An infinite woman

Vorschau: geschrieben vor der Eröffnung

In 1925 Citroën's expedition across Africa, La Croisière Noire, brought back pictures of a Mangbetu woman from north-eastern Congo, seen in profile. That image went on to fill Western magazines, exhibitions and films. Now the story is told inside Citroën's own former garage on the Brussels canal.

The show runs in two acts, a nod to Saidiya Hartman's 2008 essay Venus in Two Acts. In the first you follow the archive: how the profile travelled until it became, in the announcement's words, an "ethnographic fetish". In the second, artists of the African diaspora take such images back, among them Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, Simone Leigh, Lorraine O'Grady, Frida Orupabo and Barbara Walker, whose 2002 work The Sitter, credited to Tate Modern, is the show's lead image.

It is in Room 12. A standard ticket is €18, €9 for 19 to 26s, and free with museumPASSmusées or a Brussels Card. Hours are Wednesday to Sunday 11:00 to 19:00, Thursdays until 20:00.