New Viewings #43

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.

The white series are part of the project “Beaugocity”, a sketch of a utopian city: “A city, folded and unfolded – a flat city that becomes a relief and is filled with the bodies and faces of friends. Thousands of dreamed friends, some of whom become real, they all pose to make a city that only certain minds, certain people, accomplices and friends can see.It is a city whose objective reality does not exist. Only pleasure, the joy of living, counts. To feel better about yourself and to become a prince, a star, an icon: here the dream is allowed.”

Alain Polo Nzuzi was born in 1985 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lives and works in Paris. He is a photographer and visual artist who studied at the Academy of Art in Kinshasa, from which he graduated in 2006.

Alain Polo develops an aesthetic practice combining sensuality and desire for the male body. In 2008–2009 he produced his first series of photographs in which he stages himself, performing his masculine, sensual and vulnerable image. Far from making his body the object of desire, he reveals himself to us as questioning the ways of seeing and considering the other.

Alain Polo Nzuzi was presented at Paris Photo in 2011 in the Revue Noire gallery. His work serie “Blanche” was presented at the Bamako photographic biennale in 2017, was selected among the winners of the fotofever prize in 2019 and exhibited at the Carrousel du Louvre.

Alain Polo Nzuzi presented his work in the collective exhibition “Almost Home” in the Rx gallery in Paris 2019, the “Familistère de Guise” alongside the artist Pume Bylex in 2021 as well as the New Distance virtual project organized by the Paris Jeu de Paume Museum / Jeu de Paume Lab in 2021. As a performer he appeared at the Abattoirs Muséum Toulouse in 2021 as part of the Revue noire exhibition, at the wasteland of Belle mai on the occasion of the Africa Fantastique 2021 and 2022 festival and at the international city of the arts in the Africa festival, “Performative Utopia”.

This is how AI is used as a fortune-telling element: centuries-old literature and culture are transferred into the digital realm. In doing so, the artist tries to keep his own influence on the databases and the functioning of the AI as low as possible in order to preserve the specificity of the original Iranian tradition: divination is given the space it needs to unfold, unaffected by humans.

Intelligence has been described in many Iranian poems as the opposite of the symbol of wine, since drunkenness is understood as the deactivation of intelligence.

The word وش††ی†ه††ب, means „without intelligence“ and is an example of this metaphor, describing a spiritual state. The scene depicted tries to imagine an AI that is based on logical data processing in a fight with an AI in this drunken, spiritual state of mind. In contrast to the commercial use of AI, the goal of the creation of the drunken AI is the attempt to transfer the control to spiritual divination.

The Fishes and Folders depicted each stand for a divination made by the audience as a part of the Fãl project at the Fellbach Triennial. The names that are written on the folders are names submitted by the audience and the words are the important words selected by the system for their divination. These data have been chosen randomly from the project database.

Mohsen Hazrati was born in 1987 in Shiraz, Iran and lives and works in Berlin. He graduated with a BA in graphic design from the Shiraz Art Institute of Higher Education in 2012, minoring in new media and digital art. His works focus on literature and digital technologies and have been presented at various conferences such as: State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, IAM weekend Barcelona, EVA and UCL mal London, Elo University of Central Florida, TEDx Mollasadra St and exhibitions by Grafikenshus museum, PeertoSpace, RadianceVR, Espronceda, synthesis, Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach, Transfer gallery, etc. Since 2013, in collaboration with Milad Forouzande, he has co-founded and curated the “Dar-AlHokoomeh Project”; a new media art project and activity, based in Shiraz, Iran.