Objects as extensions of the body: supports able to hold and prolong the memory of lived experience.
Aza Mansongi (b. 13 June 1980, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese visual artist. She lives and works between the DRC and the different contexts of creation that nourish the evolution of her practice.
Her relationship with art was built in childhood, from a personal experience connected to learning to write: made to switch from her left hand to her right, she discovered in drawing a space of expression and escape. That experience is today one of the starting points of her reflection on gesture, body and memory. She pursued her training at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts of Kinshasa, where she obtained her diploma in visual arts, and then joined the Atelier Botembé, developing her practice in contact with other artists and deepening her experience of painting. Her path widened through a collaboration with two Cameroonian artists, which gave rise to the collective 3 Kokoricos, active in Kinshasa and Douala, and opened a new stage in her career; her prolonged stay in Cameroon contributed in particular to the evolution of this reflection and broadened her view of the relations between body, space, memory and identity.
Over the course of her research, Mansongi has developed a reflection around the "memory of gesture". Initially tied to her own experience, this inquiry has progressively expanded to the observation of the body, of daily gestures and of the social and cultural environments in which they take form. The body occupies a central place in her practice: through painting, collage and the assemblage of different materials, she explores the visible and invisible traces left by experiences and gestures on the body and in memory. The objects present in her works are conceived as extensions of the body and as supports capable of preserving or prolonging the memory of lived experience. Her compositions, situated at the border between figuration and abstraction, often stage bodies and faces that overlap, intertwine or dissolve into one another; colours, fabrics, papers and diverse materials contribute to the construction of a plastic language in which personal experience, bodily memory and social environment meet. Through her practice she seeks to create a space of questioning around the way in which gestures and everyday experiences transform our relationship to the body, to memory and to identity, inviting the viewer to observe what, in our experiences, may leave traces that are sometimes invisible yet deeply inscribed within us.
Mansongi has exhibited in Africa, Europe, the United States and Asia. In 2008, with the 3 Kokoricos collective and the Belgian artist Arnaud Debal, she realised a monumental fresco of eighty by three metres at the Lycée Français of Kinshasa. Her exhibitions include "Under African Skies" at the Sankaranka Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2006), "CongoEyes" at the AfricArt Gallery, Hong Kong (2019), her first presentation in Asia, the solo exhibition "Échelle" at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Kinshasa (2023), the group exhibition "HERtory Reframed" in Lagos (2024) and the two-person exhibition "Défier l'Ombre" with Folake Idowu (2024). In 2024-2025 she was awarded the AFRICALIA grant for an artistic research and creation residency at WIELS, the contemporary art centre in Brussels.