Article | Kezia Ouomoye (Senior Editor, The Neoteric)
[ 14th September 2026 | 8:49pm]
What happens when photographs refuse to stay still? What lives beneath the image?
[A Conversation with Kelvin Haizel on Decay, Colonial Archives and the Material Life of Photography.]
The core invention of the photograph is to capture a moment, freeze it in time and compel it to stand still. What does a photograph promise? Preservation of history for generations to come. An image can survive a biological body. A place is preserved even when it disappears.
But what happens when the photograph itself starts to evolve and refuses to stand still? An original photograph is exposed to conditions that causes change in color, cracks, and fading as the photograph ages.
In Kelvin Haizel’s exhibition titled Material Revolts: Ecosystem against Empire, we attempt to ponder the question: what dialogues arise within the deterioration of a photograph when something other than loss emerges? The exhibition was recently on view at FOMU in Antwerp from 26 June to 23 August 2026.
The exhibition emerged from Haizel’s 2024 three-month residency at MORPHO with the Thinking Tools research group at KASKA and takes as its point of departure a nineteenth-century album in the FOMU collection containing twelve pictures of Congolese men, women and children exhibited in the human zoo at the Antwerp World’s Fair of 1885.
FOMU describes the exhibition as a microscopic examination of colonial photographic representation. But Haizel’s project is not simply an examination of what these photographs represent. He looks at what the photographs themselves have become.
It is important to note that this distinction is crucial.
Through his body of work, Haizel draws our attention to the evolving histories beneath the photographs, the embedded growth on paper, albumen, bacteria, fungi, chemical reactions, scratches, deterioration, storage, handling and time.
I discussed with Haizel about what brought him back to these photographs, his interest in the material life cycle of images, the conflicting relationship that occurs between preservation and power, the collaboration he had with Godelive Kasangati Kabena, and his thoughts on decay not simply as destruction but as an opening.
Kezia Ouomoye: What made you turn specifically to Jacques van den Bemden’s 1885 album? Did the painful encounter with racism have something to do with it?
Kelvin Haizel: I did not initially request Jacques van den Bemden’s album. My interest at the time lay in the material processes of decay and deterioration in albumen prints, a curiosity that emerged from my first encounter with the medium during my residency and resulting exhibition at the MARKK in Hamburg. With this in mind, I asked the team at FOMU whether their collection included any albumen prints. They presented me with Bemden’s album from the 1885 World’s Fair. At that stage, I had no intention of working with the two-page spread depicting Congolese people. It was only later, following my encounter with a racist joke about how I was lucky not to have been housed in the Antwerp zoo, that I returned to these images. That encounter fundamentally shifted my reading of the album, directing my attention towards the colonial violence embedded in its representations and prompting me to engage with those particular photographs.
“That encounter fundamentally shifted my reading of the album.”
— Kelvin Haizel
Haizel explains that he did not approach the archive searching for images of colonial violence, but he was fascinated with the matter of the photographs. The album print pricked his curiosity because of its vulnerability and deterioration. The targeted racist joke subsequently altered the context of the material investigation. The album became personal and less autobiographical. The racist remark quickly made the images in the album less distant. Therefore the photographs in the album did not change but the conditions of perception and looking had.
Kezia Ouomoye: What shifted in your practice from viewing a photograph as a historical document to viewing it as a material life or living ecosystem?
Kelvin Haizel: I have always been fascinated by the objecthood of photographs. My instinctive way of engaging with images has therefore been to attend to their material presence as much as, if not more than, their representational content. However, my interest in microbial ecosystems of photographs only fully emerged during this project. Looking at the photographs through a microscope, I repeatedly encountered intricate worlds beneath their surfaces. I was mesmerized by their complexity and beauty, and began to imagine what it might mean for these hidden ecologies to emerge into visibility. This shift was also conceptual. I have long been interested in the expanded meaning of a photograph beyond its indexical relationship to what it depicts. To borrow from Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs accumulate multiple social and object biographies over time—through their making, circulation, handling, storage, and deterioration—and these histories fundamentally shape what the image becomes, beyond the moment of its making. Viewing photographs as living material ecosystems extends this line of thinking by recognizing that their surfaces are not inert, but dynamic sites where biological, chemical, and historical processes continuously intersect.
