The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection

Congo Biennale , Kinshasa, Democratic Republic Of The Congo

from 16/09/2022 to 23/10/2022

For this second edition, Congo Biennale honors the links between Africa, its diasporas and its Afro-descendants. Congo Biennale has entrusted Armelle Dakouo and Fahamu Pecou, two independent curators, with the curating of this second edition. Taking place over 38 days , from September 16 to October 23, 2022 , at Kin ArtStudio, in public spaces, and other places in the city of Kinshasa. More than 40 artists, designers, architects, art historians, curators, art critics and others from 5 continents will be invited to propose a project that will be realized and presented within the framework of this international event in the cosmopolitan city of Kinshasa. Entitled Le Souffle des Ancêtres - The breath of the ancestors this edition of the Biennale will establish itself as an essential event on the Congolese artistic scene with a great international impact. This new relationship to the environment, to nature and to the beings around us refers us to another relationship to the world that we find in Africa, Asia or even America in another related form, animism.  The philosopher Gaston-Paul Effa, in "Le Dieu perdu dans l'herbe" explains that animism is a new understanding of nature (…) it is the fact of recognizing that living is not the property of the only human, we share a common space with other beings”. If for him, “animism is a loving relationship to the world and to things”, for Birago Diop, it is a feeling of humility that our human condition should impose in the face of nature and the sacred. In his poem “Breath”, it is the soul of things that he summons: “Listen more often to Things than to Beings (…) It is the Breath of the ancestors.”
Link to the exhibition website