The Congolese artist Kiripi Katembo, who died of malaria aged 36 on 5 August, is due to have a solo show at 1:54 art fair in London in October. The exhibition (15-18 October) will include three photographs from a new series documenting Kinshasa street life that Katembo was working on when he died. It will be the first time these three works have been shown anywhere.
Katembo’s final, untitled series is a continuation of two earlier projects. The first, Un Regard (2009), is a series of photographs depicting Kinshasa citizens as seen in the reflections of puddles. In an interview with the Guardian shortly before he died, Katembo described how people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) do not usually like having their photographs taken.
“You have to ask them directly if you want to shoot them in a public space. For me, that loses the essence of what I am trying to capture: the natural movement of people. That’s why I started shooting reflections—it was a way to document people going about their lives,” the artist told the newspaper.
The second series, Mutation (2013), was shot from above, presenting a bird’s eye view of the Congolese capital. By positioning himself at a slight distance, Katembo again circumnavigated the problems associated with taking photographs in the DRC, where a permit is often required. The 1:54 exhibition will feature six photographs from each project.
“The two series refer to one another, both depicting Kinshasa and its street life. The third series was a continuation of the other two, but more than that I cannot really say. We were just in the middle of producing it all,” says Eva-Lotta Flach, Katembo’s Stockholm gallerist who is organising the London show.
Touria El-Glaoui, the founding director of 1:54, says she commissioned the exhibition some time ago “to highlight the relevance and depth of Katembo’s practice to an international London audience”. She adds: “It is an honour for 1:54 to present this solo show following his untimely death.”
Katembo, who Flach describes as “an important cultural ambassador” for the DRC and Kinshasa, was also a painter and film-maker. He founded Yebela, an art collective for Kinshasaian artists, and was the executive director of the Yango Biennale in Kinshasa, which took place for the first time in November 2014.
Katembo’s photographs are currently on show in the exhibition organised by the French curator André Magnin, Beauté Congo: 1926-2015, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (until 15 November).