Christian Nyampeta
Christian Nyampeta (b. 1981, Rwanda, lives and works in Amsterdam and New York) is an artist and organizer of exhibitions, screenings, performances and publications, which are all conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking and mutual action.
Nyampeta convened the Boda Boda Lounge 2022-2024, a trans-African film and video art festival. His other recent and ongoing activities include contributing to the 14th Shanghai Biennale in collaboration with Wanuri Kahiu; the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburg; Manifesta 14, Prishtina; and the 17th Istanbul Biennial. In 2019, Nyampeta was awarded the European Union Prize at the 12th Bamako Encounters, the African Biennial of Photography. In New York, Nyampeta facilitates the African Film Institute at E-flux, sits on the board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture, and is a board member of Blank Forums and November Magazine.
Carnets d‘Amerique
2025
3 videos, 15 min, Wooden platform, 7 m × 5 m, Vinyl prints
Produced by École du soir
Co-produced by Centre d’art Waza in Lubumbashi
Commissioned by Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art
The installation presents three episodes from the ongoing film project Carnets d’Amérique together with a site-specific intervention on the windows of the library. The work takes its title from a book by the Congolese-American writer Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (1941–2025), a key figure of African literature in the 20th century.The book is a diary chronicling Mudimbe’s first visit to the United States, years before he would settle there as a university professor. One episode of the film, a visual essay, reflects on the artist’s experience as an immigrant to the United States within the history and current changes in global diplomacy and cultural exchange between Africa, White America and Black America. Drawing parallels from his biography with the accounts of the Congelese writer Mudimbe, the artist reflects on the ongoing effects of history, on former and current politics. The video essay raises questions on what to learn or relearn from history and what responsibilities derive from that.
The site-specific presentation includes window filters with stamp illustrations of fauna in Congo drawn by a Belgian artist and published during the period the country was colonised by Belgium (1908–1960). The illustrations act as symbolic incomplete representations of Mudimbe’s homeland, which he left in exile in 1979 due to the authoritarian regime’s manipulation of academic discourse for political control.