Aimé Mpane CONGO: Shadow of a Shadow

Installed in the exhibition "Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa," July 7, 2013–May 4, 2014), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Mixed media (matchsticks, wood, shoes, beads, and metal), dimensions variable.

Cultural fluency became the focus of works in the late twentieth century. This allowed for specific issues and cultural concerns to translate across cultures, time, and space.

Congo: Shadow of a Shadow was created with headless wooden matches glued together into a hollow framework of a life-sized man. Congo is personified, even given a death date, to reference the death of the country by the Berlin Conference.