The exhibition Tirailleurs is an intervention into the historically marginalized and instrumentalized representation of the Tirailleurs—individuals recruited under European colonialism, whose lives were carried across continents to the front lines of war, and whose decisive contribution to defeating Nazism during the Second World War is hardly recognized within dominant historical narratives. The exhibition confronts the paradoxical oblivion of the Tirailleurs, and the ‘whitening’ of history that continues to deny them equality, dignity, visibility, and reparations. Reframing the Tirailleurs as subjects within histories of liberation, the exhibition creates a common space for celebration and remembrance of the Tirailleurs’ lives and contributions.

The term Tirailleurs, or Tirailleurs Sénégalais, initially referred to colonized groups recruited by the French army in Saint-Louis, Senegal, beginning in 1857, and later expanded to encompass those recruited from French colonies in West and North Africa, South East Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The exhibition understands the term not as a fixed category, but as a critical lens through which to reflect on the shared conditions of coercion, forced labour, and transnational displacement produced by war, alongside the Tirailleurs’ articulation of critical political consciousness that informed subsequent anti-colonial, anti-fascist, and Pan-African discourses. Further, it also sheds light on the largely unrecorded labour of women, addressing the gendered asymmetries of war through figures such as the Mesdames Tirailleurs—women who accompanied Tirailleurs, sustained families, and laboured across various roles. Forceful recruitment of colonized or oppressed subjects was a cornerstone for colonial regimes, for example the Askari—people recruited from East Africa during Germany’s colonial period since 1891; the many Nigerians recruited by the British Empire who fought in Burma; Moroccan Goumiers in the French army from 1908 onwards; or the African American soldiers who fought in the Second World War under enforced racial segregation in the United States. It further considers people from Vietnam, China, and North and West Africa, who were forced to work in the arms industry and agricultural economies in France. In this sense, Tirailleurs extends the term to reflect on the ongoing recruitment process, where geopolitical asymmetries continue to draw people into wars not their own. Colonial continuity persists in the afterlives of unequal pensions, erasure from public remembrance, and unresolved reparation claims pursued by Tirailleurs over decades, and found its most brutal expression in the massacre at Camp de Thiaroye, Senegal, in 1944, when Tirailleurs demanding unpaid wages were murdered by white French military officers.

While Tirailleurs were at the forefront of modern warfare, they remained largely absent from modernist avant-garde art, or appeared only through the distortions of derogatory racist propaganda in the media of their time. Their absence from the European avant-garde reveals its limits—the exhibition shows two of many exceptions: the works of Félix Vallotton and Othon Friesz, two European modernist painters who depicted Tirailleurs as human beings. Yet the canon of the avant-garde thus rests on a structural disavowal: the narrative of artistic avant-garde unfolded alongside the colonized subjects who bore the embodied realities of being the ‘avant-garde’. At the same time that Tirailleurs were sent to European wars, European avant-garde artists drew extensively from the cultural forms of the very regions from which the Tirailleurs were recruited. Masks and sculptures from Africa—foundational to Cubism and reinvigorating for Expressionism—were framed as ‘sources of inspiration’, detached—at times intentionally—from their authors, contexts, and epistemologies. What was canonized as formal innovation operated through cultural appropriation and extraction.

In the Sylvia Wynter Foyer, multiple agoras, developed in collaboration with exhibition architect Yelta Köm, invite pause, listening, and collective deliberation. Five Thematic Resonances introduce the Tirailleurs as subjects of history across times and regions. Working ‘with and against the archive’, as literary theorist Saidiya Hartman proposes in her confrontation with colonial archives, these sections approach archival material critically: rather than reproducing images that glorify war or perpetuate the objectification of the Tirailleurs, they foreground their testimonies, the reparation claims of descendants and activists, and the ongoing processes of archival restitution. The foyer also presents Perspectives from five art spaces and collectives in Dakar, Tanger, Marseille, Taipei, and Port of Spain whose engagements with the Tirailleurs’ histories, communities, and voices for justice are grounded in their own methods and situated practices. And Anguezomo Nzé Mba Bikoro’s video work recalls the Madame Tirailleur through a ritual practice in Saint-Louis, Senegal, remembering the Tirailleurs across genders and generations.

