OFLUXO

Pool Malebo is a well-known place in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo – a tropical river landscape that in the past has been both a real trade center and a site for the projection of European fantasies from colonial times to this day. On the basis of this hub for the transshipment of goods and images, the Congolese/German duo Mukenge/Schellhammer explores the fictional potential of contemporary depictions of otherness in their multimedia exhibition Pool Malebo. They create opposing alienations and dream images by reordering and reinterpreting stereotypical images of the exotic. Embedding contemporary images and narratives into fantastic and speculative scenes leads to a discovery of the act of representing the other as a process of making it exotic, constructing meanings and producing realities.

Mukenge/Schellhammer process layers of real and imaginary pictorial worlds that shape our collective (un)conscious and they subject themselves to a process of strategic auto-exoticization. This leads to jointly made digital and analogue paintings that they expand in the exhibition with scenographic interventions, digital painting and experimental videos to form a multi-dimensional, multimedia narrative. In a mutual agreement of importation and exportation of painting techniques and artistic traditions, the Congolese-German duo combines contemporary art practices from the two continents. Otherness and the opposite are not merely presented or criticized, but worked upon in a shared process that poses questions as to its opportunities for designing different, better or simply more interesting images that can become part of our collective imaginary world – a speculative Fiction that aims to transgress the two-dimensional space of painting by combining experimental video, 3D animation and traditional painting.

Pool Malebo is a work series created in different stages between Kinshasa and Europe: It was presented in form of an experimental video at „Magical Cohabitations“, Akademie Schloss Solitude, as a multimedia exhibition at the National Museum of Kinshasa and Haus der Statistik Berlin in the framework of Laboratoire Kontempo and at ifa Galerie Stuttgart, curated by Bettina Korintenberg.

Mukenge/Schellhammer comprises Christ Mukenge (b. 1988, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Lydia Schellhammer (b. 1992, Germany). The artists expose themselves to transcontinental conflict situations within rapidly changing social systems between Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo and respond to their experiences and investigations in an ongoing artistic process that includes analogue and digital paintings and drawings, experimental videos, urban interventions and performances. Their specific collaboration makes it difficult to categorize and classify them according to binary notions of cultural context, artistic traditions and geographical origin.

The duo has recently showcased works at the Plateforme Contemporaine Kinshasa, Galerie Noah Augsburg (2020), the pan-African video festival »BodaBoda Lounge» (2020), at City Salts Basel/Switzerland and the Guggenheim Museum New York//USA (2020/2021). Their exhibitions have been presented at the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2021), ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2022) and Yango Biennale Kinshasa (2022), among others. They were fellows of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2021/22). In 2019, the duo created the project »Laboratoire Kontempo«, a transdisciplinary and experimental platform for contemporary art in Kinshasa.