Artistic Directors
Mukenge/Schellhammer
Rêve tropical (2024)
Multimedia installation, painting on canvas, video object
“Rêve Tropical” is part of the Transmedia Landscapes (Paysages transmédias) series of works by Mukenge/Schellhammer, shown at the KFZ Kunst für Zukunft (2024), Art Basel Miami Beach (2024), Laboratoire Kontempo(2025) and the Fellbach Triennale (2025). The series deals with the processes of visual translation between the analog and digital spaces and on the possibilities of the medium of paint in the post-digital era. In terms of content, the series refers to linguistic and intercultural untranslatability. Digital images are generated using photogrammetry and virtual reality programs, which and are then projected into analog space via augmented reality or painted on canvas. The duo explores the changes, add-ons and omissions that get passed onto the work during the translation process between analog and digital spaces. Pictorial, digital and real spaces are intertwined. images extend three-dimensionally into virtual space, mimicking in analog space the characteristics of digital painting such as spatial dimension, animation and movement. “Rêve Tropical” addresses the theme of the commercialization of cultural narratives: the palm tree as a reference to exotic stereotypes and Wax fabrics with counterfeits reflect the desires and the illusions aroused by global interconnection, but which often remain inaccessible. Asymmetrical globalization defines the South as the final consumer and the North as the power, which defines luxury and success. Counterfeit traditional African fabrics undermine the exclusivity of Western luxury brands and reinterpret their meaning.
Mbassu Ya Mundele (2024)
Video-collage, AR projections, urban interventions
“Mbassu Ya Mundele” follows on from the “Mundele Na Ngai” painting presented at the Institut français de Kinshasa in 2018. It was the duo’s first work to directly address the power dynamics between the art scenes of Kinshasa and Europe. With the “Mbassu Ya Mundele” video, Mukenge/Schellhammer questions their own positioning in art history as a transnational duo. The many references in the duo’s work not only refer to a “global” ( AKA “western”) art history, but also draw on the local art scene and popular culture of Kinshasa. As these references often go unrecognized, false ones are attributed to the duo. “Mbassu Ya Mundele” is on the one hand an investigation into the history of painting in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its links with the European art market, and on the other hand also a critical perspective also on their own artistic production as a transnational duo working mainly between Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mukenge/Schellhammer consists of Christ Mukenge (*1988 in Kinshasa) and Lydia Schellhammer (*1992 in Constance). The artists expose themselves to transcontinental situations of conflict within rapidly evolving social systems between Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo and respond to their experiences and investigations in an ongoing artistic process that includes digital and analog paintings and drawings, experimental videos, installations and performances. Both artists sign their works in pairs, working together on canvas, video or digital painting. In this way, the clear classifications of author, tradition or geography are blurred. And so, over the past seven years, a third style has developed from the working methods, painting styles and visual habits of the two artists: the pictorial universe of the “duo”. The duo has its own aesthetic, and has become a being in its own right, a two-headed monster, shaped and deformed by the pressure of the political conditions of our time.
Mukenge/Schellhammer’s work has been shown internationally, including at the pan-African video festival “BodaBoda Lounge” (2020), the Guggenheim Museum New York (2020/2021), the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo (2021), the ifa Galerie Stuttgart (2022), the Yango Biennale Kinshasa (2022), the Martha Herford Museum (2024) and Galerie Barbara Thumm (2024). In 2021/22, they were scholarship holders at the Schloss Solitude Academy. Mukenge/Schellhammer is represented by Galerie Barbara Thumm.