Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo - Strange by Primo Marella Gallery

Strange Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo

Strange, 2015-2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 120 x 79

Strange Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo

Strange Kóan Jeff Baysa Strange is the second exhibition of the talented well-traveled Congolese artist Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo at Primo Marella Gallery. Frequently citing French poet and art critic Claude Baudelaire as a primary reference, his first exhibition curator Sandra Skurvida commented: “Underneath both style and art, lies body politic” and elaborated on the genesis of the sapeurs “the subversive dandies of the Congo (. . .) whose hyper dapper style and performatively elegant manners . . . metabolize the ‘gentille’ appearances of colonialism as it stripped the Congo of its own customs and resources.”

Of his current exhibition, the artist maintains: “Strange refers to a primary antagonist, an aggressive alien creature who abuses and attempts to kill the Earthlings, and its parallels to our politicians who are also our executioners.” An analogous sentiment is evoked in the popular cartoon Pogo in which a character pronounces: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” It is a journey into the strange and fictive world in which society is transformed by the Alien and its collusion with multinational organizations and their self-serving interests. The artist invites the audience “to fly in the free painting spaces” that he has created to experience the chaos and disorder of contemporary society. He further alleges, “My new body of work deals with the economic, social dependence and absolute policy that our politicians and multinationals maintains with respect to their people or populations used for their selfish interest. This project shows the daily practices of some of the largest multinationals and world leaders. Their profit is achieved thanks to the poor.” One of the main veins of Mwilambwe’s oeuvre finds its genesis in the crucible of civil strife and personal tragedy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo whose serial historical names of Zaire and the Belgian Congo resound with the internecine struggles of the Congolese Civil wars that began in 1996 and resulted in the deaths of 5.4 million of its people. Burgeoning with rich natural resources, the DRC, the second largest country in Africa and the most populated officially Francophone country, is hobbled by political instability, corruption, colonial oppression and commercial plundering. Small armies rain death and devastation to mining areas, drive citizens off of their properties and use rape as a weapon of war. Various manifestations of violence have majorly influenced the artist’s work in form, technique, and process.These brutal events underlie the physicality of the form fruste avatars of Mwilambwe’s works that mix and embrace the mediums of collage, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance.

Alien and Avatar, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 189,5 x 189,5

Rich Slaves, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 169,5 x 139,5; cm 50 x 50

Derived from an eponymous project, this current show differs from the first exhibition with this gallery in its content, form, and perspective, creating new confrontational dialogues between his world and his audience. More texture is involved through sourcing nonfashion magazines, books, and photographic images. He introduces bright background colors, shapes, and the suggestions of movement. It is an investigation of himself as well as his society expanded to a dialogue between different cultures and backgrounds, creating new worlds characterised by difference. The artist asserts: “The mutilated body confronts us with a chaotic situation that reflects on current contemporary problems in our society.” With the embodiments of the nefarious Alien in provocative states of undress, he interrogates the definition of alien, a nonnative, in the shifting contexts of new societies. It finds a counterpart in medicine, in which the body has developed an immune system that is vigilant and aggressively defends itself in the presence of or invasion by the non-self. The human body is a slippery surface upon which discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality are mediated, and thus becomes a contested scientific, political, ethical, cultural, economic, and social site. Since human subjectivity and identity are linked to the changing perceptions of vision and visualization, we make and remake our visual experiences of the world within these different contexts. We experience the loss of boundaries and control, evoking issues of physicality, vulnerability, and mortality. Through the imaging and re-imagining of the human body, these visual maneuvers have a profound impact on human self-understanding and behavior, questioning the way that meaning is negotiated. Mwilambwe contends that his art reflects the openness and dialectical denial of physical, geographical and mental boundaries. His complex negotiations of re-assembling and re-presenting the body, ostensibly the African body, further questions the nature of self and the betrayal of the body politic by insidious forces. Collage is a technique of arranging various forms, common and disparate, to create a new whole, a contemporary Chimera. Mwilambwe’s new striking images are steps apart from his first untitled show where the various body parts were cut from international fashion magazines then re-configured piecemeal into corpora delicti. In Strange, there is a similar modus operandi that forensics would reveal the eclectic intermix of gender, class, and race but derived from wider sources than international fashion magazines. His figures are lean, dazzling with the rich prismatic surfaces of shimmering shards. As a medical doctor, I am reminded, by the process of his art making, of the medical condition, mosaicism, in which there are two more populations of cells of differing genetic expressions in a single individual who comes from a single fertilized egg. In contrast is chimerism, where two or more genetic expressions are derived from the fusion of more than one fertilised egg. In the Iliad, Homer describes the Chimera as an immortal nonhuman with the fused bodies of a lion, fire-breathing goat and a dragon. In this particular body of work, the monstrous presence is the Alien, largely bare, voluptuous, seductive . . . disarming and nefarious. In medicine, a forme fruste (French, “crude, or unfinished, form”; pl., formes frustes) is an atypical or attenuated manifestation of a disease or syndrome, with the implications of incompleteness, partial presence or aborted state.

