tradition

Phinet Kisimba returns with a quieter painting than Sala Po Ozala and a harder subject. A woman in a yellow turban sits thinking against a red that stands for her period, while the ceremony that once would have guided her hangs on the wall in a frame. In the video, Kisimba calls on mothers and wise women to take back a role that has lapsed: menstruation, he says, is not a taboo subject.

Gédéon Ndonda introduces himself in the video with one commitment: he paints in the style populaire. In Le Réveil d’un Géant (oil on canvas, one meter square), his one-sentence message, that Africans should wake up and take their destiny into their own hands, becomes literal painted hands: one balancing the Earth on its fingertips, one lying open beneath a circuit board, while an old merman at the edge of the scene raises a horn to his lips.

Glory Kanga calls himself an artiste classicien écologiste and has committed his painting entirely to the bond between man and the environment. In Recours à la Tradition (acrylic on canvas, 150 by 130 centimeters), a man woven from strips of wood bends over a steaming basin, head under a cloth. In a short video, Kanga explains the likeness of life that holds the painting together.