Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo is known for his activism and his radical performances, in which he makes his own body a territory of pain. Using the body as a symbol for the expression of human passions, Mwilambwe Bondo reflexively mirrors the realities of society and politics. His work reassembles bodies and faces with the use of clippings from international fashion magazines, revealing the human figure as perpetually incomplete. Through techniques in painting and collage, bodies and faces emerge severed, depersonalised and reconstituted, providing a reflection in part, on the precarity of the civilian in political and juridical arenas.
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts (ABA) in Kinshasa, Mwilambwe Bondo studied visual arts at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, France, before undertaking an artist’s residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. While there, he had his first solo show, where he presented collages made from magazine pictures of faces and limbs. His work has been included in international exhibitions in Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland.