Democratic Republic of the Congo / 2008 / 15mins / Experimental / French

U.M.H.K. stands for Union Minière du Haut Katanga, a Belgian mining company founded in 1906, in Leopold II’s Congo Free State, to exploit the mineral wealth of Katanga. From 1908, U.M.H.K. accounted for a massive percentage of the Belgian Congo’s GDP; after the company was nationalized by Mobutu Sese Seko in 1967, taking on the name Gécamines, this continued to be the case, despite stunning mismanagement and asset stripping. Entire lives were built around the company: the lives of generations of mine workers and their families, at once supported and violently exploited by it. Today, the company, under a new name and, once again, with a significant European presence, continues to impact, shape and exploit the lives of thousands. Focusing on the intersecting movements of bodies, machines and materials, Baloji’s film casts a simultaneously jarring and poetic gaze on these lives, lived amidst the ruins of a business that made successive colonial and neocolonial regimes extraordinarily wealthy and left the Congolese people destitute.

Sammy Baloji

Sammy Baloji, who was born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1978, graduated with a degree in letters from the University of Lubumbashi. He was interested in comics before turning to photography and video. Sammy Baloji won two awards at the 2007 Bamako Biennale, was a finalist for the 2009 Pictet Prize in Paris for his Mémoire series and took the Prince Claus Culture and Development Prize from the eponymous foundation for Mémoire. Sammy has participated in various international shows worldwide, from the first Photo Quai exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris to one at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren in 2009 and 2011, WIELS in Brussels and the Museum for African Art in New York. Baloji participated in the Lyon Biennale (2015), the Venice Biennale (2015), PhotoQuai festival at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris (2015), the Dakar Biennale (2016) and Documenta XIV (2017). He is a co-founder of the Picha Encounters, a photography and video biennale in Lubumbashi. Learn More