Renzo Martens and Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) will represent the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale 2024. The collective grew out of the Dutch artist’s collaboration with Congolese plantation workers, in Lusanga (once known as Leverville, the colonial-era headquarters of the Lever plantation operations), with whom he set up a sculpture workshop; and in 2017, in the DRC countryside at the White Cube exhibition space.
Martens came to prominence with his 2008 film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, in which, travelling around the DRC, the artist attempts to engage local photographers in discussions about the nature of the international media economy and the Western market for images of suffering in other parts of the world, encouraging them to exploit their own poverty and instability for profit. It was a work, J.J. Charlesworth wrote, that ‘forces us to face the uncomfortable question of the balance of economic power that continues to condemn many Africans to a life of subsistence labour and grinding poverty, somehow regardless of the countless millions in aid, and the thousands of aid workers and NGOs that have come to Africa to do “good work”’.
The Dutch artist and his Congolese colleagues will open an exhibition at White Cube in Lusanga simultaneously to the Dutch pavilion.
Artist Ced’art Tamasala of CARPC said in a statement: ‘The opportunity to connect a white cube on a plantation to one of the art world’s top events allows a direct look at these two worlds and the disparities between them.’
