Immortal Swirls Cradling a Fallen Sun

Text by Ethel-Ruth Tawe

Although Leonard Pongo’s practice has been framed through the lens of photography, film, textile, and installation, what is often present is less of a medium and more of a condition: fluid images breathing like x-rays of the visible world, woven works mimicking the generative force of porous landscapes, mirrors fragmenting our perceptions of reality, and objects absorbing light, reading like fossils of a trembling future. These works don’t ask to be decoded but to be encountered. Nothing settles into representation nor remains materially or immaterially fixed.

Immortal Swirls Cradling a Fallen Sun unfolds as a field of encounters—gestures, objects, and residues that survey the artist’s own complications. The title is borrowed from Congolese writer Kama Kamanda’s book Les myriades des temps vécus (1992), echoing the poetics of temporalities spiraling together without hierarchy or closure. Pongo does not aim to illustrate a thesis but to reenact a memory. This exhibition gathers works born years apart, now placed in dialogue not to resolve their differences but to let them reverberate. Akin to a concept proposed by Martiniquan author Patrick Chamoiseau in La Matière de l’absence (2016), the exhibition sets the stage so that something unannounced or uncaptioned might emerge from absence.

At the core of Pongo’s practice lies Primordial Earth—a continuum of works in which multiple currents diverge and overlap without clear distinction. The Belgian-Congolese artist collaborates with the land in his ancestral home, The Democratic Republic of Congo, as a diasporic quest for symbiosis in every work rendered. Pongo’s process is marked by distance and return; a slow tethering of the body to the land as a living entity. ost of Pongo’s creations propose an invitation to look more closely; they can be viewed from multiple vantage points often held by African cultural devices. In this exhibition, a range of scales and proximities journey the viewer through elusive timelines and landscapes, as seen in Treeline (2026) or Untitled (Nyiragongo Print) (2019). Each format carries its own sediment; a stratified register on the erosion of time.

Pongo engages in an extended dialogue with his source material, from Congolese philosophies to alternative printing techniques. In his process, he redefines the life of a moving-image: an array of infrared and ultraviolet lights inscribed as an image; the image transferred via natural and chemical reactions onto glass plates; glass plates scanned and enlarged into metallic prints to produce telescopic views like in Untitled III, IV and V, and so on. Pongo’s self-generating assembly line reveals a chain of disruptive experiments with an ingredient of curiosity. It is a practice of mutation rather than documentation, extending the event of photography*. It is what Black feminist theorist Tina Campt calls ‘still-moving images’—photographs that are physically still yet activate movement and affect through how we engage with them.

A series of ‘artefacts’ render images as painterly or sculptural objects in Pongo’s Apophenia. Their mirrored surfaces suggest that seeing is always contingent and shared with what sees us back. The title ‘Apophenia’ refers to the human tendency to perceive patterns and correlations from seemingly random phenomena or data. The vaguely titled and untitled works often request an interpolation of meaning from the viewer, resisting rigid categorisation that acts as a technology of capture and foreign spectacle. Pongo’s own technology is an extension of nature, responding to shapes, symbols, and forms already found in Congolese cosmography and the natural environment. For me, several questions hum beneath the surfaces of these image objects: how can symbols that repeat across mineral, machine, and flesh conjure new forms of connection? What spiritual technologies of care are capable of transference without depletion or extraction?

In his textile works, Pongo produces something increasingly graphic yet geological. Images are digitally manipulated and then woven within each thread rather than printed onto the tapestry. They float or are floored, resembling sand drawings or recursive markings, and form an allegorical cartography of memory as seen in Mbanza Tapestry (2019) or Untitled (Lola) (2022). They become like a vortex, portal, or a site of germination where meaning begins to sprout. The artist often borrows from traditional Congolese material culture and craftsmanship, for example from raffia weaving traditions from the Kasai region. According to Pongo,  the velours du Kasaï, or Kasaï velvets, operate like ‘hard drives’: storing, compressing, encrypting and transmitting family histories and symbolic language. Reflecting on the challenges of navigating Congolese terrains or accessing information in languages like Tshiluba, spoken in the Kasaï region, Pongo remarks that “one does not always know that one knows”. In his practice, verbal language loosens its authority, and meaning circulates through texture, gesture and rhythm. The artist becomes attuned to not what is lost but what is found in translation.

Pongo employs a methodology of abstraction through often unidentifiable objects that seem to glitch between realms, yet remain steadfast in their refusal to perish. It appears as his own honest reckoning with the limitation of Western regimes of visibility and knowledge; perhaps his ‘immortal swirl’. Pongo’s lens-based practice oscillates between hybrid traces and the sensorial. He instigates a slow destabilising gaze—less a window onto Congo than a gateway into its frequencies and their afterlives, resisting narrative containment. Impressions are transmitted instead, not because they are understood or transparent, but because they are felt. The spirit of the camera—once a rampant colonial weapon in Congo—is not extractive but receptive and attuned to trembling rather than certainty in Pongo’s work. It is a relational process, where light can fracture into a spectrum of meaning and absence is a generative void.

To move through Immortal Swirls Cradling a Fallen Sun is to accept a different contract with meaning. What is witnessed is a polysemic and an intuitive procedure, as the artist is increasingly uninterested in coherence as proof of value. In this sense, rather than guide, the exhibition listens and holds questions open. It is evidence that the evolution of Pongo’s practice no longer obeys linear logic but works against taxonomies that flatten complexity into legibility or the assumption that access is owed. It is an act of opacity as care for the earth and ourselves, because some things survive only when they are not fully revealed.

“The event of photography is never over. It can only be suspended, caught in anticipation of the next encounter that will allow for its actualisation: an encounter that might allow a certain spectator to remark on the excess or lack inscribed in the photograph so as to articulate every detail including those that some believe to be fixed in place by the glossy emulsion of the photograph.” — Ariella Azoulay in "Photography: The Ontological Question", Mafte’akh, 2011 *