Black or White...?, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 139,5 x 169; cm 50 x 50

The very process of Mwilambwe’s creating bodies from pieces mirrors the factionated histories of the African continent that was colonized by outsiders and is now struggling for resolution and the synthesis of new societies. In the works presented in Strange, the Alien inhabits various personae. Notable are the works with beheaded bodies that occupy a different space than their disembodied heads, with eyes that stare back at the audience. Serpentine lines and uncoiling loops emanating from various origins on the body suggest a traumatic un-doing . . . disembowelment and arterial blood patterns. Some of the heads and bodies are incomplete, substituted with a black void; others tumble, foreshortened in space. Patterned nebular forms float in the richly colored backgrounds. In the painting “Peau Noire, Masques Blancs” two heads are melded in one image, one the tumor of the other, the upper, fair-haired and light-eyed, with the allusion of an event horizon of an all-consuming black hole, in lieu of its right eye. Below, a beautiful black face implores the viewer candidly. In the painting “Strange” an alluring image, a cataract of brown hair crowns the emerald pastiche comprising a woman’s face and shoulders, her right hand covering her left breast alone. Inset into her head in profile is a mismatched scrutinising eye. At the corner of her mouth, a smaller wide-eyed image peers. Historically, the partial or fragmented image suggested grief and nostalgia for the loss of a vanished totality and a utopian wholeness, echoing the tortured history and people of the DRC. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry offers “an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and culture forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.” The body in pieces, viewed as relics and synecdoches, constitute deconstructed images of humans and problematise issues of creation and re-creation, existence and mortality, integration and dissolution, especially when the images of the dematerialised body are ultimately transduced from digital binary-encoded popular press images. The artist’s collective figures reconstructed from disparate sources in time and space embody the complementary and antagonistic dynamics of self-determination. Realizing that these images are purely fashioned re-presentations empowers us to recognize the political, social, and economic factors that direct their multiple readings. The works encourage different levels of appreciation and pivoting perspectives, from the political to the personal. In an overview of both exhibitions at Primo Marella Gallery, the unexpectedly linked triad of beauty-fashion-pain is a thread in Mwilambwe’s art production. Historically, the shift from the traditional Congolese liputa attire to sapology finds theater in the Congolese sartorial attitudes of the sapeurs in the Kinshasa versus Brazzaville steam-venting posturings that are veritable nonbloody conflict resolutions. Kinshasa sapeurs tend towards garish and daring color clashing; those from Brazzaville prefer to match and accessorise. In one of the works in the exhibition with unclothed paired figures, one is barefoot; the other is elevated with multicolored stilettos festooned with red bows.

The figures in this exhibition are largely unclothed, and it’s their nakedness, revealing secondary sexual characteristics, that is noticeable in contrast to the first exhibition. In one image, against a black background, a body has vacated its red-jacketed, white-shirted garb, remaining upright. Its hollowed-out absence, abandonment, or disappearance, makes as strong a statement as a despot’s bronze statue. Garments can make powerful and empowering political statements that reflect a characteristic African modernity. In Fashioning Africa, a conference whose proceedings were published in a book, a group of international scholars brought their perspectives to the topic of “clothing as an expression of freedom in early colonial Zanzibar to Somali women’s headcovering in inner city Minneapolis. Nationalist and diasporic identities, as well as their histories and politics, are examined at the level of what is put on the body every day.

Citing Homer, Plato, and Proust, among others, Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, “not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice.” Mwilambwe’s images lend their nuances to the term “naked truths.”The concept of beauty aids us in paying attention to that which is just by invoking fairness and fostering its perception sensorially. The neuro-physiologic basis for empathy provides the de-centering of the self-concerned individual leading to a heightened concern for others in the contexts of conviction, morality, alerts to injustice, ethical fairness, and verity. Ultimately, this segues and translates into social justice. The strategies by which the sensate body is displayed and re-presented by Mwilambwe disengage and dismantle fossilised parameters that straightjacket our abilities to imagine the potentials of other worlds, re-organised. The recent history of the DRC is marked by civil war and corruption, and the Congolese media operate against systems of warring political powers and violent turmoil. In this artist’s brilliant approach through art, imagination blossoms, hopes grow; the borders become the center, and the interstices, the essence. In a notable video interview, the artist asserts that his works show “the confrontation between reality and the dream” as he personifies the Alien and definitively underscores the indomitable resilience of the Congolese people. 2 3

Traditionally Congolese clothing is centred on the wearing of colourful materials referred to as ‘Liputa’. The study of the sapeurs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1985. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press. 2001. Fashioning Africa. Power and the Politics of Dress. Ed. Jean Allman. Indiana University Press, 2004.

