-Showcases paintings by innovative Congolese artists from Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, Bunia, Mbandaka, Kikwit and Kisangani -Explores the concept of painting as visual memory Painting was one of the defining factors in the formation of Congolese national culture during the seventies and eighties. Looking back on works from this era, we gain a clear impression of the country's collective memory. The exhibition of paintings featured in this book explores the development of Congolese society from 1968-2012. Portraits, landscapes and allegorical paintings alternate with urban scenes, historical figures and critical reflections on religion, politics and social problems. Humor is never far away. Historical objects, photos, drawings and archive footage provide a broader perspective, and similarities to older art forms and other genres from Congo are clearly visible. The importance of popular paintings is not fundamentally different from that of more traditionally respected art; both are crucial reflections on their contexts, and informed the development of Congolese society.

For the first time, this exhibition presents objects and photographs that the German art anthropologist Hans Himmelheber collected during his field trip to the Congo in 1938-39: coloured masks, imposing figures, and richly decorated everyday objects. These are contrasted with contemporary positions by renowned Congolese artists. Exhibition: Museum Rietberg, Zürich, Switzerland (22.11.2019 - 15.03.2020).

A fascinating account of the effects of turbulent history on one of Africa’s most storied kingdoms, Kongo: Power and Majesty presents over 170 works of art from the Kingdom of Kongo (an area that includes present-day Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola). The book covers 400 years of Kongolese culture, from the fifteenth century, when Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian merchants and missionaries brought Christianity to the region, to the nineteenth, when engagement with Europe had turned to colonial incursion and the kingdom dissolved under the pressures of displacement, civil war, and the devastation of the slave trade. The works of art—which range from depictions of European iconography rendered in powerful, indigenous forms to fearsome minkondi, or power figures—serve as an assertion of enduring majesty in the face of upheaval, and richly illustrate the book’s powerful thesis.

First comprehensive book on the extraordinary collection of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, considered one of the best in the United States.

In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redress archival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominant narratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial and immediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical and speculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how their practices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that attests to the ramifications of colonialism across time.

Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English. Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu’s effort to revive “authentic” African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors’ interest and generate an international market for Congolese art. The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo’s decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.

"Fragments of the Invisible celebrates the first exhibition in the United States of thirty-four Congo sculptures from the Belgian collectors René and Odette Delenne, acquired in 2010 by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Focusing on the theme of the fragment, this book explores the contextual framework of the Delenne works both in their various African cultural settings and within their new museum home in Cleveland."--Back cover.

CATPC is the first publication to focus on the activities of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, an cooperative based in Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Included in this compact but hefty and fully illustrated monograph are writings and projects rethinking postcolonial power relations within the global art world. Contributors include curators Ariella Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Ruba Katrib, Alexander Koch, artists Eleonore Hellio and Renzo Martens, art historian Els Roelandt, political theorist Francois Verges, documentary filmmaker Leonard Pongo, art critic Charles Tumba Kekwo and writers J.A. Coster and Charles Siketele Gize, among others. CATPC, initiated in 2014 by Amsterdam-based artist, Renzo Martens, whose radical and controversial hybrid practice feeds into many current debates and Ren Ngongo, a Kinshasa-based biologist and environmental activist, this cooperative continues to develop independently and redefine the relations between art, agriculture, industry and value creation. CATPC has exhibited at The Sculpture Center, NY (2017) and MIT List Visual Art Center (2014).

"At the turn of the twentieth century, in particular Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and later the Surrealists, then others right up till the present day, Western artists have drawn on the arts of Africa for inspiration. How can this constant impact ever be measured? The same is true for the arts in Africa. Every sculpture carries within it the heritage of a people, culture, and artistic tradition in the originality of its forms. West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa each has its own set of characteristics, within which the variety of the sculptures--always similar yet also always different--demonstrates the creativity of the ethnic group that created it. This book presents a remarkable collection amassed by a knowledgeable and impassioned art lover that combines sensitivity with quality--a quality of forms meticulously selected among different African cultures. It includes masks and reliquaries carved in Gabon, effigies and statuettes from Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa, and astonishing objects from West Africa, from Mali to Cameroon, the Koro and Mossi peoples, the Ejagham and Ekoi in Nigeria, and the Gouro in the Ivory Coast. An extraordinary collection of artistic forms that well merits its place in the universal patrimony of art."--Publisher's website.