Gosette Lubondo
Giclée print on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta 325 gsm paper. 54 x 80 cm.
Gosette Lubondo (b. 1993) is a Congolese photographer whose staged images explore memory, time and the layered histories of place. Through carefully composed photographic tableaux and performances, she inhabits abandoned buildings and forgotten sites, transforming them into evocative spaces where past and present converge. Her practice examines questions of heritage, identity and collective memory, revealing how architecture can preserve the emotional and historical traces of lived experience.
After graduating from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa in 2014, Lubondo pursued photography through a series of workshops, collectives and international masterclasses, developing a distinctive visual language that combines documentary observation with theatrical staging. Influenced by her father and great-uncle, both renowned Congolese photographers, she approaches photography as a medium capable of reanimating histories that have been obscured or forgotten.
Lubondo's breakthrough came in 2016 with Imaginary Trip, a landmark series set within abandoned trains at Kinshasa's former railway station. Populating the deserted carriages with imagined passengers whose dress and gestures evoke another era, she established the central concerns that continue to shape her work: the plasticity of time, the persistence of memory and the imaginative reconstruction of history. She expanded this inquiry in Imaginary Trip II, produced during a residency at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, within an abandoned school founded in 1936, and later in Imaginary Trip III (2024), created at former industrial sites across the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Land of Milk, Land of Honey (2022), conceived within the ruins of President Mobutu Sese Seko's palaces in Gbadolite, Lubondo reflects on the fragility of political power and the enduring presence of history within architectural ruins. Lubondo's work was first presented at October Gallery in the group exhibition Emergent Energies, introducing her contemplative photographic practice to London audiences.
Lubondo's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Kampala Biennale, Uganda; the Lubumbashi Biennale, Democratic Republic of Congo; Images Vevey, Switzerland; Rencontres d'Arles, France; the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris; and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles. In 2020, she received the CAP Prize for her series Tala Ngai, and in 2021 was awarded the Prix Maison Ruinart, presented annually to an emerging artist exhibiting at Paris Photo. In 2026, Lubondo represented the Democratic Republic of Congo in the country's pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Her work is held in numerous international collections, including the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris; KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels; the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and the Harn Museum of Art, Florida, among others.
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View below for career highlights and works for sale by the artist.
