Marisa Kingica

(Angola, 1992)

On her artwork

Marisa Kingica's work has not been restricted to a single artistic discipline. Performance, painting and photography are part of a poetics that recovers heritages fragmented by colonial, civilising and ethno-social processes. She goes out to meet her ancestry, venturing to understand its meanings, to revitalise its knowledge. She values the legacy of her Ubuntu community, conviviality as an inclusive capacity to relate to each other, a way of being and being together. In this way, her artwork updates imaginaries of belonging, proposes a common spirituality open to plurality and to listening to the Other.

Within the corpus of the tradition she rescues, she also develops a place of its own. Through her art, she assumes an active role in her environment. From her feminine identity and her generational position, she reconnects with her cultural heritage, visualises the stories of the women who sustain the life of her society, questions behaviours that marginalise them and breaks patterns.

She uses colour expressively to highlight the features of the symbolic heritage that surrounds her. She works with communal iconography to capture the depth of its mystery, to condense its ritual depth. In this way her work seems to touch on abstract figuration, where the plastic treatment confers emotion and communicative force to the compositions. She also experiments with materials she takes from everyday life, in order to imprint a contemporary approach, as well as to bring the pictorial surface closer to the reality that circumscribes it. Her work is heterodox and unconventional, she opts for less common languages in her milieu and for involving the spectator, inviting him to problematise and debate.

Trajectory (summary)

Graduated in Visual Arts at the Instituto Superior de Artes, ISART, she studied a Master in Cultural Projects Management at the FUNDAÇÃO UNIVERSITARIA IBEROAMERICANA ‘FUNIBER’. Her works have been part of several exhibitions in galleries such as: Camões Angola Cooperação Cultura e Língua, Instituto Guimarães Rosa, Skay Galery ‘ESCOM’, Fundação Arte e Cultura, Siexpo, CCBA, Casa Museu Óscar Ribas, Museu Militar, Kafukolo 5, among others. She has been a member of the art collectives Resiliart Angola, Jovens Artistas de Angola (YAANG) and Jovens Artistas do Futuro Angola (JAA). Her work was part of the collective exhibition “Caminhos Cruzados” with the artist Ximena Mesu at Fundação Arte e Cultura. Participated in the XI Biennial of CPLP in 2019. Honored as an artist of the Municipality of Cazenga by the Administração do Cazenga in 2021. Also participated in the Biennial of Luanda in 2021 and in the Pan-African Forum for the Culture of Peace (Resiliarte Angola).