For the past decade, Dawoud Bey has been making work that engages the American landscape and its history in relation to the African American past. These landscapes have included places with a history of Black enslavement and flight. Bey uses the familiar style of classic landscape photography to unsettle the idealized ways we often imagine these sites. Although the images show empty scenes, they carry the weight of the Black lives once shaped by these landscapes — bodies that are not pictured but are still deeply present.
At the Academy, he is producing a series of photographs focused on the landscape surrounding the site of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, which brought together 14 European colonial powers and concluded with the signing of the General Act of Berlin, which aimed to regulate European colonization and trade on the African continent and effectively partitioned it.
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