What is “raw material” in an age of ready-mades? For Coumba Samba, it is color. Her show “Red Gas” (2024) at Arcadia Missa, London, interprets diplomacy as a play of surfaces: her sole reference is a photo, taken in June of 2023, that shows Russian president Vladimir Putin shaking hands with then-president of Senegal Macky Sall. They stand on a big blue carpet. The carpet could be anywhere; it happens to be installed in a convention center in St. Petersburg called Expoforum. The men pose, smiling, a bit in front and to the side of the triple-striped flags (green, yellow, red; red, white, blue) of their respective nations, which are around twice the size of their blue-suited bodies. They look a little like board game figurines. Though the occasion it documents — the second Russia-Africa Summit, during which Sall and Putin met to discuss “opportunities to step up partnerships in agriculture, geological exploration, mining, energy, [and] fisheries” as well as the war in Ukraine — has doubtless affected lives across the globe, the photo itself is not particularly interesting. Banal and devoid of aesthetic intention, it’s the kind of image meant to look invisible.
“Red Gas,” which consists of six monochromatic radiators of various shapes and sizes innocently installed over a carpet hued Expoforum-blue, forces us to confront what normally passes for background. Each radiator is painted a specific shade color-picked from the press photo — the dark navy of Sall’s suit, for example, or the color of Putin’s face. Radiators bear an obvious symbolic relevance to the geopolitics at play; in the UK, where Samba is based, even government buildings are heated by Russian gas, despite the fact that the country has publicly taken a strong stance against Russian fossil fuel exports to Europe. Affixed to the gallery’s white walls, the glossy, pneumatic radiators are sinister and surreal.
Color-picking is a technique Samba uses often. For a video of flashing colors shown in a Tokyo karaoke bar (Tokyo Karaoke, 2024, at Galerie Tenko), Samba sampled colors from photos she took of the city’s subway system. One of the pleasures of encountering Samba’s work is becoming aware of pure color, devoid of form: you start seeing an eyedropper-shaped icon running perpetually over everything — landscapes, faces, screens. “Red Gas” is overtly political; the show channels circulations of capital, visualizing its often-invisible incursions into quotidian spaces. But there’s also something playfully absurd about drag-and-dropping Putin’s skin tone onto an unassuming household appliance — Samba’s transubstantiations of digital images into material form are almost magical. Rather than painting a representation of the world (or an expression of a subjectivity) onto a canvas, her gesture of abstraction functions inversely: as a literal objectification that transforms a real environment into an encoding of a flat image. This process of extracting raw color and injecting it elsewhere, onto a radiator or a canvas or a karaoke screen, reverse-compresses a three-digit code (R, G, B) back into a three-dimensional object. But it is also a way of encoding the ineffable, internal movements of memory into something much easier to look at: cold, hard color. Samba’s work asks: What do we really (think we) see when we are seeing? What does form bring to color, and vice versa?
For Stripe (2023), shown at Drei in Cologne, Samba worked off a photo of her mom’s Bronx apartment. In the resulting painting, this reference is reduced to a series of colored stripes that vaguely evoke ISBN codes, striped candies, or maybe flags produced by a poorlytrained AI (the floors, in this show, are covered in vinyl bearing the French tricolore). The other paintings in the “Stripe” series are inspired by composited images from the free stock photo website pixabay.com. In another more personal work, Stripe Blinds (2023), wooden window shades are painted with colors ripped from a photo of Samba’s sister. The blinds, hung over white walls, are literally blind: instead of hiding a window, they show us an image that is, to us, illegible. Samba often juxtaposes the intensely individual and specific with the generic — stock photos, flags, heraldic signs — and the point is that we can’t tell the difference. Family photos, hidden in abstraction, pose as universals. Samba’s “Stripes” materialize the invisible imbrications of the micro and macroscopic, global and local, flattening these planes into simple, shiny surfaces.
For Cityscape (2023), an installation created with frequent collaborator Gretchen Lawrence, Samba’s sampling takes a more material form. Composed of found objects stacked to suggest a skyline, Samba and Lawrence’s city consists largely of outdated or broken consumer electronics, many of them hot pink: Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 games, cassettes, CD players, a boombox, VCR tapes, a vinyl record. Like Samba’s radiators and window shades, these are objects robbed of their function and forced into the world of mere appearances. The work also includes a pair of studded denim cut-offs, microphones, and a bong. Cityscape is charming in part because it suggests a narrative: the moving-day detritus left out on the sidewalk of a certain kind of Bushwick apartment, for example. It also reminds me of the towers of trinkets, the spreads of knockoff AirPods and Gucci bags hawked on New York’s Canal Street. It reminds me of shopping — which, after all, is what cities are mostly about. In installation shots of the work, a real cityscape is visible in the background. Through Emalin gallery’s street-facing window, one sees BOXPARK, a London chain of hipster “pop-up malls” made from retrofitted shipping containers. Given this juxtaposition, Gretchen and Samba’s ready-mades take on a slightly sarcastic tone. Galleries and lifestyle stores are really just spaces selling stuff — “recycled” or not.
