POP-UP EXHIBITION
Blood Bonds: Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda
October 13-19
Images from Jan Banning’s book, Blood Bonds: Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda will be on display in the gallery. On Wednesday, October 15, Banning will be in conversation with USC professor and Director of the Walker Institute, Carl T. Dahlman. This event is sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s Walker Institute, the USC School of Visual Art and Design, and All Good Books.
The book offers a series of powerful double portraits and stories of Rwandans who, after the 1994 genocide, once again look each other in the eye: survivors of massacres together with the perpetrators who killed their family members — and with whom they have reconciled.
Artist Bio
Jan Banning (b. 1954) is a Dutch conceptual documentary photographic artist who combines visual impact with rigorous research. He gained international recognition with the ironic Bureaucratics (2008), a portrait study of civil servants in eight countries across five continents. His work often tackles difficult-to-visualize subjects such as state power, criminal justice, and the long shadow of conflict. Banning’s parents were born and raised in the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). During WWII, his father and grandfather were among the millions forced into slave labor by the Japanese military. That past, together with his academic background in social and economic history, inspired intimate
projects such as Traces of War (2005), about survivors of the Burma and Sumatra railways, and Comfort Women (2010), focusing on women coerced into sexual slavery under Japanese occupation. Blood Bonds: Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda (2025) is another example of a project that explores the long-term psychological impact of conflict. Rejecting straightforward reportage, Banning constructs his images with deliberate composition and lighting, often employing typology to reveal variation within repetition (as seen in Bureaucratics, 2008, and Law & Order, 2015). At times, he nods to art history, notably in the highly ironic The Sweating Subject (2017). “Artivism” plays a strong role in his work, most notably in The Verdict: The Christina Boyer Case (2022), which investigates a U.S. miscarriage of justice and supports the movement to free a woman imprisoned in Georgia for over 30 years.