Coumba Samba Interrogates Russia’s Primary Export

Coumba Samba makes light work of heavy metal. ‘Red Gas’, the artist’s first solo show at Arcadia Missa, comprises a series of eight painted radiators (‘Radiator’, 2024) affixed to the walls and a newly fitted carpet (Blue Carpet, 2024) in a slight display freighted with meaning.

The exhibition interrogates the connections between Russia – hence the titular red, a reference to the predominant colour of the Soviet Union flag – and the rest of the world. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, liquified petroleum and natural gases from Russia have come under international sanctions. Several Western nations, including the UK, have condemned President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive military agenda, while maintaining a trade-based relationship with Russia via loopholes in legislation. Others – notably the syndicate of nations that participated in the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit – have sought to deepen diplomatic ties with the Kremlin amidst mounting exploitation and extraction across the continent, both intertwined with and occurring independently of the sanctions.

Samba derived her palette for the show from photographs taken at the first Russia-Africa Summit in 2019 – the milky beige, for example, a subtle abstraction of the mellow gold backdrop in front of which assembled delegates posed. You can interpret the warping of the colour between the reference and the creation as the artist’s way of communicating the disjuncture between what we expect resources, allegiances and international reach to yield, and the more sober reality. Meanwhile, the carpet reads as an attempt at conveying the insulation from more sober realities granted by outsourced labour.

These matters of state addressed in the work cast monumental shadows over how we identify ourselves and others, not to mention what we stand to offer one another. A few singular truths emerge out of this complex snarl – a collision of imperial logic and opportunity proffered, of uneasy ethics and access prohibited. Statehood, personhood and even, as the exhibition notes detail, ‘objecthood’ are all positions animated in the most precarious ways under capitalism. Samba has proven adept at rendering this triangulation at scale, notably in ‘Capital’, her show at Cell Project Studios, London, earlier this year. 

‘Red Gas’ telegraphs an open, and unanswered, question about colour theory and commodification – its geopolitical underpinning brought to bear as a whisper as opposed to a shout. Each of the radiators, save for one, has been coated in metal paint, with hues ranging from navy to burgundy. Each of the radiators, save for one, is monotone. The lone two-tone fixture, pastel pink with an accent of milky beige, tucked away behind a corner, is broadly reminiscent of Samba’s trademark colour field canvases. Each of the radiators, save for one, is either a traditional column or a vertical panelled unit – with the remaining one formed of two, industrial-sized spirals.

In the booklet produced to accompany the show, curator Mischa Lustin writes, ‘Though Russia presents itself as a “new power” in Africa, unburdened by colonial histories in the region, its interactions with the continent stretch back centuries.’ ‘Red Gas’ suggests not much is as new as it might initially appear – even the show’s radiators are all found objects salvaged by the artist – and the passage of time promises nothing. It also conjures a worthy, albeit woolly, semiotic exercise: while the aesthetic claims made by Samba about colour and form are largely opaque, they are far from hot air. Nevertheless, with much of the infrastructure – pipes, valves and, crucially, gas – that facilitates heating taken out of the equation and minimal interpretative scaffolding provided by the artist, ‘Red Gas’ signifies everything but delivers a highly austere and knowingly offbeat display.

Coumba Samba’s ‘Red Gas’ is on view at Arcadia Missa, London, until 25 October 

^{Main image: Coumba Samba, ‘Red Gas’, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: Arcadia Missa, London; photograph: Tom Carter}