And when objects can’t be profitably upcycled, where do they go? In other projects, Samba investigates the underside of Western consumerism. Every year, millions of tons of garbage are shipped from Europe and the US to developing nations lacking proper waste management facilities, many of them in West Africa. In 2022, it was estimated that fifteen million pieces of used clothing arrive in Ghana every week. Broken consumer electronics — often exported under the pretense that they might be usefully repurposed — pose extreme health risks to those living near toxic waste sites. Samba’s “Capital,” a solo show at Cell Project Space earlier this year, documents this ongoing form of colonialism. Taken in Dakar, where Samba’s father lives, her photo Plastic (2024) shows a pile of trash gleaming on a sandy beach.
The centerpiece of “Capital” isFIFA (2024), a performance developed in collaboration with choreographer Alesandra Seutin and the École des Sables, a dance company in Dakar of which Seutin is co-director. Lawrence provided the score for the piece, field recordings from Senegal set to royalty-free loops and delivered via a white megaphone-like loudspeaker meant to evoke the outdoor speaker systems used by mosques when calling their communities together for prayer. Over the course of the nearly hour-long performance, three dancers circulate over a mud floor, repeatedly flinging themselves to the ground in a choreography inspired by Senegalese Laamb wrestling, the South American game Queimada, and soccer. The mud floor in FIFA recalls earlier uses of organic materials in Samba’s work — for exhibitions at both Galerina (“Couture,” 2023) and Stadtgalerie Bern (“Slow Dance (3),” 2023), Samba has installed piles of sand that seem to leak out of the otherwise clean corners of the gallery space. After the FIFA performance, the wet soil dries into a hard crust that preserves the imprint of the dancers’ movements. In this way, the installation retains and exhibits the often-invisible economies that Samba is interested in — in this case, the traces of bodies in labor, exploitation, entertainment. Soccer is one of Senegal’s main soft-power exports to the West: Samba notes that, for many people she encounters in Britain, the sport is their only association with the country. With FIFA, Samba stages games of power against a backdrop of the very real forms of global domination and subjugation played by organizations like the Fédération Internationale de Football Association.
Together, Samba and Lawrence also make up the band New York, an experimental pop music project that has brought them attention beyond the confines of the art world — the duo has been invited to perform at both Bushwick clubs and art institutions like Kunsthalle Basel. Their first album, No Sleep Till N.Y. (2022), synthesizes electro-clash and reggaeton into a sound that is sexy and smart, self-consciously cool, but also really funny. “You should see how much I can’t stand myself,” Samba intones in a perfectly auto-tuned deadpan, “Because I’m a lazy bitch.” Or: “I saw you on the subway / I want to get in your skinny jeans.” If the album sounds like the interior monologue of a barred-out Barbie come to life from a flash party photo, the video for their 2024 single “night and day,” appropriately, is a slideshow of photos in exactly that genre — except it’s just pics of everyone’s party shoes. Their music video for “L.A.,” a compilation of stock videos in a style I associate with fan-made Avicii lyrics videos, has a similar quality: of a genre performed so seriously, so vacantly, that it crosses into the uncanny. Lawrence, who produces the music, exclusively uses free soundbites found online, and Samba’s lyrics, too, often read like ready-mades. “ginger candy <3” has some of my favorite lyrics, ever: “You’re so hot, You’re so hot, I love you I love you I love you I love you.”
On Rapstar* (2024), their equally experimental though perhaps less danceable second album, Samba’s voice only rarely surfaces into fully articulated lyrics. Instead, it’s more like she’s singing scraps of language that echo through a richly textured soundscape of snaps, crackles, and pops. “Um, hi… I’m just calling, um… Cause I have something to say?” she lilts at the beginning of Rapstar* Side A’s “hi.” Split into an A and a B side, the album was inspired by producers like J Dilla and Miss Kittin, as well as Chief Keef and Pink Dollaz. When speaking about the moods of the respective albums, Samba cites Madonna’s various “eras” as an inspiration: New York’s concerts for No Sleep Till N.Y. and Rapstar* are sung by different characters, in different costumes. Their earlier shows staged “bedroom pop” as a literal scenario — Samba and Lawrence would perform sitting on the floor with their laptops, styled fully in the “I <3 NY” print pajamas sold at tourist shops. These performances had a feeling of intimacy; the two artists sat inward instead of toward the audience, addressing the songs only to each other. For Rapstar*, they chose a more “militaristic,” high-energy mode. Although the two albums differ in style, both deliver a special kind of slick, empty generality that is wholly, uniquely theirs — or, perhaps better said, New York’s.
It is this quality, this misleadingly flat-and-shiny universality that most recalls Samba’s “Stripe” paintings: throughout Samba’s work, one has a sense of very much raw emotion, very many references, very much life being compressed into something deceptively easy to consume. Something, maybe, like a hard, sweet candy, a pair of pink earbuds, or a pretty abstract painting.
