Jean Katambayi Mukendi, The Concentrator, 2022. ©️ Z33/Kristof Vrancken, On-Trade-Off: Charging Myths, installation view, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium, 2022

Jean Katambayi Mukendi will work at the Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam to prepare new work for the upcoming exhibition 'Charging Myths' of On-Trade-Off at Framer Framed.

Established in 1990, the Thami Mnyele Foundation runs since 1992 a unique three month artists-in- residence program in Amsterdam. The main objective of the Foundation is to advance cultural exchange between artists from Africa and the diaspora, the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular. To this aim, the Foundation offers African artists of all disciplines of contemporary visual art (painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video, film, audio and multi media) an three-month studio residency for free, in the Thami Mnyele Foundation studio, located in an old school building in the centre of Amsterdam.

_

Jean Katambayi Mukendi was born in 1974 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He lives and works in Lubumbashi, DRC. Trained as an electrician, his entire artistic practice is imbued with his fascination for mathematics, engineering, geometry, and technology. Profoundly marked by his upbringing in the workers’ camp of his mining hometown and by its mechanisation, Katambayi creates fragile and complex installations and drawings inspired by sophisticated electrical circuits and technological studies. His works are part of a search for solutions to social problems in current Congolese society, as well as to the country’s depletion of its enormous energetic resources. Often made of recycled and impermanent material, such as cardboard and recycled electronic material, the artist’s poetic pieces attempt to redress the imbalance of the world’s hemispheres.