Poésie érotique
Paulvi Ngimbi
Video and audio installation, 19 minutes 47 seconds, Banners, Sculptures, Posters
Paulvi Ngimbi’s artistic practice examines the intersection of art, religion and coloniality, drawing on both European art history and pre-colonial spiritual expressions to challenge definitions of the sacred and profane. Drawing on the intersecting spatiality of how different spaces reappropriate each other’s influences, from the sacred to the profane, Poésie érotique examines themes that are central to revivalist churches by dismantling their lexicon, communication and corporate identity. These themes are reappropriated and layered with new meaning with the help of artificial intelligence, which simultaneously pushes the boundaries of the work and unravels its layers of meaning. Combining sculptures, AI-crafted posters inspired by real posters, video and audio works and banners, Poésie érotique creates a new lexicon that invites audiences to think more deeply about the boundaries between the profane and the sacred, and how the two spaces reappropriate each other.
Born in 1997, Paulvi Ngimbi lives and works in Kinshasa. He graduated from the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa in sculpture, where he is currently an assistant lecturer. A multidisciplinary artist, his singular creations take shape through a variety of expressions: interactive installations, digital space design, sound art, collective performances, video, photography and scenography. The distinctive feature of his work is the combination of these different media in holistic spatial installations. He develops the notion of interactivity, according to which the work exists and evolves thanks to the spectators’ bodily and social relationships, creating heterogeneities between visual and physical spaces. The conceptual arrangements of sculptures, objects, light and sound interrogate spaces as spaces of socio-political design, questioning religious matter in Kinshasa and seeking to decipher the way in which religious expression unfolds in the city. A member of Laboratoire Kontempo since 2020, he has shown his installations in digital space (2020), at the Musée National de Kinshasa (2021) and at the Haus der Statistik Berlin (2022). His work has also been shown at the Biennale Yango de Kinshasa (2022), Collectif Sadi (2019), Centre Mont des Arts de Kinshasa (2018), Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale MRAC (2023), a la Base / Fondation Malraux Scène nationale Chambéry, France (2024), and Espace Public de Bamako (Mali). In 2023, he worked as set designer and artistic director on Dieudo Hamadi’s fiction series Les âmes errantes de Kinshasa.