Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip

February 27–September 18, 2022

Congolese photographer Gosette Lubondo’s Imaginary Trip series probes the intersections of memory and architecture, examining tensions between residual colonial constructs and contemporary life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lubondo places herself in these pictures, wearing a range of guises and interacting with other subjects. Bodies fluctuate in and out of corporeality; some are solidly in the present while others seem to emerge from a ghostly past. Staged in stylized, almost nostalgic tableaux, the characters inhabit one of two settings: a train car and a school, both abandoned and devoid of the vitality that historically characterized these key nodes of colonial infrastructure. With each photograph, Lubondo imagines her way through the lingering remnants of her country’s colonial past. Schools and stations once humming with movement and exchange now conjure the ghosts of a bygone waystation—a fitting metaphor for Lubondo’s journey and the memory of previous generations who passed through.

PRESS RELEASE: Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip

Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip is organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and curated by Erica P. Jones, curator of African arts, and Elaine Ericksen Sullivan, Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Support comes from the Fowler Contemporary Council Fund.

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