Exposition Coloniale

Exposition Coloniale combines posters from different colonial exhibitions held in France with pseudo-scientific illustrations and engravings devoted to the classification of “races.” The still images are arranged chronologically and then assembled into a video sequence, turning their historical progression into a temporal continuum. Temporal scanning then compresses different moments from this sequence into a single image, where representations from separate sources overlap and interweave. This juxtaposition connects two complementary forms of colonial discourse: its popular and spectacular staging through colonial exhibitions, and its legitimisation through pseudo-scientific theories that classified human beings into racial hierarchies by placing them at different stages of human evolution.