Léonard Pongo

Léonard Pongo (born 1988, in Liège, Belgium) is a Belgian-Congolese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores Congolese identity, landscape, memory, spirituality, and the layered realities of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Working across photography, film, textile design, experimental printing techniques, and mixed-media installation, Pongo examines how Congo is perceived and represented through immersive visual strategies that move between documentary observation, abstraction, and material experimentation.  Pongo studied Political and Social Sciences at Maastricht University, graduating in 2009, and later earned a BA in Visual Arts: Photography from Bussel’s Art School in 2012. His work often engages landscape, social history, craft, and diasporic belonging, using snapshot, diary-based photography, abstraction, moving image, and installation to consider the complexity, contradiction, and polysemy of Congolese experience beyond reductive frameworks of conflict or spectacle.  His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale in 2026, and has been shown in exhibitions across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. He was named one of PDN’s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch in 2016 and received a Getty Grant in 2018. Léonard Pongo lives and works between Brussels and Kinshasa.