Sunday, October 21st
6:00PM
Maysles Cinema

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CLOSING NIGHT EVENT

AN EVENING WITH BALOJI!

“I see music in colors”. Multi-talented rapper-singer-artist Baloji, whose upbringing spans continents and cultures, shares a selection of his music videos and short films. Among the selections are his debut fictional short, Kaniama Show, a blistering satire of African television propaganda, and his eponymous music video, Peau de Chagrin/Bleu de Nuit, a collaboration with South African photographer Kristin-Lee Moolman that explores indigenous Congolese wedding traditions in a panoply of color.

Followed by Q&A w/ Baloji + closing night reception

Baloji is an artist in motion, a musician, poet, film director, a man of images and ideas. He’s in motion like the inhabitants of Avenue Kaniama in Lubumbashi. In motion like the synthetic afro beats he produces, the fruit of an unlikely alliance between rockrumba and futurist funk. In perpetual motion, like his limbs on stage as he fronts the Kaniama Show band, leading them in a sensual voodoo trance. In motion like the era captured by his pen, an era where the intimate and the political come together and clash.

Baloji means “man of science” in Swahili, but during the colonial period, that meaning shifted as a result of Christian evangelisation, to signify “man of the occult sciences” and then “sorcerer”.

Baloji was born in Lubumbashi and grew up in Belgium. As a teenager, he started his first rap collective, Starflam. In 2008, as Baloji, he released “Hotel Impala” an album conceived as a reply to a letter he received from his mother after a 25-year absence. Baloji directs his own videos and creates the visuals for his varied projects.  His first feature film, for which he has written the screenplay, is planned for 2019.