M HKA Ensembles

Installation, variable dimensions , 300 x 200 x 155 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. S0552).

Trained in science and engineering, Jean Katambayi Mukendi tends to conjure up a world of machinic objects and execute them in cardboard and coloured paper, with or without moving parts. The diagrammatic – thought-image or image-thought – is another powerful stream in his work, foregrounded in the installation Inertia, 2017. Its three parts are titled The Tree, The Chariot and The Class. The cardboard is still there, but as surface and vehicle for image and text. Katambayi Mukendi speaks of the pressure to read and write with ever-greater speed, so as not to be left behind by ‘progress’. Yet the tree, as a seemingly stationary bundle of relations and communications channelling transformative energy, is his central metaphor. ‘Every tree responds with its roots – also the mobile inversed tree, because its roots are situated in the brain.’