Contemporary artists enliven the exhibition spaces with both existing and newly commissioned works that underscore the Tirailleurs’ contemporary relevance. These artworks address historical gaps in representation, driven by social responsibility and, in many cases, by the artists’ own familial histories. In the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, a patterned floor relates to the patchwork textiles of the Baye Fall community in Senegal, which sew together cast-off cloth scraps in an act of unity, as well as to patterns of tactical deployment of Senegalese troops during Second World War. We are welcomed by Daniel Lind-Ramos’ anti-monument, which assembles a heap of military knapsacks with the belongings of the Tirailleurs as symbols of displacement and hardship: repositories of what could be carried across continents—subjective fragments of memory and spirituality. Through tactile strands of beads as part of the exhibition architecture that recall the spiritual beads carried by many Tirailleurs, the exhibition continues to confront the infrastructures and narratives of colonial power and crafts an artistic language to recall the Tirailleurs as subjects—such as in Dior Thiam’s fluid monument; Slavs and Tatars’ reflection on propaganda and religious instrumentalization of Muslim Tirailleurs; El Hadji Sy’s paintings as an expression of a generation that witnessed the return of Tirailleurs to Senegal; or through soil—Binta Diaw’s installation demands burial rights and identified all the Tirailleurs of the Thiaroye massacre of 1944. The displacement and labour of the Tirailleurs urge a necessary shift of attention away from Eurocentric accounts towards a transregional history of the conflicts of the twentieth century. Tiffany Chung’s counter- mapping traces these movements across continents, situating the trajectories of Tirailleurs alongside those of female labourers, while Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s speculative works recompose archival footage and reimagine family histories, connecting geopolitics to personal stories. Advocating for the remembrance of women’s experiences of displacement in wars, Hana Yoo’s two videos engage with the history of forced sexual labour endured by Korean women under Japanese colonialism during the Second World War, while Pélagie Gbaguidi creates a curved space that through textiles, painting, and ritual symbols honours the courage of African women who resisted wars. The exhibition situates the history of the Tirailleurs within non-linear trajectories of liberation—this continuum extends in Mónica de Miranda’s installation on the liberation of Angola, as well as in Josèfa Ntjam’s film, where masked figures embark on a cosmic and geological journey, carrying memories into emancipatory Afrofuturist imaginaries. Meanwhile, Abrie Fourie returns to Namibia, reflecting on his conscription as a youth in South Africa, drawn into wars not his own. In the Marielle Franco Space, Kathleen Bomani’s film engages communal memory and more-than-human witnesses in Tanzania, reclaiming often omitted histories of resistance to German colonialism before the First World War.

In the Beatriz Nascimento Hall, artists confront the dismemberment of communities shaped by war and forced migration. Against nationalist narratives, these works treat memory not as a seamless chapter of history but as heterogenous realities with the potential to be pieced together from rupture. Halida Boughriet’s photographs reveal how home can become an altar or a museum—an autonomous site of celebration and remembrance when official narratives fail to hold the histories of migrant communities, including the post-war trajectories of many Tirailleurs. Josèfa Ntjam’s photomontages relate to the speculative worlds of recomposition, where archival images of resistance fighters are reimagined. This fragment-based poetics of memory responds to Othon Friesz’ La Guerre (1915), one of the few modernist paintings to depict the Tirailleurs within the agency of avant-garde, capturing the horror and chaos of war. In the adjacent space, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Barthélémy Toguo, and Oscar Ngu Atanga intervene in colonial archives, questioning official representations that imposed military uniform and a controlling gaze onto the Tirailleurs. Alongside them, Godfried Donkor’s works draw on the allegory of the boxer to evoke the endurance, struggle, and vulnerability of the Tirailleurs. Kader Attia’s installation confronts the racist propaganda that shaped derogatory perceptions of the Tirailleurs and underscores the importance of reckoning with the Tirailleurs’ complex histories to confront structural racism today.

Anti-militarist positions mark the final section of the exhibition, which refuses to reduce Tirailleurs to heroic icons; instead, it troubles the atrocity of war and its enduring ramifications for all humans. In the Bessie Head Foyer, the poster series of Francisco Vidal activates peace pedagogies, while in the Lydie Dooh Bunya Space, the video by Mario Pfeifer problematizes contemporary recruitment processes. On the Paulette Nardal Terrace, three flags by Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena respectively tackle the geopolitical divisions, the weapons industry, and the vulnerability of the very skin exposed to war, while in the Bibisara Oripova Driveway, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s series of sixteen flags reminds us of the tools of struggles through which peace may be imagined. In Yassine Balbzioui’s mural along the HKW facade, the mask—once appropriated by the European avant-garde—reclaims its position as subject: always worn by a body and representing subjectivity— a mediator of identities and worlds. The exhibition challenges the art historical notion of the avant-garde to see art not only through revolutions of form, but through those who moved, laboured, fought, and embodied histories of liberation, and were unjustly forgotten.