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

Artist Paul Emmanuel will participate in the upcoming online roundtable “Inventive Leaps, Unruly Voyages: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” Hosted by American University and convened by anthropologist Mark Auslander and artist Abdi Osman, the discussion brings together artists and curators connected to the exhibition Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, currently on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. 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 Russell Smith. Pride and Belonging in African Art Roundtable During the roundtable, Emmanuel will speak about his installation Untethered / Retethered. The work features a suspended parachute harness positioned within the opening of a parachute canopy, creating the appearance of a figure standing within a threshold or portal. Through this sculptural arrangement and recorded dialogues with soldiers and veterans, the installation reflects on the complex process of untethering from military identity and retethering within civilian life. Installation view of ‘Untethered’ (2024) in the main court at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA. The roundtable explores questions of belonging, identity, and queer creativity within African and African diasporic artistic contexts. Emmanuel’s work engages these themes through the metaphor of suspension and transition, examining how individuals move between different systems of belonging. Inventive Leaps, Unruly Voyages: Pride and Belonging in African Art Online Roundtable hosted by American University Friday, March 27, 202612:00–3:00 PM (Eastern Time) Further information and access details can be found here: https://markauslander.com/2026/02/26/inventive-leaps-unruly-voyages-a-roundtable-on-here-pride-and-belonging-in-african-art/

Paul Emmanuel, Ex Unitate Vires, shown in its new frame case at the framer’s studio, Johannesburg, 2026. Paul Emmanuel, Ex Unitate Vires, 2020 Hand-incised, perforated carbon paper, carbon residue 63 × 73 cm Recent views of Ex Unitate Vires in its new frame case at the framer’s studio in Johannesburg. These photographs document the work during framing, before it returns to the studio. Related content Exhibition Substance of Shadows, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2021 Intervention Rising-falling, General Louis Botha Monument, Pretoria, 2021

Remaining pole base from Paul Emmanuel’s The Lost Men France, near the Thiepval Memorial, France, photographed by David Thomson, 2026. The Lost Men France In 2026, David Thomson, who lives near the Thiepval Memorial, sent this photograph of one of the remaining pole bases from The Lost Men France. The banners had long since been removed, but the support poles and swinging cables remained in the landscape for years after the temporary installation. According to Thomson, the carabiners at the ends of the cables continued to clang in the wind until the poles were finally removed twelve years later. Related content Documentary video Remembering a Counter-memorial: Making The Lost Men France, 2014 Counter-memorial The Lost Men France, Thiepval Memorial to the living of the Somme, 2014 Archive post Process views: Making The Lost Men France