After the Comic Salon 2020 was cancelled, the artists of the project “Popular Images” had to wait two years for their trip to Erlangen. This year in June it finally happened, the International Comic Salon 2022 could take place – and so could the long-awaited exhibition! Three of the artists from Kinshasa have captured their impressions and experiences of their stay in Erlangen in drawings.
Popular culture in Kinshasa, its narrative strategies, its role in society and its transformation over time: art critic and researcher Jean Kamba shows the connections between popular comics, music and television.
A conversation as part of the “Café littéraire de Missy” (Missy’s Literature Café): Missy Bangala is a journalist, cultural manager and initiator of the Literature Café and invites Hilaire Mbyie, professor at the Pedagogical University of Kinshasa and comics specialist, to a conversation about the history of Congolese comics.
“Poor images” are squeezed, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, and copied through slow digital connections. Just as life and art thus merge, so the boundaries between author and audience become blurred. Based on Hito Steyerl’s thesis of “poor images”, curator and writer Olivia Berkowicz analyses how popular images challenge the boundaries of Western cultural narratives.
