Baloji is a polymath artist, filmmaker, and poet born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and based in Belgium.

His name, Baloji, means “man of science” in Swahili. During the colonial era, the term acquired a new ambiguity: from “scholar,” it came to signify a “man of the occult sciences,” and eventually a “sorcerer.” This semantic shift deeply informs his work, nurturing a sensibility attuned to dreamlike worlds and a form of magical realism.

His acclaimed short films, widely screened and awarded on the international circuit, as well as his debut feature film Omen (Augure), which enjoyed an outstanding international trajectory (Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival and Belgium’s submission for the Academy Awards), embody this holistic approach. In Baloji’s practice, disciplines do not merely coexist; they interpenetrate one another, conceived from the outset as components of a single artistic gesture.

The image acts as a point of narrative condensation. His films generate figures, motifs, and temporalities that extend beyond the screen, calling for other forms of spatialization and presence.

Music occupies a central place in this process. Baloji has released three critically acclaimed albums, all certified gold records, including Avenue Kaniama on Bella Union. For Omen, he also composed an ambitious four-part soundtrack: thirty-four tracks conceived from the perspectives of the film’s four main characters. This project gave rise to a touring exhibition, presented at institutions including the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp, MAAT in Lisbon, and the ICA in London, highlighting costumes, masks, photography, art direction, and conceptual intentions.

Around his second feature film, Mulatresse Solitude, Baloji develops a multidisciplinary practice that is neither a production strategy nor a simple accumulation of forms. Rather, it lies at the very heart of the creative process: narratives, media, and languages are developed simultaneously, prior to any public presentation, according to a structure conceived as an integrated whole.

Awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Baloji has received numerous international distinctions recognizing the coherence and cross-disciplinary scope of his work, in which the invisible continually surfaces without ever imposing itself.