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

Field notes from a week between the Smithsonian and Milwaukee Native American burial mound with bronze plaque in Lake Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. Middle Woodland Period, c. 200 BC–AD 400. Photographed in 2023. When I returned in June 2026, the bronze plaque was no longer in place. Talking With Monuments at the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center In 2023, while working in Milwaukee with veterans and medical anthropologist Dr. Katinka Hooyer, I photographed a burial mound marker in the city. The bronze plaque identified the site as a prehistoric burial mound and noted that it was the last of a larger group of mounds formerly located there. By the time I returned to Milwaukee in June 2026, the plaque was no longer in place. I don’t yet know whether it had been removed for conservation, replacement, or another reason. It’s also possible that the older language on the plaque, including the word “prehistoric,” is being reconsidered. Whatever the reason for its absence, the missing marker stayed with me. It made me think about another layer in a longer story of erasure: not only the loss of many mounds themselves, but also the disappearance, revision, or replacement of the markers that once named them. A place can be sacred and still look ordinary to someone passing by. A history can be present and still remain unseen. A marker can tell us where to look, and then the marker itself can vanish. I’ve been thinking about that missing plaque alongside the events of this past week, which carried me between Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee, between the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, between museum space and veteran testimony, between public visibility and quieter acts of witnessing. Arriving at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art for the artist panel for Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art. I began the week in Washington, D.C., where I took part in the artist panel for Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. My work Untethered/Retethered is included in the exhibition. The installation is made from a decommissioned military parachute, severed suspension lines, a detached harness, video, and audio built around the recorded voices of military veterans. The work brings military material into close proximity with voices, bodies, memory, and the difficulty of returning to civilian life. At the panel, I spoke briefly about the work’s material presence and the long process of developing it with veterans. I also spoke about how strange it can feel to work with something visually beautiful that comes from a military context. It’s my hope that viewers can sit with the parachute, the severed lines, the harness, and the voices in their own way. Below is a selection of images from the artist panel and opening programme for Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2026. Photography by Studio Ari. Speaking about Untethered/Retethered during the Smithsonian artist panel. Photographed by Anastasia Gekis. A few days later, I travelled to Milwaukee for the final session of Talking With Monuments: Veteran Dialogues on Remembering, a project developed with Dr. Katinka Hooyer and veteran participants through the Medical College of Wisconsin. The session was held on Thursday, June 25, 2026 at the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. The move from the Smithsonian to Milwaukee felt important to me. In DC, the work was being held within an exhibition. In Milwaukee, some of the questions that had shaped the work were being carried into a room with veterans, facilitators, and members of the public. Talking With Monuments materials at the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. Katinka introduced me at the beginning of the session, and I gave a brief introduction to myself, my work, and the exhibition I’m part of. But once the session began, I mostly just listened. That felt right. As a South African artist and a non-American visitor in that room, I didn’t feel I needed to speak more. I’d helped shape the guide for the session with Katinka, but the conversation belonged to the people gathered there: veterans, civilians, facilitators, and people carrying their own relationships to service, land, memory, and loss. I think that sometimes presence is enough. Somehow witnessing seemed the more honest role. This final discussion group focused on Native American burial mounds in and around Milwaukee. Marquette University historian Dr. Bryan C. Rindfleisch opened the session with an overview of the mounds and their historical context. The guide Katinka and I created asked participants to consider a deceptively simple question: are these mounds monuments? We often think of monuments as things that stand upright in public space: statues, plaques, columns, war memorials, civic markers. They tell us where to look. They often tell us whose names have been made visible. Mounds however, ask for a different kind of attention. They don’t dominate the landscape in quite the same way. They