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

The conversation takes its cue from Seeing Katharina (2026), a new tapestry by Sammy Baloji currently on view in the exhibition Copper thread, Rubber thread, Sugar thread at Kunsthal Extra City. For this work, Baloji draws on The Negress Katharina, a sixteenth-century drawing by Albrecht Dürer that is considered one of the earliest known representations of a Black woman in Europe, believed to have depicted a woman living in Antwerp. By reimagining this historical image, Baloji raises questions about visibility, power, and the ways images acquire meaning over time.

In the week of 30 June, when the independence of Congo is commemorated, Seeing Katharina offers an opportunity to reflect on the history and contemporary relevance of representation. Who creates the image of the Black female body? And who determines how that image is read?

Approaching the work from two distinct perspectives, Bambi Ceuppens and Kadia Doumbouya enter into conversation. Ceuppens situates the work within the history of colonial image-making and its enduring influence on contemporary forms of representation. Doumbouya explores the body as an archive and self-portraiture as a space of autonomy, imagination and resistance.

Moderated by Laetitia Sabiti (Kunsthal Extra City), the conversation opens up questions about how images circulate, shift and make new forms of representation possible.

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Bambi Ceuppens is a social anthropologist, author, researcher and curator at the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium. Her work focuses on Western representations of Africa and Africans, Belgian and Congolese colonial history, and their continuing impact on contemporary visual culture. She is the author of Our Congo? Congolese Perspectives on Colonisation (2003) and editor of Pietpraat: On Black Pete in Belgium (2018). She has also curated several exhibitions, including Indépendance! (2010) and Congo Art Works (2016), developed in collaboration with Sammy Baloji.

Kadia Doumbouya is a multidisciplinary artist from Guinea based in Brussels. Bringing together painting, performance and culinary projects, her practice explores questions of memory, embodiment, diaspora and collective care. Drawing on lived experience, oral traditions and archival imagery, she investigates how bodies carry, transform and reimagine history. Through her ongoing project KOMOS, she creates spaces where food, storytelling and encounter become vehicles for knowledge-sharing, memory and cultural exchange.