Rachel Malaïka (b.1986) is a Congolese visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, installation, and textile-based works. Defining herself as an "activist photographer," she engages critically with the representation of women and children in Congolese society. Drawing on historical research, the artist confronts colonial imagery, intertwining it with Congolese traditional elements and spiritual iconography. Through carefully constructed visual narratives, she challenges dominant histories and reclaims spaces of power, offering renewed visibility and agency to female figures.

" As a woman and an artist, I am reappropriating my ancient history. And I read it differently. Perhaps we made a mistake when we wrote it and we deliberately put women aside? Today we realise that history varies according to who tells it or writes it"

Rachel Malaïka (1986) trained in visual communication form the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, graduating in 2007. Her desire to pursue an artistic path emerged at an early age, despite strong societal and familial resistance. Her practice was further shaped through photographic masterclasses and research-driven projects, notably within archives, museums, and sacred sites. 

Through series of self-portraits and photographs, Malaïka challenges established power structures and constructions of femininity. Often embodiying powerful female figures within traditionally male-dominated spaces, she reclaims these environmetns while questioning the narratives that have shaped them. By intervening in places of worship, institutional settings, or engaging with colonial-era sculptures, she opens up new perspectives on women's position in society. Her compositions, grounded in research, bring together costumes, gestures, objects, and settings with deep symbolic resonance. For instance, in Le Feminin Sacré, Malaïka stages herself adorned with the regalia of a powerful chief, challenging the viewer with a daring gaze and powerful stance. By blending sacred iconography, historical references, and Congolese cultural elements, Malaïka creates layered visual narratives that confront historical erasures and affirm forms of female power, presence, and continuity. 

In her recent body of work, Pouvoir effacé (Erased Power), Malaïka explores archival photography through textile-based practices, combining embroidery, weaving and traditional textile crafting techniques.  Incoporating 18th-century European tapestries, alongside traditional Kuba embroidery traditions and modern textiles, she constructs complex surfaces that merge histories and geographies. This use of textile techniques, long  associated with so-called “feminine crafts," adds a critical dimension to her work. By intergrating them into contemporary art forms, Malaïka honors ancestral female knowledge, and challenges its historical marginalisation. The tactile, layered quality of her works reflects a broader engagement with memory, transmission, and the rewriting of history from a female perspective.

By reworking colonial-era photographs, Malaïka produces strong counter-narratives and restores dignity to the previously anonymised and silent figures. In her works, women appear not as victims, but as strong and autonomous individuals, carving their own space. Red threads run across her compositions as visual and symbolic lines, evoking both wounds and transmission, linking personal and collective histories. Her work ultimately weaves together past and present, intimate and collective memory, to create an iconography in which African women reclaim authority, visibility, and power

Rachel Malaïka, Fenix, 2025

Rachel Malaïka has exhibited internationally and participated in art fairs across Africa, Europe, and the United States, including AKAA Art Fair Paris (2023) and the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York (2025). Her work continues to gain recognition for its powerful visual language and its critical engagement with questions of gender, history, and representation.