Canadian Congolese artist Moridja Kitenge Banza was born in Kinshasa in 1980 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He holds degrees from l’Académie des beaux-arts de Kinshasa, from l’École supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole and from the Humanities and Social Sciences faculty of l’Université de La Rochelle. In 2010, he was awarded the Léopold Senghor Grand Prize of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, DAK’ART for his video Hymne à nous and his installation work De 1848 à nos jours. He received the 2020 Sobey Award alongside 25 other finalists in the context of the COVID pandemic. The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is currently presenting a solo exhibition by the artist entitled “Et la lumière fut (And there was light)”. His work was previously included in exhibitions at the Musée Dauphinois (Grenoble, France), at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Rosklide, Danemark), at the Arndt Gallery and Ngbk (Berlin, Allemagne), at the Biennale Internationale de Casablanca (Casablanca, Maroc), at the Fondation Attijariwafa bank (Casablanca, Maroc), at the Fondation Blachère (Apt, France), at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montréal, Canada), at the Phi Foundation (Montréal, Canada), the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (Montréal, Canada) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada). Art works by the artists were acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Collection of the City of Laval and multiple corporative art collections including BMO, la Caisse de dépôt et de placement du Québec, Canadian Shield Capital, Desjardins, Hydro-Québec, RBC and TD Bank Corporate Art Collection.
As a multidisciplinary artist, I express myself through painting, photography, video, drawing and installation.
My artistic approach is situated between reality and fiction, a means by which I question the history, memory and identity of the places where I live or the places that I have lived in, in connection with the place I occupy in these. Through my works, I intentionally confuse reality and fiction in order to disrupt hegemonic narratives and create spaces where marginal discourse can exist.
Drawing on current or ancient realities, I organize, assemble, trace figures, revisit parts of my history, by reappropriating the codes of religious, cultural, political, social and economic representations. I do this with the intention to highlight the contradictions that constructed my identities. Thus, I make my own tools to better invest in the territory of the other; in order to nurture all these areas of research that inspire my art practice.
