Mihalina Nyota Buzilu, one of the rising voices on Kinshasa’s contemporary art scene, brings a quiet but unflinching gaze to the question of who we pretend to be. A multidisciplinary artist trained between the ceramic workshops of Lubumbashi and the painting studios of the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, she refuses to define herself as a painter alone. Her practice moves across painting, sculpture, poetry, and photography, and her subject, more often than not, is the inner life.
Watch Mihalina discuss the symbolism and philosophical weight of her latest work, “Pembeni mwa nafsi” (Au bord du soi, or At the Edge of the Self), in our exclusive video.
Through the artist’s own words, discover how the classical theme of vanitas is rewoven into a deeply contemporary reflection on narcissism, self-worth, and the life we refuse to accept.
In this striking composition, Nyota revisits one of the oldest themes in the history of Western painting and brings it into conversation with the anxieties of her own generation. A reclining figure stretches across the canvas, body draped in folds of peach, ochre, and white, one arm extended toward a small hand mirror. Behind them, a dense frieze of finely drawn silhouettes, figures, trees, a crown, a bird, runs along the top of the canvas like a tapestry of ambition and memory. Below, a human skull rests on a draped stool, patient, unavoidable.
The painting is a meditation on vanity, a term Nyota handles with care. For her, vanity is not a simple fault. It is a complex knot that binds pride, excessive self-confidence, and the craving for the admiration of others. It is what happens when a person becomes so absorbed in their own image that they lose the meaning of life itself, a life that, as she reminds us, should be received with integrity and gratitude.
The mirror in the figure’s hand is the heart of the work. It is the instrument of self-contemplation turned inward until it becomes a trap. The figure’s gaze is held by its own reflection, suspended above a world the viewer can sense but the figure no longer sees. The dreamy, almost weightless pose is deceptive: this is not rest but the posture of someone lost in themselves.
Against this, the skull speaks with the oldest voice in the painting. A classical memento mori, it is what the figure is trying so hard not to see. Nyota names the condition directly: there are people, she says, who navigate in what we call narcissism, who forget that one day they too will die, and yet all they want is to appear more beautiful, more intelligent, more capable than others. The skull is the quiet correction to that forgetting.
What makes “Pembeni mwa nafsi” particularly powerful is Nyota’s use of line. The white-drawn figures along the top band and the ghostly forest below are rendered as if etched into the dark background, like the fading memory of everything the figure has chased, a bird, a crown, crowds of others. The painted body, by contrast, is solid, fleshy, almost too present. That contrast is also a material one: the painted volumes are worked in acrylic, while the drawn silhouettes are traced in felt-tip pen directly on the canvas, as though the figure’s dreams were inscribed on the surface of the world rather than lived within it.
The work’s Lingala title, Pembeni mwa nafsi, translates as “at the edge of the self,” and the translation matters. Nyota is not painting the self from the outside. She is painting the dangerous border where self-contemplation becomes self-loss.
🎨 Size: 147,5 x 99,9 cm
🖌️ Technique: Acrylique et feutre sur toile
📅 Année: 2025
For acquisition inquiries: 📍 In Kinshasa: Contact the artist directly 🌍 International buyers: kitokongo.art@gmail.com
Discover more: Explore Mihalina Nyota’s complete portfolio in her artist profile.