Géraldine Tobe

GÉRALDINE TOBE WAS BORN IN 1992 IN KINSHASA IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO WHERE SHE LIVES AND WORKS. 

She finished her studies in painting at the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa in 2012. Not satisfied with her paintings, she burnt her canvases. She then began to paint with the smoke from an oil lamp, linking her art to the traumas of her childhood: night, fire and spirits. Seeing art as a way of soothing the soul, Géraldine Tobe has created a cultural structure (Losa) in Kinshasa which organises art therapy workshops for psychiatric patients. 

Accused of witchcraft as a child and subjected to a violent exorcism, her work now questions ancestral beliefs and the place of the coloniser's religion. She imbues her work with her suffering and the pain of women and the Congolese people. Her paintings deal with ethnography with a more specific focus on the church in colonial history and ancestral spirituality. In her canvases, African masks mingle with disjointed, dancing bodies. She says that using fire and smoke enables her to link the immaterial and physical worlds.

Tobe’s work drew particular attention at the 2018 Dakar Biennale. Since then, it has been the subject of several solo exhibitions in Belgium, Congo, Madagascar, and France. More recently, her pieces were featured in The True Size of Africa exhibition at the Völklinger Museum in Germany, and are currently on view at the Musée Rath in Geneva as part of the exhibition Au delà des apparences (Beyond Appearances).