Géraldine Tobé

Géraldine Tobé (born February 9, 1992, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese visual artist and artivist whose multidisciplinary practice explores trauma, spirituality, ancestral belief, mental health, womanhood, and the social and political conditions of contemporary Congolese life. Working across painting, drawing, smoke-based image making, installation, and performance-inflected practice, Tobé examines personal suffering, collective memory, and the tensions between Indigenous belief systems and Christianity through haunting figuration, ritualized process, and materially charged surfaces.  Tobé studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Her work is deeply shaped by her experience of being accused of witchcraft as a child and subjected to violent exorcism, a history she transforms into an artistic language built from soot and smoke. Her practice often engages memory, spiritual violence, social stigma, ancestral transmission, and the psychic burdens carried by women and marginalized people, using oil-lamp smoke, painting, and symbolic imagery to consider both personal healing and wider collective struggle.  Her work has been exhibited at AFIKARIS in Paris, in Brussels through the Lever House exhibition context, and in international presentations connected to restitution discourse and contemporary African art. In 2026, she was included among the artists for the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s pavilion presentation at the Venice Biennale. Géraldine Tobé lives and works in Kinshasa.