The artist
Kabeya Ilunga (born 2003, Goma, DR Congo) is a self-taught artist whose practice blends hyperrealism with Afro-descendant heritage. Having experienced conflict and exile, he returned to art in 2023 from a refugee camp in Uganda, a turning point that gave birth to AFROCENTRIK, a series of fifteen portraits exploring Black pride, African traditions, and memory. His works, rich in symbolism, weave intimate narratives with collective identity through gazes, scarification, and textile patterns. Combining technical precision with a socially engaged voice, Kabeya interrogates and celebrates African identity. He has exhibited in East Africa at Makerere Art Gallery, Kiggundu Art Studio, and Afropocene (The Capsule),
while also integrating social impact by supporting displaced children in Kivu. In 2025, he also exhibited with Young Leaders for Arts and Health, a global initiative by ylah.org with the Global Art in Medicine Fellowship and the Commonwealth Leadership Institute kampala summit. Currently based in Kampala, Kabeya is represented by Bella Art Gallery (Berlin) and seeks to engage with global contemporary dialogues.

Shaped by a personal journey marked by exile, displacement, I strive to bring dignity, presence, and voice to Afro-descendant identities. After years immersed in programming and digital creation, I returned to drawing in November 2023 from a refugee camp in Uganda. This moment became the birth of Afrocentrik a series of 15 portraits reclaiming pride, heritage, and future through visual storytelling. My practice is both a form of resistance and a celebration: a way of remembering who we are, and imagining who we might become.

Artistic statement

My art is a quest for memory, identity, and Black beauty, rooted in Afrocentrism. Through hyperrealistic portraits blended with African cultural symbols, scarification, traditional fabrics, hairstyles, patterns, and sacred iconography, I celebrate often-forgotten legacies and question our relationship to the past, the body, dignity, and pride. Each work is a conversation between tradition and modernity, a way of making the invisible visible, of honoring what history has attempted to silence. I draw on African collective memory to create powerful, spiritual, sometimes vulnerable, yet always deeply rooted images.

My work is also an act of resistance: it counters the loss of identity with a reappropriation of self, and the global standardization with the richness of Afro-descendant narratives. My art is a mirror for those who seek to reconnect with their origins, to see themselves represented with dignity, strength and humanity.

With love for art and for cultures, Kabeya ilunga