A salon conversation with Bambi Ceuppens and Kadia Doumbouya on image sovereignty, representation, and the ways Black women have been depicted throughout history and continue to shape their own image today.

To mark the finissage of Copper thread, Rubber thread, Sugar thread, we invite you to join a salon conversation inspired by Seeing Katharina (2026), Sammy Baloji's new tapestry. For this work, Baloji draws on The Negress Katharina, a sixteenth-century drawing by Albrecht Dürer, widely considered one of the earliest known representations of a Black woman in Europe, believed to have lived in Antwerp.

Approaching the work from two distinct perspectives, Ceuppens and Doumbouya reflect on the histories and politics of representation. Ceuppens situates the work within the history of colonial image-making and its continuing influence on contemporary visual culture. Doumbouya explores the body as an archive and self-portraiture as a space for autonomy, imagination and resistance.

Together, they consider questions of visibility, power and representation. Who creates the image of the Black female body? Who determines how that image is read? And how can artists create new forms of representation today?

Moderated by Laetitia Sabiti (Kunsthal Extra City).

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PRACTICAL INFORMATION

• Location: Church of Kunsthal Extra City
• Language: English
• Admission: voluntary contribution*. Registration is required. Reserve your place here!

* This summer, we are operating on a pay-what-you-can basis. We suggest a contribution of €7, but you are free to choose the amount you wish to pay. Admission to the exhibitions is included.

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Bambi Ceuppens is a social anthropologist, author, researcher and curator at the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren. Her work focuses on Western representations of Africa and Africans, Belgium's colonial history in the Congo, and the lasting impact of colonialism on contemporary visual culture. She is the author publications including Onze Congo? Congolezen over de kolonisatie (2003) and has also curated several exhibitions, including Congo Art Works (2016), developed in collaboration with Sammy Baloji.

Kadia Doumbouya is a multidisciplinary artist from Guinea, based in Brussels. Her practice brings together painting, performance and culinary projects to explore questions of memory, embodiment, diaspora and collective care. Drawing on personal experience, oral traditions and archival imagery, she investigates how bodies carry, transform and reimagine history.