The University of Kinshasa UNIKIN), Democratic Republic of Congo, has a vacancy for a PhD scholarship in the following area:
A historicised approached to colonial water and oil paintings in Kinshasa and Kongo-Central as products of local visual cultures and of colonial contact history.
Your research is part of the BELSPO-funded BRAIN network project entitled ‘Inscribing lines, weaving threads. Congolese colonial paintings as images and objects’ (acronym: CONGOLINES), which is financed by the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) and carried out in partnership between UNIKIN, the RMCA, the Ghent University and the Royal Library (KBR).
This research project focuses upon the first paintings produced by Congolese in the DR Congo just before and during the colonial era, which build on local drawing and painting traditions and show the influence of contact with and patronage of westerners. The body of work consists mostly of water and oil paintings in the collections of the RMCA and KBR and mural painting traditions documented on photographs and in situ in DR Congo. Overall, these paintings have been under-researched and their stories remain untold: more is known about the western collectors, patrons and photographers who constituted or photographed the collections than about the Congolese artists who created the works and their meanings from a Congolese perspective. The research in this project builds on archival, collection and field research to reconstruct a long history of drawing and painting in DR Congo.
For more information check the website.