belong to it. They’re made of earth and many are burial or ceremonial places. They hold memory without necessarily announcing themselves in the familiar language of bronze or stone. So what happens when a monument isn’t above us, but beneath our feet? Veterans, facilitators, and members of the public during the final Talking With Monuments session. The discussion moved quickly beyond history alone. Participants spoke about land, removal, military service, American imperialism, immigration, moral injury, and the stories nations tell about belonging. Veterans spoke with striking honesty about serving in other countries and later questioning why they’d been sent there at all. Some of the questions in the room were difficult to hear: What were they protecting? Whose land were they standing on? Which histories had they been taught to see? Which ones had remained outside the frame? These questions didn’t resolve into a single position. They moved around the room and sat uneasily beside service, loyalty, harm, responsibility, grief, and moral injury. A slide from Dr. Bryan C. Rindfleisch's mini-lecture titled: Milwaukee Mounds and Erasure. One participant spoke movingly about growing up on reservations, and about the stark differences between the facilities available to Native children’s schools and white schools. That testimony shifted the room and brought with it the question about land back to lived experience: childhood, schooling, infrastructure, neglect, and survival. In the guide, the Milwaukee mounds were paired with Louise Erdrich’s poem Indian Boarding School: The Runaways. I remember selecting that poem and hearing it read again in that room, among veterans, civilians, and people carrying different relationships to land, return, and displacement, I cried. Other people cried too. I think I cried because of the difficulties so many of us are experiencing in the political and social environment we find ourselves in now, in 2026. The poem also made me think of my own family, and of the silences I carry in me. I felt the swirling resonances between apartheid South Africa and the current moment in the United States. And I cried because it’s so difficult to speak about these things at all, when silence so often remains the obvious choice. Hearing that poem in that room brought the mound into contact with children, removal, return, punishment, longing, and the question of who gets to decide where a person belongs. At points, the discussion moved into current debates around immigrants and immigration policy. That shift made sense to me because once a room begins to speak honestly about land, removal, borders, belonging, and state power, the conversation rarely stays neatly contained. Native land and immigrant lives aren’t the same story, but I found myself wondering how both become caught in public arguments over who is allowed to belong and who gets to claim the authority of “home.” That felt especially important inside a war memorial. The Milwaukee County War Memorial Center is already a place shaped by remembrance, service, and public mourning. Holding a conversation about Native American mounds there brought different forms of memory into the same room: military memory, Indigenous memory, civic memory, personal memory. They didn’t sit comfortably together and perhaps they shouldn’t. Final Talking With Monuments gathering, Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. I left Milwaukee grateful, but also uncertain. The future of this work isn’t guaranteed. Funding is fragile. Humanities programs are under pressure and veteran-led public memory projects often depend on people continuing to hold open spaces that institutions may not sustain. I don’t know what happens next, but I know what happened in that room was important. With Dan after the final Talking With Monuments session. Photo by Katinka Hooyer. At the end of the session, Dan, one of the veterans featured in Untethered/Retethered, gave me a DC Superman comic book, joking to the room that its gloriously homoerotic cover made it the perfect gift for me. Of course, I clutched it to my chest with my usual camp reverence! I was also able to give him copy of the Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art exhibition book. For me, it was a funny, absurd, generous, and unexpectedly tender moment. Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Photo by Mark Auslander. I’ve been thinking about that exchange alongside the removed bronze plaque in Milwaukee. One object disappeared from the landscape. Another object passed from hand to hand. A marker was removed. A book was given. A comic book became a joke, a gift, and a form of recognition. A poem opened a room. A group of people sat together and listened. Some monuments stand above us. Others are beneath our feet. And some forms of memory survive because people carry them, however briefly, from one room to another. Related content Exhibition Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2026 News post Untethered/Retethered at NMAfA, installation-stage projection, 2026 News post Collaboration on Talking With Monuments discussion series, 2024

