This program will be presented in French with English translation.

To mark the opening of Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip at the Fowler Museum, join us online for a conversation between the artist Gosette Lubondo and exhibition curators Erica P. Jones and Elaine Ericksen Sullivan, and learn about the making of Lubondo’s two-part photographic series. 

Imaginary Trip I and II take a probing look at the intersections of memory and architecture. Across the two series, Lubondo places herself and others in a range of guises in an abandoned train car and a colonial-era school. Bodies shift in and out of corporeality, seemingly emerging from a ghostly past. The work speaks to post-colonial, post-memory generations of contemporary Africa. Lubondo herself belongs to this generation: born after independence, she examines colonial spaces and considers their lingering resonances in post-colonial society.  

Gosette Lubondo (b. 1993, Kinshasa, DRC) is a photographer based in Kinshasa. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions and festivals, including many in Kinshasa, as well as at the Lubumbashi Biennale (2017, 2019), Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa (2018), and the Congo in Harlem Film Festival in New York (2019). Her work is held in the collections of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kinshasa and Belgium; and in the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac in Paris. In 2020, Lubondo was one of five recipients of The Contemporary African Photography (CAP) Prize.

Erica P. Jones is Curator of African Arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. She received her PhD in Art History at UCLA, specializing in African art. Since joining the Fowler in 2015, Jones has organized multiple exhibitions, among them: Pantsula 4 LYF (2017), Meleko Mokgosi: Bread, Butter, and Power (2018), On Display in the Walled City: The Nigerian Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition 1924–1925 (2019), and was a co-curator of Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s-1990s (2021). Her publishing has been focused on the arts and museums of the Grassfields, and she is the author of the book accompanying the exhibition Bread, Butter, and Power. 

Elaine Ericksen Sullivan earned her PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance in 2020. For her dissertation, “Petit à Petit”: Contemporary Art and Decolonial Horizons at Belgium’s AfricaMuseum, she worked with contemporary Congolese artists on three continents, examining how their works engage with colonial history and cultural memory. Her research was supported by numerous grants, including an Arnold Rubin Award from the Fowler Museum. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow for sub-Saharan Africa in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Curator’s Choice
Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different worldviews and find joy in the multiplicity of human experiences.

Image credit: Gosette Lubondo (b. 1993, Kinshasa, DRC), Imaginary Trip I, 2016; © Gosette Lubondo, Courtesy Axis Gallery, NY & NJ.