Bio & Biblio

Born in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sinzo Aanza lives and works between Kinshasa and Zürich. Writer and visual artist, Sinzo develops a transdisciplinary practice that explores the radicality of fiction as a poetic, critical, and plastic method. At the heart of his work lies the concept of Ngwaki, inspired by an ancient funeral wake dance of the Nande people, in which movement, speech, and rhythm compose a collective space of narration and renewal. Sinzo Aanza appropriates this principle to develop a practice in which texts, drawings, installations, and performances function as the gestures of a single narrative architecture. At the crossroads of literature and the visual arts, his work interrogates the mechanisms by which societies, institutions, and individuals produce their founding narratives and regimes of truth. Drawing on writing, archival research, documentary inquiry, and poetic speculation, he constructs devices in which objects, images, and textual fragments become the elements of a transforming narrative field. His installations borrow as much from theatre as from critical thought, composing environments in which images appear as traces of real or imagined events. Between document and legend, memory and speculation, official discourse and alternative fiction, the work stages the tensions that run through the fabrication of collective imaginaries. His work has recently been presented in several exhibitions, including at the 36th Biennale of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, where he received the Audience Award, and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (2025), at PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv as part of the Future Generation Art Prize and at the Magasins Généraux in Paris (2024), at the Kunsthaus Zurich (2023), the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris (2020), at Museum Rietberg in Zurich, WIELS in Brussels, and the Lubumbashi biennale (2019), at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles (2018), and at the Lyon biennale (2017). He has published several books of fiction and his plays have been staged, among others, at Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe and Festival d’Automne in Paris, at les  Récréâtrales in Ouagadougou, at Théâtre Jean-Vilar of Vitry-sur-Seine, at Festival Ça se Passe à Kin in Kinshasa, at the Grand T of Nantes, at les Praticables in Bamako, at Comédie de Caen as well as at Comédie de Reims and the Festival d’Avignon.