Tracey Rose
Tracings (2015)
First installed in Brussels in 2015 as part of an exhibition at WIELS which also featured Die Wit Man, this work is also concerned with the genocidal history of Belgium in Congo and the present-day implications for a 21st Century society. The pipes are painted in Caucasian skin tones, alluding to Belgium’s colonial, white supremacist agenda in Congo, and are also a reference to the fantastical ignorance which it implied.
In the context of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern, the white skin tone points to the extent to which social, cultural and political institutions in the global West are generally still dominated by a white view of the world.