"No one can evolve alone, everyone needs someone else."
Aza Mansongi (b. 1980, Kinshasa, DRC) is a Congolese visual artist working across painting, collage and assemblage. Her research revolves around the "memory of gesture": an inquiry that began with a personal experience, being made to switch from her left hand to her right while learning to write, and expanded into an observation of the body, of everyday gestures and of the social and cultural environments in which they take shape. Trained at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts of Kinshasa and formed at the Atelier Botembé, she co-founded a collective with two Cameroonian artists before pursuing a solo path between the DRC and Cameroon. Her compositions, poised between figuration and abstraction, stage bodies and faces that overlap, intertwine and dissolve into one another. She has exhibited in Africa, Europe, the United States and Asia, and in 2024-2025 was awarded the AFRICALIA grant for a research residency at WIELS, Brussels.