KunstRAI | Art Amsterdam
Booth 73
Artists: Frank Bauer | Till Freiwald | Daniel Heil | Harding Meyer | Jurriaan Molenaar | Éder Oliveira | Claudia Rogge | Kate Waters
Solo Show: Fransix Tenda Lomba
Fransix Tenda Lomba is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Kinshasa, DR Congo. His practice encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture and animated video. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa and has participated in several residencies. He was in residence at the prestigious Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2021 – 2023. In January 2024, Fransix Tenda Lomba has been nominated for the the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize.
Fransix Tenda Lomba has been inspired by palm lines to build his figures and for the past few years, he has been exploring archival elements in his drawing and painting work, mixing documents and archival objects of his parents from the 1900s with official documents issued by the national authority and the archives of the world's chocolate companies. Fransix Tenda Lomba considers these archives as witnesses to experience and history, living documents that bear the traces of everyday life that tell the story of a post-colonial society. He entitled this project "Le choc est là", which is inspired by chocolate. The double meaning of the title refers to the cultural, economic, political, social and geopolitical shocks of the cocoa chain, which he traces from the different places of origin of cocoa to the world of consumers. Fransix Tenda Lomba has created large-scale drawings that form the basis of his video animations. These works tell diverse but deeply intertwined stories about the human connection through the production and consumption of raw materials such as cocoa, personal commentaries on the collective memories of post-colonial societies and the bittersweet reality that the pleasure of chocolate is fraught with suffering. “We are bound by cocoa (chocolate).“