Congo as Fiction was a compact, informative, and visually intriguing exhibition at the Museum Rietberg Zürich. It was sourced from the rich photographic and documentary archive as well as the exquisite art collection of German anthropologist and art ethnographer Hans Himmelheber (1908–2003) to bring into dialogue the creativity and cultures of colonial French and Belgian Congo in the 1930s with contemporary Congolese artistic perspectives. The core argument of the exhibition was quite simple: namely, that the Congo is and always has been rich in culture, arts, and creativity but also has served historically as a canvas for Eurocentric projection and fiction. This is not necessarily a new insight, and the exhibition must be situated in the recent trend of museums and international exhibition projects to put Congo at the center of a critical analysis of Africa's colonial past and its legacy in the present. They almost all rely on the...

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