Mihalina Nyota

About

Mihalina Nyota Buzilu is a Congolese multidisciplinary visual artist, born in Lubumbashi and now living and creating in Kinshasa. She holds a Licence (Bac+5) in fine arts, painting option, from the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, completed in 2024. In parallel, she has been working in sculpture since 2021, a practice she seeks to fuse with her painting.

Her artistic research centers on the paradox between body and soul, between the visible and the invisible. For Mihalina, the body is not simply a material envelope but a symbolic surface where the unconscious, the emotions, and the spiritual dimension of the human being are inscribed. Her work explores this double reading of the person, at once biological and spiritual, and stages the body and its movements as a plastic language, a silent writing capable of revealing what escapes immediate perception. Across her canvases, recurring figures draped in heavy folds of cloth, skulls, hourglasses, and ghostly white line-drawings etched into deep blue backgrounds give form to this inner life, turning each painting into a quiet meditation on memory, mental weight, and the tension between what we show and what we carry.

In 2024, that inward-facing practice opened onto the public square with “Kimpa Vita,” a two-meter sculpture co-created with Francine Nsenda Ndaya and Gloria Tabasenge and unveiled in September 2024 in a park in Charleroi, Belgium. For Mihalina, paying tribute to the 17th-century Kongo prophetess is a way of inviting her generation to reconnect with a cultural identity which, for her, is also a way of knowing oneself.

Her practice is deliberately pluridisciplinary, moving between painting, drawing, sculpture, and poetry. These mediums cross one another to give form to allegory and paradox, associating contradictory worlds or ideas. She is also drawn to hybrid forms in which painting dialogues with volume, matter meets light, and the scenography of an exhibition becomes a sensitive space that immerses the viewer between shadow and clarity, matter and transparency. For now, she works primarily on canvas and in the round; projects of installation combining material, light, and transparency are part of the horizon she is moving toward.

« Le premier trait rompt le silence de la toile. Tout le reste est dialogue. » The first stroke breaks the silence of the canvas. Everything else is dialogue.

Her practice is that first line, and the continuing dialogue it opens.

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