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Nza

Koko Biamungu Kabamba

Video/Performance, 4:24 min, Kinshasa 2021

 

Koko Kabamba’s video work, which depicts a figure in ritual movements, is oriented towards an atomic conception of the whole. In a quantum approach that focuses on the ancient “African” cosmogony, which he seems to reinvent according to his ideas, he believes that in the beginning of everything the binary principle prevailed. Here, the “nza” that best circumscribes this logic unfolds in the form of plus and minus, from positivity to negativity,

just like the yin and yang among the Chinese. In a series of movements that suggest multiple meanings and are at the same time meaningless, this figure (entity) seems to coincide with Mother Nature to bring humanity into existence. The cosmos is seen here as a product that obeys the law of relativity as viewed by the ancestors.

Koko Biamungu Kabamba was born in 1994 in Bukavu, in the east of the democratic Republic of Congo. He currently lives and works in Goma. Kinshasa is the city where he has been able to come into contact with most of his acquaintances from the contemporary art world, since his first visit in 2009. He also got to know the world of applied art focused on audiovisual by benefiting from training, among others at CHANEL CAFÉ/production & management and at the Institut Congolaise d’Audio-visuel (I.C.A); and many others.

In 2018, he met Mugabo Baritegera, founder of the cultural centre Ndoto art and activism, based in the city of Goma, with whom he currently works in collaboration. He practices several artistic mediums, from sculpture, through painting, performance, to photography and video, both art and documentary. Koko’s work underlines a search for identity, in a formerly colonised Africa that is still marked by the influences of this metamorphosed political system.