Kinshasa Photographies

A guide to visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo that provides an overview of the countries' geography, climate, history, government, culture, politics, and economy and offers information on accommodations, transportation, entertainment, shopping, nightlife, attractions, restaurants, and sights.

Reading African cities into contemporary theory—reprint of a richly illustrated reference work In their internationally acclaimed publication Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, anthropologist Filip De Boeck and photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart provide a history not only of the physical and visible urban reality that Kinshasa presents today, but also of a second, invisible city as it exists in the mind and imagination of its inhabitants. They bring to light a mirroring reality lurking underneath the surface of the visible world and explore the constant transactions that take place between these two levels in Kinshasa’s urban scape. With the exhibition that accompanied the release of their Kinshasa book, the authors won a Golden Lion at the 11th International Architecture Bienniale in Venice, 2004. This beautifully illustrated publication is now again made available. Based on longstanding field research, it provides insight into local social and cultural imaginaries, and thus in the imaginative ways in which local urban subjects continue to make sense of their worlds and invent cultural strategies to cope with the breakdown of urban infrastructure.

Gives an ethnographic account of the complexities of the use of photography in Africa, both historically and in contemporary practice. This collection of studies in African photography examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn, examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, and reflecting on the distinctive qualities of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena. The volumecritically engages current debates in African photography and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios' products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between photography and ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in Africa. RICHARD VOKES is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and author of Ghosts of Kanungu

Summary: Ongeziene historische kijk op de Belgische koloniale periode. Carl De Keyzer en Johan Lagae selecteerden uit het archief van het Afrikamuseum in Tervuren meer dan 100 nooit eerder gepubliceerde foto's van Belgisch Congo. Deze beelden werden gekozen omwille van hun revelerende inhoud of sterke beeldkwaliteit. Tegelijk met het boek worden deze beelden ook geëxposeerd in het FotoMuseum Antwerpen van januari tot april 2010. In samenwerking met het Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika en het FotoMuseum Antwerpen.

Photographs taken by Guy Tillim in Kinshasha, July 2006, during the first multiparty elections held in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Congolese Kiripi Katembo (b.1979, Goma) began his artistic career as a painter, but in his late twenties his interest shifted towards photography and video art. Nonetheless his background as a painter is unmistakable in his video work and photographic oeuvre. Katembo paints with a camera, writes a story in pictures. With the poetic touch and the attentive gaze of an impressionist, he manages to bring the rapidly mutating urban landscape to a halt. In one single shutter time he captures the reality and gives it a dreamy, often surreal, expression. By shifting focus Katembo makes the unattractive attractive, renders the transient timeless and unveils that what should have been kept hidden. His atypical compositions capture our gaze and dare us to look differently. The intriguing set of photos Un regard...(2009) - both literally and figuratively a reflection on the reality in his hometown Kinshasa - was presented at Afrikaribu (the first biennial of African photography in Kinshasa, 2010), the Biennale Picha in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2010) and at the Rencontres de Bamako (2011).0Katembo's other photo series (including Mutations) and video creations are highly valued both in his home country and internationally and have been exhibited with great success in Paris, Avignon, Berlin, New York, Tunis, Toronto and Stockholm.

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.