Strange, 2016 Exhibition view, Primo Marella Gallery

Untitled, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 189 x 189; cm 50 x 50

Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 90 x 90

Judgment, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 159 x 129,5

Strange Alien, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 189 x 189; cm 50 x 50

Alien and Earthlings, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 168,5 x 139,5

Untitled, 2016 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 120 x 79

Untitled (triptych), 2015 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 90 x 90; cm 60 x 80; cm 50 x 50

Untitled, 2015 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 135 x 96

Untitled, 2015 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 120 x 79

Untitled (diptych), 2015 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 100 x 140 each

Untitled (diptych), 2011-2012 Collage and acrylic on canvas, cm 100 x 140 each

Strange, 2016 Exhibition view, Primo Marella Gallery

Biography I live and work in Kinshasa - in the heart of the chaotic megalopolis of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was born there in 1981. In my early childhood I lived in Kalemie, a city in the province of Katanga in the south East of the RDC. I returned to Kinshasa, to my birthplace, which is a phantom for me. I made my schooling and studies in Visual arts at the Art Academy of Kinshasa. I made the diploma of the Institute of the Art schools and the diploma of the Art Academy in 2000 and 2003. After that I had an Artistic formation on Visual Arts at the School of Decorative Art in Strasbourg from 2004 until 2005. From 2006-2007 I worked at the Academy of Kinshasa and in 2008-2009 at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, NL. I was a member in the collective of young Congolese artists, we tried to explore with passion and engagement free and innovating creations. The collective was constituted as a framework to exchanges the different experiences in our lifes, spirits and expressions but also to fight for human rights and our freedom. All the attempts are articulated around a concept which is called the Librisme. This is a movement of young revolutionary thinking artists in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries of the African continent which opposed to colonial and old school academic art. VMB

Strange, 2016 Exhibition view, Primo Marella Gallery

Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo (1981, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) Educations 2008 - 2009 Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten researcher in Art/Science, Amsterdam, NL 2006 - Academie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, RDC 2004 - 2005 Ecole des Arts Decoratif de Strasbourg, FR 2000 - 2003 Academie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, RDC 1994 - 2000 Institut des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, RDC Solo exhibitions 2016 - Strange, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, IT 2013 - Solo Show at the Gallery MOMO, Jouhannesburg, S.A 2012 - Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan - MONDO, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund, Germany - Solo Show, at the French Institut, Kinshasa, RDC 2011 - The French Cultural Center, Pointe Noire, Congo - My New World - Gallery Momo, Johannesburg, SA 2010 - The French Cultural Center, Pointe Noire, Congo. Curated by Eric Gerald Miclet 2009 - French Cultural Center, Pointe Noire, Congo 2007 - Galery Pierre Hallet, Brussels, BE Selected Group exhibitions

2016 - AFRIK’EXPO, Group - show at Libreville, Gabon - What about Africa? What about it?’at WITTEVEEN, Visual art center in Amsterdam, NL Curated by Rob Perrée. 2015 - Biennale de Lubumbashi, DRCongo, curated by Tomas Muteba Lutumbwe - Moengo Art festival / Suriname Triennal, Curated by Rob Perrée. Moengo, Suriname 2004 - Warm Heart of Africa, Primae Noctis Gallery, Lugano, CH 2013 - UNITED NATIONS REVISITED ‘’curated by Signe Theil, Kunstraum Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, DE - EXOTIKA, Bangkok, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand 2012 - Le Surréel-Congo “Mondo”, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund, DE - Africa, Africa, Abbaye Saint-André – Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meymac, FR - Banian Exhibition, KAS Project, Kinshasa, D.R.Congo 2011 - Banian Exhibition, TCG Nordica Kunming, China - Banian Exhibition, Banaras Hindi University, Faculty of Visual Arts, Exhibition Hall, Varanasi, India 2010 - Cool Art, Festival Couleur Cafe Brussels, BE - Brave New Worlds, (Theatre der Welt) Essen, DE - Accents d’ingéniosité (Bicici), curated by Yakouba Konaté Abidjan, Ivory Coast 2009 - Banyan Project in Berlin, DE - Licht aan Zee AA, Kunsthal 52, curated by Georges Hanna, Den Helder, NL - French cultural center, Pointe Noire, Congo - Dialogue, De Markten, Brussels, BE 2008 - Open studio, Rijksakademie Van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, NL 2007 - Kinshasa – Lubumbashi, MAMAC, Lieges, BE - Yambi project curated by Roger Pierre Turine,BE - Centre Wallonie Brussels, Paris, FR - Musée de Louvain –la–Neuve, BE - Botanic, Brussels, BE - Jobek Park Project, Johannesburg, SA - Contemporary Art of Africa in Espal, Le Mans, FR 2006 - KVS, Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg, Brussels, BE

