Since the late 2010s, artist, musician, filmmaker and designer Baloji has developed a cinematic practice at the intersection of music video, short film, performance and the visual arts. Screened on a continuous loop in Room 37 as part of Symbiosis, this programme brings together four films whose formal and narrative experiments trace the recurring concerns of his work: the body as a site of memory, ritual and belief, family wounds, and a refusal of socially imposed identities.

Shot in the streets of Kinshasa, The Day After (2010) and Karibu ya bintu (2010) offer vibrant portraits of the Congolese capital, oscillating between political observation and fantastical apparitions. With Kaniama Show (2018), Baloji appropriates the codes of a Congolese variety television program to create a political satire exploring the relationship between power and the media. Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit was created in response to a song from his 2018 album 137 Avenue Kaniama. A hybrid work – musical, cinematic and choreographic – in which every image is composed as a tableau, the film portrays the hours leading up to a romantic union. Its title echoes Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Peau de chagrin, in which desire, power and possession exact their price through the gradual diminishment of life itself. In Baloji’s work, this reference becomes a metaphor for romantic attachment: to love intensely, to desire and commit, but also to be consumed by power dynamics, social expectations and emotional illusions. Also conceived from the music of 137 Avenue Kaniama, Zombies (2018) plunges us into a hallucinatory Kinshasa, where hair salons, futuristic clubs, parades and cityscapes become the settings for a contemporary western. The film explores our almost visceral attachment to mobile phones and digital technologies. Combining poetry, dance and costume, Never Look at the Sun (2019) addresses colourism and skin-lightening practices – not as aesthetic choices, but as symptoms of a deeper history: one shaped by inherited beauty standards, hierarchies of skin tone and the symbolic violence enacted through the ways Black bodies are seen.

Saturated colour, elaborate costumes, choreography, frontal compositions and a taste for fragmented storytelling give these works an immediately recognisable visual language. Together, they form a formal and political laboratory for an artist in which practice music, cinema, poetry and fashion continually enter into dialogue, each medium expanding and enriching the others.

With Symbiosis, the Palais de Tokyo continues its collaboration with performance artists and reaffirms its commitment to sustaining these relationships over the long term, within a framework inspired by institutional permaculture that guides the institution’s project.

The artists invited throughout the year as part of this new format will thus be able to expand their work to engage with the building’s spaces and programs through various forms of interaction with the public, from discreet and intimate interventions to more spectacular gestures.

Sound laboratory, Room 37 becomes 37db, when the Palais de Tokyo entrusts this oval space to artists, musicians, and composers to explore the exhibition through acoustic experiences. These invitations go beyond the field of contemporary art, expanding its boundaries and decibels.

• The programme is screened on a loop during Palais de Tokyo’s opening hours
• Both exhibition and event tickets grant access to this programme
• Salle 37 is located on Level -1 of the building