In Congo, a spotlight on local artists.
LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo — This hot, dry metropolis may seem an unlikely art center. It is 1,600 kilometers from the capital, Kinshasa, on the southern edge of an enormous, unwieldy country typically associated with wars and other crises.
Yet the Lubumbashi Biennial, founded in 2008, recently held its sixth edition in this city in the mineral-rich Katanga Province. It gathered work by 42 artists from Congo and beyond, including contemporary African stars like Ibrahim Mahama, Emeka Ogboh, and Kemang wa Lehulere, and a collaboration with Ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that is curating Documenta 2022.
During the opening weekend, the poinciana trees were in bright orange flower around the National Museum, the biennial’s main site, which sits next to the Parliament house.
The photographer Sammy Baloji, the best-known contemporary artist from Lubumbashi and a founder of Picha, the collective that runs the biennial, explained that the Parliament building was originally a theater. Since Mobutu Sese Seko’s fall in 1997, it has been the region’s seat of Parliament.
“It’s a political space now,” Mr. Baloji said. “And that’s a metaphor for the city, where art is hemmed in by political forces.”
The global mushrooming of biennials and triennials has reached Africa, with new or forthcoming events in Casablanca, Lagos, Kampala, Rabat and Stellenbosch, among others, joining the well-established Dakar contemporary art and Bamako photography biennials. Still, Lubumbashi stands out as a frontier event, remarkable for its resilience.
Its first edition was an act of daring, imagined after Mr. Baloji earned the chance to exhibit at the Bamako biennial in 2007. “That’s where I met a community of African artists who were questioning their history and their relationship to the world,” he said.
The first Lubumbashi Biennial assembled 15 artists on a $90,000 budget, supported by the French cultural center and a local industrialist.
The biennial’s hardscrabble approach was part of the appeal for
Sandrine Colard, a Congolese-Belgian art historian who served as artistic director of this year’s event. “This one has been created by local artists,” Ms. Colard said. “It’s very grass roots.”
Katanga is vastly wealthy in metals — cobalt, copper, gold, manganese, uranium, zinc — used in everything from electric wires to cellphones and nuclear bombs. Founded in 1909, Lubumbashi was built on extraction, the hub where minerals were loaded on the railroad.
Mining and its impact — social, political, ecological — were apparent in the biennial. Hadassa Ngamba, an emerging Lubumbashi artist, exhibited a fabric piece with sections alluding to the region’s minerals, including shards of bright green malachite. Jean Katambayi used a Tesla coil to zap into life a car-shaped carapace of copper wire, a comment on how electric vehicles rely on Congolese lithium and labor.
War and other crises also found attention from Congolese artists’ perspectives. The Congolese-Belgian photographer Léonard Pongo examined Congo’s natural history in large-scale landscapes made in remote parts of the country. “Congo still represents the total possibility of life on Earth,” Mr. Pongo said.
In the heart of Lubumbashi is a grim monument to extraction — a massive slag heap that aggregates seven decades of copper, cobalt and other residues. It once appeared on Congolese bank notes. Today it sits in the derelict complex of Gécamines, the Congolese state mining company, which has undergone a spectacular collapse since the late 1980s.
The biennial took over the abandoned Gécamines mess hall as a site for works including Mega Mingiedi’s ballpoint-pen fantastical map of Congo and Lubumbashi, marked with dates and mineral symbols and references to domestic and foreign exploiters.
Mr. Mingiedi, who is from Kinshasa, also directed a performance featuring artists who built a ball of cardboard and PVC and rolled it through the former Gécamines workers’ quarters. The ball symbolized the company, fraying and flattening. Eventually, Mr. Mingiedi set it on fire.
Like every biennial, this one too faces the challenge of proving its relevance to city residents and their needs. While children and students engaged with artists at their installations, a photo project in working-class Kamalondo brought skepticism.
Used to obstacles, the Lubumbashi artists aren’t giving up.
“To see beautiful things is important for consciousness,” Mr. Katambayi said. “It’s the beginning of a solution.”