Messing Encounters2020-2021Dimensions variable with installation, Single channel video projection, 4:00 min, color and black and white, sound
Messing Encounters stages a critical dialogue between an African immigrant in Belgium and a Congolese statue displaced into a Belgian museum. The video questions the loss of meaning suffered by artistic and cultural objects when they are uprooted from their original context.The work explores the trauma linked to this loss of cultural context — the statue becomes a foreign and unreadable witness.This symbolic conversation highlights the tension between the one who looks (in the position of the museum) and the one who addresses the displaced object.Entangled temporalities: the past (the statue’s original context) and the present (immigration, Western institutions) intersect in a subversive exchange.With Messing Encounters, Hamza Halloubi responds to debates on the restitution of artworks from formerly colonized countries, and focuses on what has been taken, lost, and cannot be returned.