Prisca Tankwey & Paulvi Ngimbi

Both Prisca Tankwey and Paulvi Ngimbi were born in Kinshasa in 1997 and graduated from the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa in 2019, the former in painting and the latter in sculpture. The two artists now teach at their alma mater. Prisca heads the painting department and is the assistant of the academy’s director-general, Henri Kalama, while Paulvi heads the sculpture department.

They were in residence at the AfricaMuseum in October-November 2023 to conduct artistic research. Their country of birth is marked by Christianity and religious symbols. Such symbols, sacred to many, primarily originate from Christianity and the colonial era. Meanwhile, traditional symbols and forms of artistic expression from precolonial times are viewed negatively in modern-day Kinshasa, where Christianity prevails. As such, their artistic practice tackles themes such as colonial Christian and contemporary Congolese traditions. 

During the residency, they met with researchers and consulted the collections. The initial area of research on Christian Kinshasa rapidly expanded to include, notably, the museum collections and the way in which these were presented, shared, displayed, and discussed. The two artists had access to parts of the collections that were to be featured in the exhibition ‘ReThinking Collections’, and became particularly interested in the concept of ‘provenance research’, which seems to encompass different realities in Belgium and in DRC. 

The results of the residency took the form of a performance entitled ‘AUTOPSIE’, presented at the AfricaMuseum on 23 November 2023.