This autumn, Almas Art Foundation presents From Above, Everything Looks Beautiful, the first London solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Congolese-Canadian artist Moridja Kitenge Banza. The exhibition debuts a new body of work from Banza’s ongoing Chiromancy series, examining the enduring legacies of colonialism, resource extraction and the ways in which territories are mapped, controlled and consumed.
The exhibition arrives at a moment when the Democratic Republic of Congo sits at the centre of the global race for critical minerals—resources essential to the world’s digital technologies and energy transition.
Curated by N’Goné Fall, Who says: “With From Above, Everything Looks Beautiful, Moridja Kitenge Banza proposes a geo-poetic reappropriation of space – a way of making visible, within the very material of the painting, what regimes of power, surveillance and extraction too often seek to silence.”
For Banza, the exhibition asks audiences to question not only what they see, but how they
see it: “Beauty is what distance allows us to see. History is what the land refuses to forget.”
While rooted in the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the exhibition speaks to urgent global conversations around environmental justice, colonial memory, surveillance, restitution and the human cost of the technologies that shape our everyday lives. Rather than documenting these realities, Banza shifts the viewer’s perspective, revealing the often-unseen systems of power embedded within landscapes and the narratives constructed around them.
From Above, Everything Looks Beautiful marks the beginning of Almas Art Foundation’s autumn programme dedicated to contemporary Congolese art. It will be followed by History in the Making, a group exhibition featuring artists Pamela Tulizo and Dolet Malalu, whose work explores themes of memory, resilience, identity and resistance through contemporary perspectives rooted in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Together, the two exhibitions offer a powerful insight into the breadth and diversity of contemporary Congolese artistic practice.
Almas Art Foundation, Arch 28 Old Union Yard Arches, London, SE1 0LR
11 September – 31 October 2026
Book Signing: Saturday 12 September 2026 | 2.00pm – 5.00pm
Join Moridja Kitenge Banza for a special book signing, accompanied by DJs, drinks and refreshments.
Almas Art Foundation Website: https://www.almasartfoundation.org/
