Born in 1979, Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Died in 2015 in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he lived and worked.
Kiripi Katembo was first a painter and video artist before using photography - "these still images" - to express his relationship with his urban environment, his city, Kinshasa. "Un regard" is his first photographic series: it happened by accident. Confronted with the hostility of the inhabitants towards the camera, Katembo then used the reflections of the puddles of water that stagnated on the streets of the city to make his photos of the urban landscape : "and there everything is put in situation, people, architecture, landscapes ... The reflections of water allowed to circumvent this problem while giving a surrealist vision but with full of details that correspond very well to the reality of my city." Presenting the images in reverse allows him to magnify the everyday reality to go beyond. "If you take the image in the normal sense, it's chaos. As soon as you turn it around, everything becomes more positive, more beautiful." Produced between 2008 and 2013, the series Un regard was presented in Congo in Kinshasa and at the Biennale of Lubumbashi. In 2011 he received the Blachère Foundation Prize at the Bamako Photography Meetings before being exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Berlinale. The image Survivre illustrated the poster of the Avignon Festival in 2013.
