photographic Exhibition’, Now Gallery, The Open Window, Irene, South Africa, 27 March – 30 June 2019 ‘Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts Opening Exhibition’, Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa, 26 March – 30 June 2019 ‘Wounds and Relics’, Gallery 2, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1 – 22 September 2018 ‘Turbine Art Fair 2018’, Art Source South Africa Booth GH4, Turbine Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa, 12 – 15 July 2018 ‘Recent Acquisitions: UNISA – University of South Africa Permanent Art Collection’, UNISA Art Gallery, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa, 5 – 31 August 2017 ‘Material Gains: Contemporary Art from the Spier Collection’, Stellenbosch University Museum, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 25 July – 15 November 2018 ‘The Art of Reading from William Kentridge to Wikipedia’, Meermanno Museum, The Hague, The Netherlands, 18 November 2017 – 5 March 2018 ‘I Am Because You Are: A Search for Ubuntu with Permission to Dream’, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. 2 February – 31 March 2018 ‘International Printmaking Alliance Exhibition’, Taimiao Art Gallery, Imperial Ancestral Temple, Beijing, China 25 September – 10 October 2017 ‘Rethinking Kakotopia’, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, 6 September – 4 October 2017 ‘Booknesses: Artists’ Books from the Ginsberg Collection’, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 25 March – 5 May 2017 ‘In Plain Sight: Social Life in South Africa and Romania Before and After 1989’, ApARTe Gallery of George Enescu University of Arts & Borderline Art Space, Iasi, Romania 25 November – 8 December 2016 ‘Foundations and Futures: Celebrating 25 Years of the Bag Factory’, Fordsburg Artists’ Studios, Johannesburg, South Africa, 28 October – 10 December 2016 ‘Rites of Passage: Between Light and Shadow’, Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa, 11 – 18 June 2016

Not My War — archive entry documenting Paul Emmanuel’s participation and work. Installation view of 3SAI: A Rite of Passage , 2008. High-Definition, single-channel video, stereo soundtrack, 13 min 58 sec Not My War , Michaelis Galleries, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 29 June – 25 July 2012 Not My War is an exhibition of works by significant South African artists that have reflected on their country’s involvement in border wars in Northern Namibia and Southern Angola during the 1960s to 1980s. Marking the 25th anniversary of the war’s bloodiest and most decisive battles, most notably at Cuito Cuanavale, Not My War looks at how these artists have been impacted by and responded to what is now commonly referred to as the Border War. Furthering the resurgence of dialogue around this ‘silent war’, the exhibition will endeavor to engage the complex personal and institutional discourse surrounding this conflict, as well as highlight the war’s continuing relevance and effect on South African society. Curated by David Brits, participating artists are Wayne Barker, Christo Doherty, Paul Emmanuel, John Liebenberg, Jo Ractliffe, Colin Richards, Chad Rossouw, Penny Siopis, Christopher Swift and Gavin Younge. Exhibition and catalogue text by Natasha Norman. Emmanuel's short film 3SAI: A Rite of Passage (2008) and his manière noire stone lithograph titled number 05000674PV (2009) were selected by the curator for this exhibition. Related content Exhibition ‘Transitions Multiples’, 2011 Exhibition ‘Transitions Multiples’, 2011 Publication ‘Transitions Multiples’, 2011 Publication ‘Transitions Multiples’, 2011 Short film ‘3SAI: A Rite of Passage’, 2008 ←Previous Next→

Conférence de Paul Emmanuel — archive entry documenting Paul Emmanuel’s participation and work. Still from 3SAI: A Rite of Passage , 2008. High-Definition, single-channel video, stereo soundtrack, 13 min 58 sec Conférence de Paul Emmanuel , EESI/École européenne supérieure de l'image, Angouléme, France, 8 October 2013 Après la projection de son court-métrage 3SAI : A Rite of Passage (2008), Paul Emmanuel, artiste sud africain, retracera la création de ses projets ‘Transitions’ (2008) et ‘The Lost Men’ (2004 – ). Il parlera également de sa nouvelle création “Touch me” (2013), présentée en avant-première au Cube, Centre de Creation Numerique, Issy-Les-Moulineaux. Il s’agit d’une œuvre tactile visuelle et sonore qui explore les idées liées à la mémoire et aux souvenirs. “Touch me” fait partie d’un projet global appelé ‘The Lost Men France’ (2014) coïncidant avec les commémorations des 100 ans du début de la première guerre mondiale durant laquelle de nombreux soldats sud-africains sont tombés. Paul Emmanuel y présente son corps en plan serré, tantôt vêtu de tenues de cérémonie militaires historiques ou contemporaines, tantôt habillé comme un employé d’entreprise. Une bande-son de la voix de l’artiste invite le spectateur à toucher l’écran tactile, provoquant l’habillage et le déshabillage des différentes zones de son corps et révélant sa peau, temporairement marqué des noms de soldats Sud-africains de la Première Guerre mondiale, mais aussi des victimes de la grève de Marikana Miner (2012) et de l’incursion armée de la République Centrafricaine en 2013. Ces impressions fugitives disparaissent ou réapparaissent tant que le spectateur continue à le toucher, évoquant une "guérison" ou une "nouvelle blessure" répétée de la peau. Related content Short film ‘3SAI: A Rite of Passage’, 2008 Exhibition ‘Transitions’, 27 September – 31 December 2008 ←Previous Next→