Using appropriation, irony, and various staging strategies to interrogate the often-tenuous line between fiction and reality, Moridja Kitenge Banza proposes heterogenous works that incorporate collage, painting, installation, photography, and performance, giving a formal expression to the many strands of his identity. Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, having lived in France, and now based in Montreal, Kitenge Banza meshes artistic tradition and contemporaneity to underscore notions of memory, culture, and history. From this perspective, he creates visual satires of cultural colonialism by appropriating certain codes or symbols frequently conveyed in hegemonic cultural, political, and social representations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the paintings of the Christ Pantocrator<\/em> series (2017\u2013), Kitenge Banza adopts this appropriationist approach by overlapping the sacred image of Christ the saviour\u2014a key subject in Byzantine Christian iconography\u2014with that of African masks. By reappropriating the use of traditional masks (and icons) while deflecting them from their thaumaturgic or sacred intent, he alludes to the instrumentalization of these objects in modern art and to their frequent plunder at the hands of European museums, which are so fond of exoticism. A veritable mise en abyme of the power that images have to attest to the veracity of what they represent, even to being truer than life, Christ Pantocrator<\/em> goes beyond an African-centrist discourse in order to stimulate a dialogue among cultures and highlight the vacuousness of the very notion of authenticity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kitenge Banza explicitly addresses this preoccupation in the photographic series Authentique<\/em> (2017\u2013). Here, he stages himself in the scene beside his Christic paintings, posing stoically in settings that conjure his Congolese and Canadian identities at once. Sitting in front of a low wall in his garden in Montreal, he juggles with the aesthetic codes of Africanit\u00e9\u2014bright colours, African wax prints\u2014and interrogates the concept of \u201cAfrican identity\u201d and its iconographic accoutrements, as identity is ultimately realized only in our relationships with the Other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Kitenge Banza\u2019s art, irony and appropriation thus become salutary strategies for unravelling the often complex connections that tie artists and their work to the set of cultural referents marking their identity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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