Earlier this year, he was selected as a resident artist by Black Rock Senegal, the program in Dakar created by Wiley, best known for his White House Presidential portrait of Barack Obama, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. Outside Kinshasa, Balu’s work has been shown in museum exhibitions in Zurich Graz, Austria and Sète, France.
He spent three years in residence at Kin ArtStudio. “How much of the creative genius of the bubbling art scene comes from the breath of the ancestors?” he said.īalu collaborates professionally with Bondo, and his work was included in the 2019 Biennale. With its theme, “The Breath of the Ancestors,” it is exploring how despite “the violent dismembering of cultural and spiritual context, centuries of abuse, deception and manipulation, the power of the ancestors cannot be erased,” said the visual artist Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo, the founder of both projects. In an old textile factory in the warehouse district, Kin ArtStudio is hosting artist residencies as part of the upcoming 2021 Congo Biennale (Sept. Art from local painters graces the walls of bland, blocky government buildings. Yet art is everywhere: Colorful paintings are sold in fancy hotel lobby exhibitions and propped in the dirt for sale along downtown streets. Daily life can be difficult in the capital, where only a few lights twinkle across the lush hills beyond the city center at nightfall - much of the city is without electricity - and the main form of public transit is a set of dented, rusty yellow vans nicknamed Spirit of Death for their propensity to get into fatal accidents. For them, government funding from the Democratic Republic of Congo for the arts seems nearly impossible to secure. The city also produced the artist Alfred Liyolo, known for his curvy bronze sculptures, one of which is on display at the Vatican.īut for other yet-to-be-famous artists living in the sprawling city of an estimated 17 million people, the struggle to make a living in their craft can be a challenge. “The idea was to find another way to create our own story by using the story of Europe,” said Balu, who is 29, and counts as an inspiration Kehinde Wiley, who has questioned the scarcity of Black people in Western art.īalu lives here in Kinshasa, which was the home of world-renowned musicians such as Papa Wemba, nicknamed the king of rumba rock.
#BALU DESIGNS SKIN#
He called the series, “Kuba in the Skin of Someone Else.” In their place, he painted masks of Kuba kings. He played on that idea, producing paintings in 2015 that were copies of the royal portraits - but he carefully cut out the white faces.