Fransix TENDA LOMBA

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Artist statement

Fransix Tenda Lomba (1984) grew up in the Congo, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, where he has lived and worked ever since. His multidisciplinary body of work includes drawings, paintings, sculptures and animated videos. The major themes in his work are colonial memory and postcolonial society, the economic relations between Africa and the rest of the world, and the way in which raw materials such as cocoa create global networks of power and dependency. In his work, he combines the family archives of his father—who was a journalist—and his mother—a retired headteacher at a state primary school—with well-known logos and motifs drawn from African and Western visual traditions, and he paints historical figures who appear to be bathed in chocolate. In his current exhibition at the Belvedere Museum in the Netherlands, Fransix Tenda Lomba presents works that take his personal history and that of his native country as their starting point. Cocoa and liquid chocolate serve as symbols of connection between continents, between the past and the present, between production and consumption, and ultimately between people.

Artwork