Phinet Kisimba is the first artist to appear twice in this series. When he presented Sala Po Ozala, he introduced himself as painter, photographer, and cameraman; this time he is gentler with his own titles, a painter first, an amateur photographer if he may say so, and a filmmaker. The painting he brings is gentler too, on the surface. Its subject is what happens, and what no longer happens, when a girl reaches her first period.
A woman sits on white cloth against a red wall, wrapped in white, a heavy yellow turban above a face that is somewhere else. One hand lies over her knee. The other is raised to her mouth, and the whole posture is the old shape of thinking. Kisimba builds her in his usual thick knife-work, so the turban and the drape carry as much relief as the wall behind them. Across that wall run the shadows of plants, dark red on red, and in the upper corner hangs a small framed panel holding a gray face with hollow eyes and two long horns. The signature dates the canvas 2024.
In the video he reads the painting from that frame outward. The object in it, he says, recalls a ceremony of the old days in Katangese culture: when a young girl arrived at her menstrual period, she was initiated by a wise woman of the village. What interests him is its disappearance. Today, he says, girls reach their periods left and right without that direct contact with their parents or their aunts, and we now have a great problem of culture. That is why his figure sits the way she sits, reflecting, and why the ground behind her is red. The red, he says plainly, symbolizes the menstrual period.
The appeal at the end of the video is direct. He is calling on our mothers, our wise women, to take their responsibility and initiate young girls into living a good life. Most women now, he says, lack that direct relation; there are girls who have their periods and whose mothers do not even know, as if it were a taboo. And it is not a taboo subject. The painting says the rest with its furniture. The ceremony that once surrounded a girl at this moment has become a small picture in a frame, hung on the wall of the room where she sits alone with her thoughts. What she needed has become something to look at. What she has is the red.
More on Phinet Kisimba: Phinet Kisimba’s Profile