Sinzo Aanza

This exhibition brings together three of Sinzo Aanza’s most recent projects, which explore obscure corners of history—moments when a world shifts, when political, symbolic, and material structures are transformed to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable. Une archéologie de la nuit (An Archaeology of the Night) examines these ruptures not through their official narratives, but through the traces they have left on objects, cosmologies, the psyche and gestures.

The figure of Kalisya appears through the sculptures of the series Kalisya, the Thousand Faces, like the paradoxical spirit of technological modernity: a goddess born in the cosmologies of Kivu, yet now scattered throughout the material circuits of a hyperconnected world.

The Sky Map of Mbwila on 29 October 1665 revisits the 1665 battle between the kingdoms of Kongo and Portugal as a moment of cosmological upheaval, where the end of a local political order ushers in a global modernity that is already corrupt and fractured.

Finally, with the series The Pedestal is a Flowerpot, the artist questions the history of museums and monuments, revealing how the beauty of the objects on display remains linked to the dynamics of conquest, appropriation, colonial knowledge and possession.

Hair, minerals, textiles, heads, displaced objects—the works act as fragments unearthed from a partially buried history. Together, they offer a symbolic excavation of our time, revealing the invisible layers that connect ancient cosmologies, historical catastrophes, and contemporary infrastructures. This exhibition is an attempt to read the night of the world—not as a void, but as an archive.