Open studio event featuring the work of Gael Maski Kusa Kusa. Maski has been an artist-in-residency and has been working on a project titled “AIR”.
Explore Kusa Kusa’s creative process and get a glimpse into the artist’s world.
” After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, GAEL MASKI graduated from higher education in painting in 2013. He draws the language of his artistic universe from his personal history. Being a survivor of the war that struck the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997, where he lost his father, a soldier who died at the front. He arrived in the capital of the country where he tried to find his bearings, how to grow in a post-war society. He became interested in art very early on as a way for him to reconnect his story with that of his society and thus rebuild a peaceful universe.
His work begins in society, the projects he carries out are projects carried out with communities, neighborhoods and families. It all starts with contact with people.
Maski has especially worked a lot with “the most deprived” who live in slums or in difficult conditions but who manage to survive in precarious realities thanks to their mental strength. Thus stories and personal memory feed the meaning of his work. In his work he questions the hierarchy of social memory.
With his camera as a means of collecting data in a fragmented way and through collage he creates both realistic and surreal worlds that eventually appear as a dream universe that serves as a moral remedy for any viewer who needs to fill an inner void and make a fresh start. Thus the word “poor” or “refugee” is used in his work as a metaphor that designates anyone in search of inner well-being.”
