-
The Untold Story of Antoinette Lubaki: Congo’s Avant-Gardist Female Artist
Ever heard of Antoinette Lubaki? The first female Congolese painter in history and a revolutionary force in 1920s African art? While her name has faded from mainstream art history, her story pulses with drama, innovation, and defiance. A chief’s daughter whose extraordinary murals in a remote Congolese village caught the eye of a Belgian administrator, she was thrust into Europe’s prestigious galleries, only to face systematic erasure of her identity and artistic autonomy. Through vibrant watercolors, she seamlessly merged Congolese…
Recent Articles
-
The Nganga, the Prophet, and the Orchestra
The Europeans in the audience were hearing an African orchestra play European music. The musicians on stage were playing Christian music. I sat between those two sentences for an evening in Kinshasa in November 2022, and have been turning them over ever since. The story of how the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste came to play Rodrigo in a wedding hall runs back to 1706, to a Kongolese woman burned at the stake for preaching in her own language, and forward through a century of a faith the West has never quite known how to hear. Read more
-
“Pembeni mwa nafsi” (At the Edge of the Self): Mihalina Nyota’s Meditation on Vanity
Mihalina Nyota Buzilu, one of the rising voices on Kinshasa’s contemporary art scene, revisits one of the oldest themes in the history of Western painting and brings it into conversation with the anxieties of her own generation. In “Pembeni mwa nafsi” (Au bord du soi), a reclining figure gazes into a hand mirror while a skull waits patiently nearby. A meditation on vanity, narcissism, and the life we refuse to accept, the work unfolds as a quiet warning about the dangerous border where self-contemplation becomes self-loss. Watch the artist speak. Read more
-
Article 15: The Unwritten Constitution of the Congo
When the state provides nothing, you seize what you can and invent the rest. To exist in Kinshasa is to live by Article 15: Débrouillez-vous. Explore the unwritten constitution of the Congo, where the daily hustle dictates everything from a policeman’s traffic ticket to the art sold in local ateliers. Step off the main boulevards to discover how this relentless pressure acts as the invisible gears keeping millions alive while the elites watch from the hills. Read more
Featured Artists
