Assistant Professor of Art History, Rutgers University-Newark
Sandrine Colard is an assistant professor of art history, a writer, and an independent curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2016 and is a specialist of modern and contemporary African arts and photography. Dr. Colard is an international lecturer (Concordia University, EHESS, European Parliament), and her writings have appeared in several exhibition catalogues and journals ( Critical Interventions, Cultures et Musées). Sandrine Colard is currently preparing The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, in collaboration with the Artur Walther Collection (Ryerson Image Center, Toronto, 2019) and has been appointed artistic director of the 2019 Lubumbashi Biennale (DRC). Based on research conducted in Belgium and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, her current book project examines the history of photography in the colonial Congo (1885-1960).
Since the 1990s, Jean Depara has become famous for his portraits of brash city dwellers, and for his hedonistic depictions of their unbridled nightlife. This essay explores how Depara’s transgressive photographs emerged in the interstices of the otherwise very controlled Belgian colonial “image world.”
