Aïcha Muteba Makana

About

Aïcha Muteba Makana was born in Kinshasa in 1988 and started painting on whatever the city offered: foufou plates first, then neighborhood walls. The Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa gave the practice its training, and Muteba gave it its name; he calls his style contemporary figurative abstraction, a frame in which scarification patterns and Kuba masks meet the present on equal terms.

His canvases carry narratives of human emotion, collective memory, and the struggle over identity, under titles that state their business: Ecological Debacle, Art Revolution. And they are built from more than paint. Muteba works recycled materials into his surfaces, a habit from the boy who invented with whatever was at hand, kept alive as a form of independence.

In Kinshasa he runs L’Atelier Lumineux, his studio, and treats its doors as part of the work. His open house events bring art directly to the neighborhood instead of waiting for a gallery to mediate, his interactive performances pull the audience in, and his largest commission to date runs twenty-five meters: a fresco for the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the school that trained him. He also curates residencies and builds collaborations between artists.

The reach extends well past Congo. For 2022 and 2023 he served as an independent curator at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, Bangladesh; a residency in Morocco paired him with Youssef El Yedidi on the theme of migration; and he takes part in the sharing movement among artists internationally. Between all of it, he mentors children in workshops at home. This profile gathers Aïcha Muteba Makana in one place online; the portfolio below is where the plates and the walls ended up leading.

Portfolio