Exhibition Announcement : An Infinite Woman at KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels.

An infinite woman examines colonial image-making and Black female imagination through archives and contemporary artistic resistance.

An infinite woman at KANAL revisits the image of a Mangbetu woman from north-eastern Congo that circulated widely after Citroën’s La Croisière Noire expedition. The exhibition examines how this image became a modernist and colonial emblem, and how artists of African descent have since reclaimed, questioned, and transformed such imagery. The exhibition unfolds in two acts. The first traces the archival life of the Mangbetu profile as a Western ethnographic fantasy; the second turns to contemporary artists who break that visual system open. With works by artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Frida Orupabo, Magdalene Odundo, Faith Ringgold, Barbara Walker, and others, the show connects colonial history with acts of imaginative refusal. It is a project about archives, visibility, and the force of Black female subjectivity beyond inherited frames.