Artist Statement

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.

 

Biography

Moridja Kitenge Banza is a Canadian artist of Congolese origin, born in Kinshasa in 1980 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a graduate of the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Métropole and the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the Université de La Rochelle. In 2010, he won the 1st prize at the DAK’ART Biennial of Contemporary African Art for his video Hymne à nous and his installation De 1848 à nos jours. He received a Sobey Award in 2020. His work has been shown at the Musée Dauphinois (Grenoble, France), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Rosklide, Denmark), the Arndt Gallery and Ngbk (Berlin, Germany), the Biennale Internationale de Casablanca (Casablanca, Morocco), the Fondation Attijariwafa bank (Casablanca, Morocco), Fondation Blachère (Apt, France), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal, Canada), Projet Casa (Montreal, Canada), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal, Canada) and National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada). More recently, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the McMichael Museum and the Phi Foundation have presented solo exhibitions by the artist. The Musée d’art de Joliette will present a solo exhibition by Kitenge Banza in 2024. The artist’s work can be found in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Foreign Affairs Canada, the Collection de la Ville de Laval and numerous corporate collections, including BMO, Caisse de dépôt et de placement du Québec, Canadian Shield Capital, Hydro- Québec, Mouvement Desjardins, RBC and TD Bank Corporate Art Collection.