From not only a recorder of history but to a participant in history. This perhaps provides the conceptual key to Material Revolts. Photographs as we know it are often approached through representation. We ask the following questions. What does it show? Who is in it? When was it taken? What does it tell us about the past? In this context, Haizel inadvertently asks us to introduce additional sets of questions: What is the photograph made of? What has happened to it? What is happening inside it? What lives on its surface? What has time done to it?
We normally envision archives as spaces where history is protected from time or its purpose is to protect objects from the destructive nature of time, temperature and humidity. So it only logical that photographs are stored in regulated and supervised environments. An art conservator analyzes and restores different art objects and artifacts so they can last for years to come. The purpose is preservation. But preservation itself becomes one of Haizel’s subjects.
Kezia Ouomoye: Your ‘colonial archives’ are in collaboration with fungi, bacteria and chemical decay. Please elaborate on your idea of nature as an active participant in your practice.
Kelvin Haizel: I would not describe my intervention as a collaboration with fungi, bacteria, or chemical decay. I rely on it as a conceptual and artistic framework for understanding colonial photographic collections as materially active. In fact, archival preservation is fundamentally structured around the exclusion of microbial life. Conservation environments are designed to suppress these ecologies precisely because they threaten the physical stability of the archive. In this sense, microbial and chemical processes are conventionally understood as agents of deterioration rather than collaborators. What interests me, however, is precisely this antagonistic relationship. Colonial archives have historically functioned as technologies of power. Through preservation, cataloguing, and classification, they seek to stabilize historical narratives, institutional authority, and particular regimes of knowledge. If microbial life is fundamentally at odds with this desire for permanence and control, then it invites a different set of questions. Rather than viewing microbial decay solely as a conservation problem, what might it reveal if understood as a decolonial phenomenon? What forms of knowledge become possible when we recognise that archives are not fixed repositories of the past, but material sites continually transformed by biological, chemical, and environmental processes? I am not suggesting that microbes intentionally decolonise archives. Rather, their activity unsettles the archive’s claim to permanence, reminding us that no historical record exists outside the material conditions that sustain—and ultimately undo—it. This perspective opens up a way of thinking about decay not only as loss, but also as a force that challenges the authority and stability upon which colonial archives have long depended.
The exhibition turns the functions of the microscope from a scientific instrument to an artistic tool. In works such as the Golden Contours, the microscopic images of bacteria and fungi associated with the albumen photographs are enlarged. Another insightful work of the microscopic dimension is in Hazel’s work titled Unseen Allies, here cultured microbes appear in illuminated Petri Dishes. In Material Revolts, the microscope is not simply a scientific instrument. FOMU joins the conversation stating that the works make visible the hidden organic processes found within the historical albumen prints and reactivating images that might otherwise be understood as static. To break down the function of the microscope, it creates another scale of history. In hand, you have a photograph which contains the visible portrait. Then the microscope reveals what the portrait cannot show. For instance, the colonial archive informs us on how the people were classified. The microbial archive however, tells us what happens to the object carrying that classification.
Kezia Ouomoye: The fictional biographies written by Godelive Kasangati restore individuality to the people portrayed in the colonial archive. How did this collaboration shape the exhibition, and what conversations emerged between your visual language and her literary intervention?
Kelvin Hazel: In many colonial archives, photographed subjects were framed as ethnographic specimens rather than as individuals. Even when they appear in single portraits, they are presented as representative examples of racial or ethnographic categories, rather than as people with singular lives, histories, and identities. Their individuality is subordinated to classificatory systems that privilege typology over personhood. This was also the case in Jacques van den Bemden’s album. Although the sitters were photographed individually—with the exception of two young boys who were photographed together—they were arranged across a two-page spread and collectively identified simply as “Congolese.” This editorial arrangement reinforces their function as ethnographic specimens rather than as distinct individuals. My intention was to work against this ethnographic framing by restoring a sense of individual agency to the subjects, acknowledging them as people with lives and biographies that exceed the colonial archive’s classificatory logic. This was what prompted me to invite Godelive to collaborate on the project. Through creative writing, she composed speculative biographies that weave together historical research, imagination, and abstraction. Rather than claiming to recover factual identities, her approach was brilliant because it invites viewers to encounter each sitter as a person whose life extends beyond what the colonial photograph permits us to know. Even if it’s fictional. I also wanted to avoid presenting the biographies as texts that merely accompany the photographs. Instead, I developed them as material forms that become integral to the visual composition of each portrait. The written and photographic elements are therefore not separate but mutually constitutive, producing an image-text assemblage that reconfigures the subject itself. In this composite form, the colonial portrait is no longer encountered as an ethnographic document alone, but as a new subject that resists the archive’s original terms of representation.
