L'Union des États
Project_L’Union des États is an installation conceived as a mock embassy: a fictional institution claiming to speak on behalf of nations. Depending on the venue, the project recreates a reception area, a visa office, and the ambassador’s office. The entire setup mimics the language of international organizations: furniture, a counter, flags, forms, posters, and graphics. A screen broadcasts a program in which the artist reads a speech laden with diplomatic jargon, accompanied by tickers blending news dispatches, maps, and statistics (both real and AI-generated). Gradually, the audience realizes that this staging serves as a cover: beneath the words “cooperation” and “security” lie policies of bodily sorting and territorial control. File cabinets and evaluation algorithms expose bureaucratic opacity. A reconfigured map of Canada superimposes borders, Indigenous territories, extraction zones, and migration routes—an analog deepfake of the territory.
Bio_Moridja Kitenge Banza (Kinshasa, 1980) is a Canadian artist of Congolese origin based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, the École supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole, and the University of La Rochelle, he has developed a multidisciplinary practice (video, installation, photography, drawing) that explores the intersections of memory, history, identity, and territory. Winner of the Dak’Art Grand Prize (2010) for the video “Hymne à nous” and recipient of the Sobey Award (2020), he has exhibited his work in numerous institutions in Canada and internationally, notably at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the PHI Foundation. He serves on the board of directors of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art and chairs the board of directors of Culture Montréal.
Approach_A multidisciplinary artist, Moridja Kitenge Banza engages in a practice where the medium is not a category but a tool for analysis. Painting, photography, installation, and video serve as protocols through which he examines religious, colonial, museum, cartographic, and archival systems that construct narratives and solidify them as “truths.” By reactivating historical forms, he reveals their architecture: what they make visible, what they conceal, and the notably extractive economies they normalize. Through montage, substitution, and hybridization, he introduces dissonance to shift perception: making what seemed obvious appear differently, and rendering invisible power relations legible. Fiction becomes a method of decentering: opening up multiple readings, reconfiguring signs, making the past active in the present. Time becomes stratified; the intimate becomes a site of the archive.
