Artist: Leonard Pongo

Project Loop presents a solo exhibition of new works by our third resident artist Leonard Pongo.

Pongo is a Belgian-Congolese artist whose lens-based practice spans various printing techniques, textile, video and installation. Working through layered and tactile compositions, he investigates the relationship between image, material and the living environment. His installations evoke inhabited spaces, assembled from objects, fabrics and imagery that trace connections to the Congolese landscape and its ancestral narratives.

Pongo approaches landscape not as a static view but as a dynamic, sentient entity. Using modified cameras capable of capturing light beyond the visible spectrum, he constructs visual worlds that straddle the threshold between the real and the imagined. Through reflective and translucent materials, his works generate shifting perspectives that unfold as viewers move through space, creating a sense of elusive, composite reality.

For Pongo, these mutable surfaces embody the idea of the land as a living, knowledgeable being, one that cannot be fully represented or possessed, but must instead be approached through relation and resonance. His works operate as “living fragments”: objects that breathe and merge, inviting an understanding grounded in experience rather than depiction.

Apophenia takes its name from the human tendency to perceive meaning or connection within seemingly unrelated phenomena. Originating from Pongo’s artist publication with CFC Éditions (Brussels), the project reimagines the image as an autonomous object, one that escapes the conventions of documentation to exist as a hybrid of painting, mirror and fragment of land.

Tribute to Tshibola continues Pongo’s exploration of fragments. The installation comprises mirrored photographic transfers that together recompose the image of a banana tree seen from multiple perspectives/angles, a symbol of vital importance in Congolese cosmology, associated with regeneration, continuity and rootedness.

Each mirrored fragment possesses its own distinct reality, yet together they assemble into a collective body. The work functions as both object and portal: a threshold through which the viewer is invited to consider the landscape not as backdrop but as active presence. In Tribute Tshibola, the Congolese land becomes a vessel for knowledge and transformation, an entity that reflects and refracts both memory and light.

Each artefact is a residue of an encounter, a crystallisation of the artist’s interaction with the earth. These objects hold a dual nature: they are at once remains of origin and autonomous presences in their own right.

Through Apophenia and related works, Pongo invites reflection on how meaning is constructed, resisted and refracted through the act of looking. His practice challenges the impulse to explain or master what is seen, offering instead an experience of opacity, a contemplative space where perception becomes porous, and the boundary between self and landscape dissolves.