Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise

<p>This exhibition is comprised of sculptures rendered in cacao, drawings, a video piece, and a reading room that provides information on how and why these artworks came to be. The participating artists belong to the collective Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC) and work together to make their individual artworks, with the support and guidance of outside collaborators who help get their expressions out into the world. They live in Lusanga, formerly Leverville (named after William Lever, the early twentieth-century Belgian founder of the local palm oil plantation that turned into the modern day Unilever corporation), in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All of the artist members of CATPC have worked or work on plantations run by multinational corporations that make many of the daily products we buy in stores in the USA, Europe, and beyond. Their sculptures are figurative and their pen-and-ink drawings depict complex structures and personal narratives; the video, <em>Upside Down World</em> (2017), is composed of a series of actions and performances by artist members, set on the CATPC property. The title comes from an artwork donated by Carsten Höller who had previously participated in the Unilever-sponsored commission series at Tate Modern in London, which ran from 2000 – 2012. All these components come together to form a cosmology that addresses the materials of life and labor, and their circulation…</p>