Moridja Kitenge Banza

The work of Moridja Kitenge Banza touches on questions that go far beyond the Democratic Republic of Congo: who has the power to draw a map, to name a territory, to make it a resource. At a time when the ecological transition is based on a new mining rush, where satellite imagery shapes our relationship with the world, where debates on restitution and colonial memory cross all institutions, the artist seek to offer a visual language to think about these tensions. 

He does not document: he shifts the gaze. And this displacement goes well beyond Congolese history. It concerns all land reduced to what can be extracted from it. 

Moridja Kitenge Banza's works look back at the viewer just as the viewer looks at them. They draw the viewer in with their beauty, then confront them with their own vantage point: that of a gaze from above – at a distance – blind to what the land actually holds. One enters them as if facing an abstract landscape, only to emerge realising that this very distance is the problem. In an age where we consume images of the Earth without feeling its weight, and technologies whose human cost remains unknown to us, the artist wants to make that substance visible once more. He do not seek to lecture, he wants to evoke a visceral experience.