Gosette Lubondo

Gosette Lubondo (born 1993, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese photographer and visual artist whose photographic practice explores memory, architecture, absence, and the layered histories of postcolonial space. Working across staged photography, photo-performance, and installation-based presentation, Lubondo examines how abandoned schools, train cars, and other sites carry the traces of personal and collective history through spectral figuration, carefully composed mise-en-scène, and an atmosphere that moves between documentation and dream.  Lubondo studied visual communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, graduating in 2014. Inspired early by her father, a professional photographer, she also participated in workshops with Kinshasa photography collectives including Eza Possible and other local training programs. Her work often engages memory, ruins, colonial and postcolonial history, and the emotional lives of spaces, using staged bodies, repetition, and cinematic black-and-white photography to consider erasure, inheritance, and the invisible presences that linger within abandoned places.  Her work has been exhibited at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, the Lubumbashi Biennale, Addis Foto Fest, and Stevenson, and she has presented solo exhibitions including Juxtapositions and Imaginary Trip. She received the CAP Prize in 2020 and the Maison Ruinart Prize in 2021. Gosette Lubondo lives and works in Kinshasa.