Rough Collar, 2018 Hand-incised, perforated carbon paper, carbon thread, carbon residue 45 × 40 × 40 cm Archival studio views and documentation of Rough Collar from Substance of Shadows. These images document the work’s surface, construction, material detail, and presentation outside its original exhibition context. Related content Exhibition Substance of Shadows, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2021 Intervention Rising-falling, General Louis Botha Monument, 2021 Archive post Field Notes: Studio | Ex Unitate Vires in its new frame case, Paul Emmanuel Studio, 2026

Still from installation-stage video documentation of Paul Emmanuel’s Untethered/Retethered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2025, showing the suspended harness, projected image, and parachute material in relation to the surrounding gallery space. Untethered/Retethered: installation-stage documentation This post brings together video documentation and still images from the installation-stage presentation of Untethered/Retethered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, recorded during the installation of Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art in 2025, before the exhibition opened to the public in 2026. The first video documents an installation-stage projection version of the work. This version was one of three projection versions I developed and made available to the museum during the installation process. It combines imagery of landscapes in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nighttime firefight, and Horatio Greenough’s George Washington, 1840, a sculpture in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection, on view at the National Museum of American History. Greenough’s sculpture, sometimes referred to as Enthroned Washington, was based on Phidias’s Statue of Zeus at Olympia. In this projection version, the sculpture appears without Washington’s face being shown. Following further internal review during installation, the museum and I agreed to use the landscape-only version now on view in the exhibition. The second video clip gives a wider view of the installation in space, showing the suspended harness and the physical relationship between the projected image, the parachute material, and the surrounding gallery. Video documentation of an installation-stage projection version of Paul Emmanuel’s Untethered/Retethered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., recorded during installation in 2025. This version was initially selected from three artist-provided projection versions and includes imagery of landscapes in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nighttime firefight, and Horatio Greenough’s George Washington, before the final landscape-only version was agreed for exhibition. Still from installation-stage video documentation of Paul Emmanuel’s Untethered/Retethered at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 2025, showing a closer view of the projected image across the suspended harness. Short video clip showing Paul Emmanuel’s Untethered/Retethered installed in the gallery during installation in 2025, with the suspended harness visible in relation to the projected image, parachute material, and surrounding exhibition space. Related content Field Note From the Studio: Looking Closely at Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Paul Emmanuel Studio, 2025 Exhibition Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2026 Guide / Public Resource TDF Close Looking Guide: Queer African Art, Tour de Force Foundation, 2026

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

Fabrication and site preparation for Paul Emmanuel’s The Lost Men France, Thiepval, France, 2014. The Lost Men France Archival process views from the making and installation of The Lost Men France, installed in 2014 adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France as an official event of the First World War centenary. These photographs and the accompanying clip document fabrication, site preparation, handling, and installation before the work was fully in place. Video clip: the first banner being raised during the installation of The Lost Men France, Thiepval, 2014. 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

Newcomb Art Museum – Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA March 21 – June 20, 2025 Parade of shadows, Paul Emmanuel, 2009. Manière noire stone lithograph, hand printed, hand coloured, signed, numbered and dated by the artist. Black lithographic ink and watercolour pigment on 285 gsm Fabriano Rosaspina Avorio paper, 81 x 158 cm (unframed). Edition 35 If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future highlights work from the Nando’s collection that was created in South Africa between 1948 and 2020. This exhibition underscores the collection’s extensive holdings in portraiture, cityscapes, landscapes, and abstraction. The artwork on view shapes an understanding of the South African milieu and its transformation over the last seventy years. They also offer insight into multi-generational views on life and placemaking. Paul Emmanuel's lithograph Parade of shadows is included in the exhibition. Read more.

An online memorial ceremony conducted every September, by living veterans for veterans who have died by suicide. A collaboration with The Warrior’s Path. Video still from The Veteran’s Memorial to the Living. (5 min 26 sec) 2025. Paul Emmanuel’s collaboration on The Veteran’s Memorial to the Living. Suicides are casualties of war. This memorial honors the invisible wounds that led to their deaths. Connect to The Veteran’s Memorial to the Living website

Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, Wisconsin, USA September 2024 – August 2026 The front cover of the final curriculum which has been specifically designed for veterans to teach other veterans. Paul Emmanuel collaborates on 'Talking With Monuments' discussion series. Talking With Monuments: Veteran Dialogues on Remembering is a 5-week public program that engages war memorials as powerful stages to recall and reflect on military service. Often, monuments tell one story, at the cost of omitting others. As a result, the experiences of diverse veterans and their stories become overlooked or forgotten. This ‘erasure’ can intensify veterans’ post-military reintegration challenges. Five veteran leaders will attend advanced training to lead difficult discussions around the topics of status and belonging, heroism, representation, exclusion, remembrance, and impermanence. Moral injury will be thread that weaves these discussions together. We visit 5 memorial sites, with historical mini lectures covering the Civil War, WWI and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pre-colonial Tribal Wars. Participants enact paired poetry and comics at these sites, activating remembrance and expanding cultural narratives around who serves and the stories that are untold. Through these site visits and veteran-led conversations, we cultivate dialogues around military service, public representation, and moral injury. Our aim is to acknowledge the stories that have not been told, or forgotten, and gain a deeper understanding of diverse veterans’ lives and service. 3 cycles of programming for veterans, veterans peer support specialists, and the public, will occur between September 2024 – August 2026. The Team from left to right: Yolanda Medina, Carlos Muñoz, Vera Reddy, Dan Kasza, Katinka Hooyer, Charlie Walton and Paul Emmanuel (front center) Photos documenting the initial lectures and discussions to introduce the curriculum to this group of veterans. This workshop included lectures on emotional intelligence, moral injury and monuments. This workshop was designed to equip this group of veterans to guide other veterans through the discussion series. PROJECT TEAM Katinka Hooyer, PhD, project director, is a cultural anthropologist with 12 years’ experience developing community-engaged programming and research with veterans and moral injury. As project director for two previous NEH Warrior’s Path grants, Hooyer serves as project director, program/evaluation design lead, leader trainer/mentor, and responsible for qualitative evaluation, reporting/dissemination. Leslie Ruffalo, PhD, statistical analyst and evaluator, is associate professor at MCW with experience implementing and evaluating multiple veterans’ outreach projects with VA and in Southeast Wisconsin. Laura Johnson is a community program coordinator at MCW, Department of Family and Community Medicine with expertise in managing multi-partner, educational projects, and financial aspects of grant awards. Johnson is project coordinator. Patricia Clason, MS is a Trauma Informed Instructor at UW-Milwaukee. She will provide advanced training in emotional intelligence and trauma informed facilitation for the Preparatory Training. Paul Emmanuel is a Fulbright Scholar and artist specializing in memorialization. His work explores the way mental and physical landscapes interact in their construction of memories and identity. Emmanuel will provide Preparatory Training on memorials and how they work to construct stories and histories. Sean Clark, MA, Army veteran, is an educator, director of programs at the War Memorial Center. He specializes in curriculum design, public programming of the War Memorial Center. He will provide historical overviews for each memorial site. Bryan Rindfleish, PhD is an assistant professor of history at Marquette University. He is an expert and teacher of indigenous history of urban spaces and will lead the history lecture at the Indigenous Burial Mound in site (300 BC - 400 AD). Otis Winstead is a veteran and President/CEO of Dryhootch Great Lakes, a veteran peer support organization. He initiated the design of the African American Memorial Wall and will provide history lectures for this site. Zeno Franco, PhD is a scholar of heroism and clinical psychologist at Veterans Affairs Franco will provide an overview of heroism as it relates to memorialization and moral injury for our Preparatory Training. Kyle Kummer: Kyle is our graphic designer and has worked with our team for 10 years doing veteran-led design including Warrior’s Path. Kyle will design all flyers, discussion guides and public facing reports. Yolanda Medina: U.S. Marine Corps 1981-1985. Yolanda is the Executive Director of the Military and Family Resource Center at UW-Milwaukee and advises veteran students. She is part of the Female Veteran exhibit, I am not Invisible. Discussion leader. Charlie Walton: U.S Marine Corps, 1968-1972. Charlie Walton is our elder, identifies as a Black Veteran, and is an experienced public speaker. He has 7 years-experience providing pastoral services through the Baptist Church serving the Milwaukee inner city. Discussion leader. Carlos Munoz II: U.S. Army 2002-2019. Carlos is an active member of the Milwaukee Hispanic community, and the Director of Veterans Upward Bound at UW-Milwaukee, supporting veterans in higher education application and attainment. Discussion leader. Daniel Kasza: U.S. Army 2003-2015. Dan is a community engaged researcher, and skilled public speaker, having presented at three national conferences. He is co-author of two peer reviewed articles on veteran engagement in programming and research. Discussion leader. Vera Roddy: U.S. Air Force/Air Force Reserves, 1977-1992. Vera is the founder and leader of the Artful Warrior’s, a grass-roots peer-lead group, for veterans and community partners to connect in creative endeavors. Discussion leader. Talking With Monuments is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Images documenting moments during the veteran-to-veteran moral injury discussions at monuments in Milwaukee during June 2025.

Montserrat College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. May 16, 2025 Paul Emmanuel receives Honorary Doctorate from Montserrat College of Art The framed Honorary Doctorate given at the ceremony A video recording of the commencement speech Paul Emmanuel delivers keynote address and receives Honorary Doctorate from Montserrat College of Art. The Zambia-born artist is currently a Fulbright Scholar and preparing for an exhibition of his work at The Smithsonian in Washington, DC. A display of his work was also shown at the college. Read more

Judkis, M., The Washington Post, Washington D.C. USA, May, 2025. Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art was originally scheduled to coincide with the worldwide Pride celebration in Washington. The museum postponed it until next year, citing a funding shortfall. Untethered/Retethered (detail) 2025, Decommissioned, model T-10, US military personnel parachute with severed suspension lines, detached harness with risers, 550 paracord, High-definition video projection, stereo soundtrack. This work is featured in Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Winter – summer 2026. Read the original article on washingtonpost.com Connect to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art website

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. Abstract 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