People

Bambi Ceuppens

Bambi Ceuppens is a researcher, linguist, historian, social Anthropologist who, since 2007, has been a senior researcher and curator at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. She played a crucial role in the intense renovation and the development of the new displays at the museum between 2008 and 2018. Her areas of expertise are the western representation of Africa and Africans, and the Belgian and Congolese colonial history. She holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews in social anthropology. Later she taught at the Universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh, and Manchester and in several art schools in Belgium. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and the Catholic University of Leuven, and currently holds a part-time professorship at the University of Nijmegen. Her areas of expertise are the western representation of Africa and Africans, and the Belgian and Congolese colonial history. She examines the Congolese diaspora in Belgium, colonial and post-colonial popular culture in Congo as well as autochthony, interculturalism and multiculturalism in the Flemish Region. Ceuppens was also the commissary of the exhibition Indépendance! on the independence of Congo, scheduled by the KMMA in 2010 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the independence of Belgium’s former colony. In 2016 she curated Congo Art Works in collaboration with artist Sammy Baloji. The exhibition was initiated by the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium and presented at Bozar in Brussels and the Garage Museum in Moscow.