DAVID KATSHIUNGA

Dark Cigar was inspired by a memory from my first trip to Kinshasa. It was night when we left the airport. As we drove through the city, I watched the streets pass by through the car window. Figures emerged from the darkness, each absorbed in their own world, like brief scenes that appeared and disappeared in an instant. Then our eyes met. To this day, I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman. The person was smoking a cigarette and looked at me for a few seconds before our car continued on its way. The moment was so brief that I barely had time to understand it. Yet it has stayed with me ever since. I painted this image as an incomplete memory: a face that barely reveals itself, a light that suggests more than it shows, and the cigarette, the only detail that cuts through the darkness. Dark Cigar is about those encounters that last only a moment, yet remain with us for a lifetime.