Nelson Makengo

Nelson Makengo (born 1990, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a Congolese artist, filmmaker, director, and producer whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary Congolese life, urban experience, infrastructure, memory, and the social and political realities of Kinshasa. Working across film, photography, and moving-image-based installation, Makengo examines power, visibility, precarity, and everyday survival through documentary observation, atmospheric cinematography, and an approach that moves between contemporary art and cinema.  Makengo graduated from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa in 2015 and later trained at La Fémis in Paris. He is also described as a self-taught photographer and filmmaker whose practice draws from visual archives, sound, and urban imagery to reconstruct fragmented histories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its capital. His work often engages social history, infrastructure, night, electricity, city life, and postcolonial experience, using documentary film, visual rhythm, and carefully composed moving images to consider how people inhabit conditions of uncertainty and transformation.  His work has been presented at Berlinale Talents, IDFA-related platforms, the Lubumbashi Biennale, and major international film festivals and contemporary art contexts. His short film Up at Night screened at more than one hundred festivals worldwide, and E’Ville won the Sharjah Art Foundation Prize at the Videobrasil Biennial. Nelson Makengo lives and works in Kinshasa.