The Antico Refettorio of the Scuola Grande di San Marco is a fifteenth-century refectory inside a building that today functions as a hospital. Monks once ate in it. Patients now pass the door. Into this improbable room the Democratic Republic of the Congo has installed its pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and built the whole thing around fire.
Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu! is, by a wide margin, the most assured African national presentation of the 61st edition, and The Art Newspaper placed it among the best pavilions of the entire Biennale. The trilingual title — Lingala, English, French — is doing work before you have entered the room.
The Argument: Fire as Forge, Not Catastrophe
The obvious reading of fire in a Congolese context is destruction, and the pavilion declines it. Its organising image is the blacksmith: fire that is seized, harnessed and directed becomes the thing that gives shape. Destruction and creation are the same element under different management.
The pavilion describes itself as a luminous forge running from Kinshasa to Goma, and takes its epigraph from the poet Matala Mukadi — an instruction to wake to a nest of flames and not turn away from it. For a country whose international coverage is dominated almost entirely by catastrophe, choosing the forge over the fire is a pointed curatorial decision. The imperative in the title is not a description of circumstance. It is a command.
Who Made It: A Philosopher and a Collective
The pavilion is commissioned by Cindy Makiana and curated by Nadia Yala Kisukidi, a philosopher specialising in postcolonial studies rather than a career exhibition-maker — and the intellectual coherence of the result rather makes the case for the appointment.
She did not work alone. Kisukidi collaborated with the MOKO collective, a multidisciplinary curatorial formation of Aimé Mpané, Jean Kamba and Johnny Leya. Mpané therefore appears on both sides of the wall text, as curator and as exhibiting artist — an arrangement that would look like a conflict of interest in a more bureaucratic pavilion and here reads as exactly what a collective is for.
The stated method is multiplicity rather than thesis. The pavilion does not resolve nine practices into a single argument; it lets them coexist, diverge and interfere with one another. Given that the parent exhibition is organised as a free-jazz ensemble rather than a lecture, the fit is neat.
The Artists Worth Arriving For
Sammy Baloji is the name most international visitors will recognise, and deservedly. His work has spent two decades on the entangled histories of colonialism, extraction and modernity in the Congo — the copper of Katanga, the archives of the Belgian administration, the physical residue of an economy built to remove things. He is the pavilion’s intellectual anchor.
Géraldine Tobé is the one to watch if the theme interests you, because she does not depict fire — she paints with it, using smoke and flame directly on the surface. A pavilion about the forge containing an artist whose medium is combustion is not a coincidence. She has been a significant presence since 2012, gained wider recognition at the 2018 Dakar Biennale, and has shown across Belgium, the DRC, Madagascar and France, most recently at the Völklinger Hütte and the Musée Rath in Geneva.
Léonard Pongo holds a rare distinction this year: he appears both in the pavilion and in the central exhibition at the Arsenale. Working between Brussels and the DRC across photography, textile, moving image and installation, he is held in the collections of KANAL–Centre Pompidou, FOMU Antwerp, Mu.ZEE, M Leuven and the Chazen Museum, among others. A double presence at Venice is the kind of thing that moves a career.
Gosette Lubondo photographs abandoned buildings and stages imagined narratives inside them — schools, trains, colonial-era interiors, populated by figures who may or may not have been there. It is quiet work in a loud pavilion and it holds its ground.
Aimé Mpané shows Le souffle (2026). Nelson Makengo works in film. Patrick Bongoy builds sculpture from recycled and salvaged material. Arlette Bashizi photographs the eastern provinces.
And then there is Damso, the Belgian-Congolese rapper, whose inclusion in a national pavilion at Venice is the sort of decision that tells you the curators were not consulting a checklist of acceptable art forms. Whether it works is a matter of taste. That it was attempted at all is the more interesting fact.
Why the Room Matters
Venice pavilions are often installed in spaces that resist them, and the Antico Refettorio could easily have been one of those. It is not.
A refectory is built for gathering, for the shared table, for a community eating in the same room under a single roof. A pavilion organised around multiplicity rather than a unified statement — nine voices allowed to disagree — is in an unusually apt container. The acoustics of a fifteenth-century hall do something to video and sound work that a white cube cannot.
It is also, practically, a considerable distance from the Giardini, and that is the reason most visitors will never see it. This is exactly the argument for giving the city pavilions their own day. The Scuola Grande di San Marco sits in Castello, walkable from the Arsenale, and entry is free.
Why It Took This Long
The DRC has appeared at Venice before, but intermittently and without the institutional continuity that a pavilion of this quality implies. Getting one here and open has not been a straight road.
The practical obstacles are the ones that face every African ministry of culture attempting this: a commissioner, a curator, a budget, a six-month lease on Venetian property at Venetian rates, freight, customs, insurance, invigilation and a catalogue. For a country of the DRC’s size and cultural weight to be arriving only now is not a comment on its artists. It is a comment on the machinery.
That it arrives in the same year as four first-time African pavilions, under an exhibition conceived by an African curator, is either a coincidence or the visible surface of a decade of groundwork. The pavilion itself declines to make that argument. It simply turns up and is good, which is the more effective version.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the DRC pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026?
At the Antico Refettorio of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, Castello 6777, in the Castello sestiere — walkable from the Arsenale. Entry is free and requires no Biennale ticket.
Who curated Simba Moto! Seize the Fire!?
The philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi, working with the MOKO collective — Aimé Mpané, Jean Kamba and Johnny Leya. It is commissioned by Cindy Makiana.
Which artists are in the DRC pavilion?
Nine: Sammy Baloji, Arlette Bashizi, Patrick Bongoy, Damso, Gosette Lubondo, Nelson Makengo, Aimé Mpané, Léonard Pongo and Géraldine Tobé.
What does Simba Moto mean?
It is Lingala for seize the fire. The full title runs in three languages — Lingala, English and French — reflecting the pavilion’s span across the DRC and its diaspora.
Has the DRC shown at Venice before?
Yes. The DRC is a returning participant rather than a debutant — La Biennale lists Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Nauru, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Vietnam as the seven first-time countries in 2026.
Further reading: the full guide to In Minor Keys, the African national pavilions, and tickets and opening hours.
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