The artist
Born in 2003 in Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, I am a self-taught visual artist working in an Afrocentric hyperrealist style, at the intersection of beauty, memory, and cultural manifesto. Through charcoal, graphite, pastels, acrylics, and oil paint, I explore themes of identity, spirituality, and the persistence of African traditions in the face of erasure. My work is a tribute to what endures the symbols, bodies, and stories often left out of dominant narratives.

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