- PROGR, Zentrum Fur Kulturproduktion, French Cultural Center, Bern, CH 2005 - Boulev’Art Contemporary Art in the street, Cotonou, Benin 2004 - Young kinoise creation, French Cultural Center, Kinshasa, RDC 2003 - Brazza project, Brazzaville, Congo - Brazza project, Brazzaville, Congo - Kin wenze wenze, Ecole des beaux – arts de Kinshasa, RDC 2001 - Jua – kali, Kinshasa, D.R. Congo - South center, Cape Town, SA - Academie des beaux – arts de Kinshasa, RDC 2000 - Academie des beaux – arts de Kinshasa, RDC - Cultural center Boboto, Kinshasa, RDC - Academie des beaux – arts de Kinshasa, RDC Residences 2014 : Uganda Art Strust, Kampala Uganda 2012 : French Institute, Kinshasa, D.R.Congo : KAS \ Project, Kinshasa, D.R.Congo 2011 : International Arts Center ( OMI ), New - York, U.S.A. : French Cultural Center, Pointe – Noire, RDC 2010 : Brave New Worlds, (Theatre der Welt) Essen, DE : Brave New Worlds, Guangzhou, China. 2008 - 2009 : Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL 2007 : Jobek park Project, Johannesburg, SA 2006 - 2007 : Urban Scenographie, Kinshasa, RDC : Progr (Kinbejozi), Bern, Switzerland 2005 : Boulev’Art Contemporary Art in the street, Cotonou, Benin : Ecole des Arts Decoratifs de Strasbourg, FR 2004 : French cultural center, Kinshasa, RDC 2003 : Brazza Project, Brazzaville, Congo Performances 2009 - French Cultural Center, Pointe Noire, Congo 2007 - Election in DRCongo, Center Wallonie, Brussels, Paris, FR - Body in transfer, Musee de Louvain–la–Neuve, BE - Congo under perfusion, Urban scenography, Kinshasa, DRC - Congo under perfusion, Botanique, Brussels, BE - Body of sick congo, Urban scenography, Kinshasa, RDC 2005 - Body and power, Ecole des arts decoratifs, Strasbourg, FR - Untitle, Group art 3, Contemporary art gallery, Ecole des arts decoratifs, Strasbourg, FR - Africa of war, Ecole des arts decoratifs, Strasbourg, FR Bibliography (Catalogue) Vitshois, Solo Show curated by Sandra Skruvida, Primo Marella Gallery, IT AFRIQUE, ASSUME ART POSITION!, curated by Yakouba Konaté, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, IT Les Arts du Congo d’hier a nos Jours, curated by Roger Pierre Turine, edition La Renaissance du Livre 2007, Brussels, BE Kinshasa – Lubumbashi, MAMAC, Lieges, BE Accents d’ingéniosité: Bicici, Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Strange, 2016 Exhibition view, Primo Marella Gallery

Kóan Jeff Baysa

Kóan Jeff “KJ” Baysa is a medical doctor and contemporary art curator and critic who coordinates forums that address sensory perception and misperception as well as the cultural constructs of health, disease, and beauty. He recently segued from a clinical practice in Manhattan to a science-andart-based curatorial and design practice in Los Angeles. He holds the posts of Chief Medical Officer - Medical Avatar; Co-founder - Joshua Treenial; Curator at Large - Institute for Art and Olfaction; and Creative Director - Honolulu Biennial Foundation. He has participated in medical missions in conflict zones, and actively organizes exhibitions and lectures globally. KJ Baysa divides his time between New York, Los Angeles, and Honolulu.

Primo Marella Gallery Milan

www.primomarellagallery.com info@primomarellagallery.com Viale Stelvio, 66 (Entrance via Valtellina) 20159 Milan T. +39 02 87384885

Primo Marella Gallery Milan

Viale Stelvio, 66 (Entrance via Valtellina) 20159 Milan - T. +39 0287384885 www.primomarellagallery.com - info@primomarellagallery.com