ARTIST TALK | Michèle Magema & Sorana Munsya

On the occasion of the exhibition Diffracted Self at the gallery, we are delighted to host a conversation between Franco-Congolese artist Michèle Magema and curator and art critic Sorana Munsya.

Michèle Magema is an interdisciplinary artist working mainly with video, performance, photography and drawing. Her work focuses on articulating a permanent exchange between individual stories, collective memory and History. Michèle Magema’s work is shown in international institutions and included in the collections of the AfricaMuseum in Brussels (BE), Museum Rietberg in Zürich (CH), Artothèque de Villeurbanne (FR), Département de Chamarande (FR), Sindika Dokolo Foundation (AO) and Attijariwafa bank Foundation (MA). She received the first prize of the Dakar Biennale (SN) in 2004 and the Yango Biennale IFAA Prize (CD) in 2014. She has been cited in numerous articles and publications on contemporary African art such as African Artists from 1882 until now published by Phaidon in 2021, Congo as Fiction published by Museum Rietberg in 2020, or Exploring a Century of Art in Congo, written by Rachel Donadio for The New York Times in 2015.

Sorana Munsya is an independent curator and psychologist based in Brussels. She is interested in notions of fugitivity, opacity and healing as they relate to Blackness and reflects on how it can function in Western institutional contexts. Focusing on contemporary visual arts created by Black artists, she has curated, among others, the group show “The Act of Breathing” (2022) in collaboration with Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Joud Toamah’s solo show at Photoforum Pasquart (Biel, Switzerland in 2022), Leonard Pongo’s solo show at Bozar (2021), Michèle Magema’s latest solo show at Extra City (2021). She was assistant curator of the 5th Lubumbashi Biennale of Contemporary Art. She is an editor for the Belgian art magazine GLEAN and has contributed to numerous art catalogs, such as the catalog for the 12th Rencontres de Bamako, the catalog for Pascale Marthine Tayou’s latest Belgian solo show (Mu.Zee) and others…