Mihalina Nyota Buzilu paints vanity with the oldest equipment the theme owns, a mirror and a skull, and makes the arrangement carry her own point: a life that should be welcomed with integrity and gratitude, lost instead to the craving for admiration. In Pembeni mwa nafsi (At the Edge of the Self), the reclining body is painted cold and the skull is warm. In a short video, she explains the vanity, the narcissism, and the death her subjects work to forget.
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.
Patrick Kusakana paints ancestral power as a family matter. La reine Mambueni is his grandmother, the nganga-kisi who healed whatever troubled the family, enthroned here on a red stool with ivory on her face and her arms spread the width of the canvas. In a short video, he explains the black and white, the tusks, and the animals she protects.
Claude Bosana, Œil d’Aigle to Kinshasa’s art world, paints a tiger and a bonobo who cannot live together sharing the one interest they have in common: a cigarette. His advice is aimed at the people who hold a portion of authority. On the ground where they stand, the fruit set aside will keep. The zebra will not.
Billy Gibula, painter and one of Kitokongo’s founders, answers tribalism with a figure who wears the argument: a wooden mask above a boldly printed shirt, a banner reading NON AU TRIBALISME across the chest, and, just below the banner, a machete at rest in a hand painted every color at once. In the video he says why: we are all human, all one family, and love must reign.
Winnart Nsangu’s Kin Eza Mboka Na Nga (Kinshasa Is My City): a man painted in full color against a Paris that stays a sketch. Nsangu usually leaves his faces without eyes. Here the eyes push through rose-tinted glasses, and they are looking at home.
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.
Jonathan Malanda paints women because, he says, it was through women that his mother inspired him to work. In Éternité (2024, acrylic on canvas, 100 by 110 centimeters), a woman arches on a wooden chair with her face hidden behind her raised arms while a zebra bends its head toward her. In a short video, Malanda says what the painting is for: the love and the ambiance between man and nature.
Phinet Kisimba paints what he calls la mathématique du temps, and in Sala Po Ozala (2021, oil on canvas, 90 by 160 centimeters) he paints it as a clock face with a young Kinois standing inside it: white shirt, polished shoes, both pockets pulled inside out. In a short video, he says what the picture asks of Kinshasa’s youth: be true, and let time testify.
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.
Junior Bile photographs the children of Kinshasa’s quartiers populaires, paints them, and covers their skin in stenographic script he calls vows, prayers, and scars. In a short video, he explains the method and the thinking behind La Croyance dans l’Ombre (2022), oil and acrylic on canvas.
Meet the Artwork is a new series on single works of Congolese art. Each entry pairs one piece with its maker’s own account of what it is and why it exists. We begin with Exprime-Toi, a 2023 acrylic by Sarah Ndangi Bunga, a painting about fear, music, and learning to speak in front of other people.