The portraits in van den Bemden’s album present an obvious problem. They depict individuals who have become specimen through the colonial system in which the images were produced. They are not persons but representative of a category. Sadly, each face is merely evidence of an idea about race. A dehumanized individual’s life becomes subordinated to ethnographic classification. The deliberate decision not to claim factual recovery is essential. What however becomes problematic is consciously filling historical gaps with invented certainty. Fictional biography does not say: This is who this person was. It says: This person is more than what this photograph allowed the archive to say. That difference creates space for dignity without manufacturing historical certainty.
Kezia Ouomoye: How do you understand the relationship between preservation, decay, and liberation in your recent exhibition?
Kelvin Haizel: That is something I am still reflecting on. As earlier indicated, it is trite knowledge that archival conservation is historically aligned closely with hegemonic power. But emerging scholarship has demonstrated that decay can unsettle the stability of such powers. This, for me, opens an aperture for speculative liberties when engaging with the archive via attending to the role of decay.
What then can we deduce in the word, aperture? In photography, we learn that an aperture regulates the entry of light. Interestingly, albumen prints need controlled exposure to light to prevent decay. Perhaps, Haizel views decay as another opening. In many ways decay in this context becomes an aperture through which the archive can be approached differently.
We must understand that the photograph is not liberated because it is destroyed. The photograph is exposed to alternate readings and conversations because its supposed stability is interrupted.
Another insightful intervention in the exhibition is Negative Positive I & II. This section of the exhibition presents albumen prints that have turned reddish-brown through the aging process. Haizel took these deteriorations and transformed them into luminous blue digital negatives. This essentially does not restore the work but inverts it.
Kezia Ouomoye: Negative Positive I & II transforms the reddish-brown deterioration of ageing albumen prints into luminous blue digital negatives. What does this inversion suggest about photography’s claims to truth, permanence, and historical authority?
Kelvin Haizel: I have always been interested in the photographic negative as perhaps the most plastic form of the photographic image. In analogue photography, the negative has traditionally been regarded as the master source from which multiple positive prints can be produced. Yet the journey from negative to positive has never been a neutral or purely mechanical process. It involves numerous decisions—cropping, exposure adjustments, retouching, dodging, burning, and other interventions—that shape how the final image is seen. The positive print is therefore always an interpretation rather than a transparent transcription of reality. This history complicates photography’s longstanding claims to truth and objectivity. If photographic meaning is continually negotiated through processes of mediation and transformation, then the authority often attributed to the image is far less stable than it appears. In Negative Positive I and II, I invert the deteriorated albumen prints into luminous blue digital negatives. This inversion is not an attempt to recover an original image but to produce another point of departure. Once the positive is transformed back into a negative, it effectively becomes a new master from which alternative readings and narratives can emerge. The work therefore challenges the notion of a singular, authoritative photographic history. Instead, it suggests that photographs remain materially and conceptually open—capable of generating new meanings long after the moment of their making, and even through the very processes of deterioration that are often understood as signs of loss.
Kezia Ouomoye: How important is spatial choreography in shaping the emotional and intellectual experience of the exhibition?
