Opening reception April 23, 5–8 pm, in the presence of the artist
The Exhibition
With The Memory of Seasons, Moridja Kitenge Banza continues his exploration of territory as a living space, both sensitive and contested. Inspired by Congolese seasonal rhythms and by the idea of a musical composition, this new series of Chiromancies presents aerial views of landscape that at times resemble satellite imagery. Waterways, forested areas, and geological veins intersect within Kitenge Banza’s singular visual language. Between surface-level beauty and historical depth, the works reveal a territory shaped by memory, extraction, and the persistence of life.
The Chiromancies Series
In his Chiromancies series, Moridja Kitenge Banza relocates the practice of cartography from a geopolitical field to an intimately symbolic, critical space. The hand becomes territory: the lines of the palm no longer exclusive to a divinatory realm, but rather revealing a lived geography traversed by history, memory, violence, and a multiplicity of displacements and belongings. Here, to read one’s palm equates to a reading of the earth and its imposed borders, circulatory networks, and sites of tension. The body becomes a map and, in turn, the map is once again a body.
Countering the notion of a fixed destiny, Chiromancies ascribes to a conceptualization of space as subject to perpetual reinterpretation. Territory is not given; rather, it reinvents itself according to its historical layers, in relation to the wounds it carries, and by virtue of the gazes directed towards it. Between map and palm, between surface and depth, between beauty and fracture, Moridja Kitenge Banza proposes a geopoetic reappropriation of space. Within the very materiality of painting, he makes visible that which regimes of power, surveillance, and extraction too often seek to silence.
Biography
In 2010, Kitenge Banza received the First Prize at the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, DAK’ART. Since then, he has presented solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the Musée d’art de Joliette, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the PHI Foundation, and the Musée d’histoire de Nantes, among others. A graduate of the Académie des beaux-arts (Kinshasa, DRC), the École supérieure des beaux-arts (Nantes Métropole, FR), and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Université de La Rochelle, FR), Kitenge was awarded the Sobey Art Award in 2020.
