The Academy of Fine Arts of Kinshasa, ABA-KIN in acronym, is a modern artistic school in the heart of central Africa, in the incessant quest for excellence. It is a public higher education and university establishment in the Democratic Republic of Congo specialising in the training of visual artists and graphic designers. In order to render service to the community, the founding act of the Academy of Fine Arts of Kinshasa assigns it a double mission: to train specialised executives in the field of fine and graphic arts and to  organize research on the adaptation of new techniques in a specific field of the arts. Currently, the Academy of Fine Arts of Kinshasa organises two programs of study: Fine Arts and Graphic Arts, with the following departments: Sculpture, Ceramics, Painting, Metal, Conservation and restoration of works of art, Visual communication, Interior architecture, Photography and Design.

www.academie-kinshasa.cd

Membership: Since 2024

Representative: Professor Kalama Akulez Henri, PhD

direction@academie-kinshasa.cd

Born in 1973 in the DR Congo, Professor Kalama Akulez Henri, PhD. is a visual artist. He has been the General Director of the Academy of fine Arts of Kinshasa since 2016. His research is on culture, decolonization of knowledge and artistic institutions, the teaching and the phenomenology of art in the DRC and the question on how to establish an academy of art without academism. He has been increasingly consulted internationally on the topic of the reconstitution of museum artifacts. In his artistic practice, he develops an approach that is both pragmatic and phenomenological from which he expresses his perception of the world in what he calls “cosmic vibrations”. Abstract painter, for him abstraction is not the absence of representation. It is rather the presence of the “essential” which we arrive at through a permanent conjugation of the verb abstract consisting of extracting or abstracting essential elements of a mental, psychic or physical entity to express the ideal of an ethical and aesthetic.