Kelvin Haizel: Spatial choreography was crucial in shaping both the emotional and intellectual experience of the exhibition. Among several spatial considerations, the most significant was the use of blue. I chose blue for the walls in the room containing the portrait ensembles because it contrasted with the sepia tones of the albumen prints, the off-white paper bearing the fictional biographies, and the digital reproductions collaged with the black-and-gold microscopic photographs. The room felt intimate, enclosed, and inviting, and it encouraged spectators to move from a position of looking at the subjects to one of facing them. The oval portraits and body-length biographies further reinforced this shift in orientation, and therefore “humanized” the figures in the space. In the second room, devoted to material interventions, spectators encountered two light boxes showing the negatives under an intensified blue light. Here, blue functioned not only as a spatial device that intensified intimacy, but also as a conceptual one: it pointed to the inversion of the albumen prints into negatives, understood as a generative source from which new speculative narratives could emerge. In this sense, blue became a central and productive colour within the exhibition’s conceptual framework.
Haizel’s work entails the play on dualities and palimpsest. The works frequently resist neat conclusions. For instance, the photograph is both document and object. Decay can be described us both destruction and continuation. We could describe the colonial image as both evidence of violence and material undoing. The fictional biography could be imagined as both invention and a refusal of historical erasure.
Kezia Ouomoye: Many of your works seem to hold opposing ideas in dialogue rather than resolving them. How do you approach creating spaces where themes such as loss and renewal, rupture and repair, can coexist without one diminishing the significance of the other?
Kelvin Haizel: I approach art with an acute awareness of the paradoxes that shape everyday life. Decay, for instance, does not signify an ending but a kind of transformation; it can appear as disappearance and as a continued form of life. When my friend once told me she had gone to retrieve the skull of their buried cat, only to find the body mummified and seemingly breathing as insects fed on the softened tissue, I was struck by how closely decay can resemble vitality. Life is full of such unstable thresholds. In that sense, I’m interested in making work that holds paradoxes, without forcing it toward resolution.
The final question is perhaps the most extensive and all-embracing one. What we can inquire is what can artists do with archives that historians, institutions and conventional research cannot? We can deduce that Haizel does not propose that artists should be hosts or possess a certain privileged access to truth. Instead, he suggests that artistic practice can create different conditions for listening.
Kezia Ouomoye: Artists today are increasingly engaging with historical records in ways that challenge established narratives and institutional frameworks. How do you see artistic practice contributing to new ways of engaging with archives, particularly in reshaping how audiences understand histories that have long been mediated through colonial perspectives?
Kelvin Haizel: More and more, we are confronted with the gaps in history, with deliberately obscured facts and with the ways governing powers have turned ideology into truth. In this context, a deep engagement with the archive — a rereading against the grain of colonial untruths and a search for counter-perspectives to dominant narratives — has become urgent. We live in an age of information overload, where abundance often tips into noise and much of what we receive feels hollow. For me, the archive is not a repository of facts but also a field of sounds and silences. They say empty vessels make the most sound; perhaps our biggest task today is not to dismiss the echoes from the emptied vessels, but to use them as a measure relative to their silences when the vessels were filled with all kinds of vibration absorbers – captured peoples, minerals, spices, cultural loots, and other forms of extraction. What sounds does a vessel make without spices, without looted artifacts, without captured bodies, without minerals? I believe it is through archival interventions that we can begin to hear differently and cultivate new modes of listening.
What did we learn from these entities on revolt? Perhaps, archives may preserve an image, but matter can choose not to obey its intended fixity. And in some ways beneath the surface of the photograph, something is still moving, living and breathing.
Images courtesy Kelvin Haizel and FOMU in Antwerp Belgium.
Article by Kezia Ouomoye (Senior Editor | The Neoteric)
Kezia Ouomoye is an art practitioner whose work spans artistic production, writing, mentoring, and curatorial practice. She currently serves as an art Consultant to emerging art institutions, where she plays a key role in developing international projects, advising on curatorial strategies, and supporting artists in navigating global art platforms. Kezia is a proud alumni of blaXTARLINES project space for contemporary art and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and holds a BFA and MFA in Fine Arts. She is also a Project Manager and Curator at Diaspora Fine Art (Florida, USA), contributing to exhibitions and programming that highlight African and diasporic perspectives in the global art discourse. Her practice as an artist, curator, and administrator allows her to move fluidly between creating work, mentoring early-career practitioners, and designing nomadic programming that bridges virtual and physical platforms. With a background in writing and art theory, Kezia continuously tests how archives, objects, and storytelling can generate new forms of understanding.
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