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.
Antoinette Lubaki painted in colonial Katanga in the 1920s alongside her husband Albert. Their watercolors traveled to Brussels, Geneva, and Paris, and were filed under his name. What the colonial archive missed was a partnership in which the visual language came from her side, carried from the mural tradition she grew up in into a marriage that worked as one. This article traces what their work actually was, how it was absorbed into a single masculine signature, and what an honest recovery looks like when the goal is not to flip the erasure but to retire it.
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.
Spend an afternoon in the galleries of Kinshasa and you begin to recognize the same woman. She is on one wall, then the next, then the gallery down the street, the ornament changed each time, the face never. She has no name on the wall, and no one expects her to. She is a type, and the type sells. Many of these faces were traced from photographs of women who never agreed to sit, then sold as original work. No one has asked the woman behind the painting who she is.
How many Congolese female rumba singers can you name? Most readers get stuck at two or three. The 1980s had six women working at the top of the genre at the same time. The 2020s have two. This article walks through seventy years of female voices in Congolese rumba, from Lucie Eyenga, who recorded in 1950s Léopoldville, to Cindy le Cœur, who fronts Koffi Olomide’s Quartier Latin now, and asks what these women had to do to be heard, and why so few are still doing it.