White Cube

While some museums are closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Apollo’s usual weekly pick of exhibitions will include shows at institutions that are currently open as well as digital projects providing virtual access to art and culture.

Over the course of several years, the Dutch film-maker Renzo Martens documented the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), a cooperative of plantation workers in Lusanga, who started making and selling sculptures as a means of buying back land from international plantation companies, and ending its desiccating monoculture. In 2017 the group opened a gallery, the White Cube, on the newly purchased land. Martens’ White Cube is both a portrait of these workers and an argument for rethinking the international art world’s relationship to the exploitative plantation system, both historical and contemporary. For the global launch of the White Cube in Lusanga, the film will be projected on to its walls every day for a month, as well as at 12 other institutions across four continents, from Kinshasa to London, Berlin and Tokyo. Each institution will also make the film available to stream online (24 March– 24 April). Find out more here  – or watch a trailer of the film here.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary here

Still from White Cube (2020), Renzo Martens

Still from White Cube (2017), Renzo Martens

Installation view of ‘Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise’, an exhibition at the SculptureCenter, New York, in 2017. Photo: Joshua Bright/NYT