2026
FOMU Antwerp.
Fomu
Thinking Tools
Material Revolts: Ecosystem against Empire
The Thinking Tools research group (KASKA) is proud to present new work by visual artist Kelvin Haizel (b. 1987, Ghana).
Material Revolts: Ecosystem against Empire emerged in response to a racist joke made by a middle-aged white Belgian man. During Haizel’s residency in Antwerp, this man remarked that the artist was ‘lucky not to have to stay in the zoo’. This hurtful comment prompted Haizel to focus on an album by the Belgian photographer Jacques van den Bemden from 1885.
From that album, Haizel selected ten portraits of Congolese men, women and children who were exhibited in a human zoo during the World’s Fair in Antwerp.
Rather than emphasising the painful colonial past, Haizel focuses on the materiality of the photographs themselves. The photographs from the album are albumen prints, a photographic technique that uses egg white. The presence of this organic material makes albumen prints vulnerable to mould and bacteria, triggering a series of chemical changes. For Haizel, this process is a form of resistance: nature breaks down the photograph and thus ‘frees’ the people trapped within it.
Traces of these chemical processes also become visible in the Petri dishes containing microbial samples from the albumen photographs. In this way, Haizel reveals the hidden ecosystems surrounding these historical images. What is allowed to grow and what is suppressed?
Haizel challenges you to view history not as a frozen moment, but as living matter that is constantly in motion.
Wall texts
Room 1
This room displays reproductions of portraits from the 19th-century photo album of the Belgian photographer Jacques van den Bemden. Behind each portrait looms a golden world of proliferating bacteria and fungi. This threat is echoed in the contemporary albumen print attached to each portrait. As these images are only briefly fixed, they will slowly fade away.
At Haizel’s request, Godelive Kasangati Kabena (1996, DR Congo) wrote a fictional life story for each portrait. In this way, she detaches each subject from the colonial context in which they were once photographed and restores their humanity and individuality.
Haizel focuses on what is fragile, both the paper and the people on it. In this way, he succeeds in stripping the depicted bodies of any fixed meaning.
Godelive Kasangati Kabena is an artist from the DR Congo who works with photography, installations and self-portraits. In her practice, she explores identity and community.
Kelvin Haizel, Silence between the Laughs: Portraits of Us. 1885-2026
Room 2
This room focuses on the hidden life within old albumen photographs. In Golden Contours, you can see large canvases featuring microscopic images of bacteria and fungi stirring beneath the surface of the image. The canvases hang on metal rods shaped like the minuscule scratches on the photograph, visible only under a microscope.
In Unseen Allies, you will see 10 illuminated Petri dishes filled with growing bacteria. Haizel collected dust samples from the original albumen photographs and brought the micro-organisms to life. What you see was always there, but never so visible.
Albumen prints turn reddish-brown as they age. Negative Positive I & II converts this discolouration into a digital ‘negative’ that consequently turns blue. These ‘false’ negatives are therefore not negatives of the photographed subject, but of the ‘photographic object’.
- Kelvin Haizel, Golden Contours. Digital print on Cotton linen, 1885-2026.
- Kelvin Haizel, Unseen Allies. A set of 10 petri dishes with cultured microbes, 1885-2026.
- Kelvin Haizel, Negative Positive I. Inkjet Print on Backlit Film in a Lightbox, 1885-2026.
- Kelvin Haizel, Negative Positive II. A set of 10 Inkjet Prints on Backlit Film in a Lightbox, 2026.