CURA.

One of the most transformative visual experiences I had happened in the desert. In the abstract landscape, thoughts and feelings lost their edges. Time felt suspended as space turned into a soft void. Until the sight of a plastic bottle gleaming under the grains of sand brought me back to earth. How can such a mundane object carry so much power? How did it arrive all the way here?

Senegalese-American artist Coumba Samba’s work raises similar questions. In her exhibition Capital (2024) at Cell Project Space in London last year, she presented Plastic (2024), a photograph picturing plastic bottles and other trash interrupting the sunny view of a rocky beach. Taken in Dakar, where Samba’s father lives, the photo is a visual testament to the millions of tons of rubbish dumped yearly by Europe and the US in West Africa, among other nations; an act which poses significant risks to landscapes and people living near these toxic sites. The image of a polluted landscape, framed in pink, as if a cute souvenir nicely packaged for gallery consumption, feels like a memory and a warning, recalling the underside of Western consumer culture, the illogic of its constant demands and desires. By portraying waste as the main character, Samba displays invisible economies and global systems of exploitation, creating a new kind of contemporary still life.

Samba exposes the power games that move flows of capital globally, not only through photographs but also through bodies in installations and performances that use organic materials and bring natural landscapes into the gallery. In FIFA (2024), a performance presented at Cell Project Space and developed in collaboration with École Des Sables in Senegal, three dancers moved on a muddy stage made of soil, stainless steel, and plexiglass. The dancers’ motions were slow at first, then became more intense, splattering mud on themselves and the audience. The repeated body actions and gestures were sampled from Senegalese Laamb wrestling, the South American game Queimada, and soccer. A sound composition—developed by Estonian artist Gretchen Lawrence—intensified the sense of being part of a game: a remix of field recording from Senegal, distorted kicks and sirens, drone sounds, sometimes hypnotic and other times recalling dance and minimal electronic music.

With a title hinting at the organization that made the game of soccer a dominant and corrupt form of entertainment, connecting politics, capital, and people globally, Coumba’s FIFA recalls systems of exchanges with bodies at their center. I think of Pierre Klossowski’s definition of human bodies as “living currencies,” whose sensations shape libidinal economies, and also of André Lepecki’s definition of performance as “a primary target for surveillance and for being (ab)used by economic and state power.” Actions can be read as experimentation if guided by people and cultures, and normativity if controlled by powers and institutions. By bringing these types of neoliberal performances into the gallery, Samba seems to ask us: who is the player and the audience? But mostly, who gets to play, and who gets to watch?

A sense of theatricality, the staging of capitalist trade, and questions of access also emerge in Samba’s oeuvre via her use of color. In her solo show Red Gas at Arcadia Missa (2024), Samba filled a blue-carpeted room with radiators painted in baby blue, bright red, sand, light pink, and navy. Samba’s choice to present familiar designs of “no discernable style”—to quote the 1920 Constructivist Manifesto—recall the tendencies of Constructivist and Suprematist movements rooted in the drive for social change. As in the tradition of geometrical abstraction, whose focus was on pure form and monochromatic, non-representational surfaces, Samba’s radiators can be just iron objects. But they can also embody a whole system of relations. As vessels for gas, they are in fact a conduit for transnational histories, interweaving the political and economic agendas of Africa, Russia, and the West. Despite the sanctions on gas exportation, especially since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West is still illegally buying from Russia while looking to build new piping systems connecting with North and West Africa. By isolating objects from their usual context into minimal compositions that favor bold colors, Coumba Samba uncovers transnational art histories and reinscribes new meanings into the very contexts where she intervenes. Removed from their usual domestic settings, cold heaters became the silent protagonists on the global stage of the exchange of energy resources, bringing these issues closer to home.

Samba’s choice to let colors speak of complex power dynamics is also visible in a series of stripy poles presented in her latest solo show Dress Code (2024–2025) at empire in NYC. As the artist explains to me via email: “The colors of the poles are picked from various flags, none resembling an existing flag. Except for the tricolore, that’s alluding to imperial flags.” The show’s press release questions the hierarchy between states, suggesting that even if there is a semblance of equality, some of these states are just “permanent observers.” In sampling colors from various flags and using the aesthetics of international symbols, Samba revives the aims of formalist art to connect with the politics of its time, moving the discussion about participation, culture, and identity-making onto a transnational scale.

Besides faulty power systems, Samba explores other structures of comfort and support through collaboration and self-narration. As she affirms in our exchange: “Where I can, I try to bring in collaboration as a means of community building and sharing.” Alongside the joint effort for FIFA, Samba is part of the experimental pop-duo music project New York with Gretchen Lawrence. Together they also presented at Emalin the installation Cityscape (2023)—a monumental assemblage of found objects including CDs, videocassettes, denim studded shorts, PlayStation games, and other “visual signifiers of 2000s hipsters.” This lo-fi skyline created a visual vocabulary for the translation of their mutual migratory identities shaped between post-Soviet Estonia and Senegal, New York, and London. Samba also draws from personal family narratives using found objects. Stripe blinds (2023) is a broken window painted in colors that echo a picture of Samba’s sister taken during her first years as a model in New York, before she turned to religion and family life.

Samba transfigures colors and objects into vessels for memories and transformative abstract visions, blending personal, domestic, political, environmental, and art-historical realities. Like the materials employed—from sand to dust, from plastic to metal—which I keep encountering in bursting cities as well as in bare deserts, Samba’s work is at once local and universal, clear and mystifying, lasting and temporary; and above all, human.