We are very happy to share that for Frieze Focus 2024, Micki Meng gallery present a solo presentation of ink drawings and sculpture by our fellow Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi.

Frieze Los Angeles will take place in Santa Monica airport from 29 February to 3 March.
You can find Micki Meng gallery at booth F1.

Mukendi is one of the most active artists living and working in sub-Saharan Africa right now. Trained as an electrician, Mukendi employs his knowledge of circuitry in his artwork, making works that often dramatize the flow of energy. In this spirit, this presentation include a central sculpture of paper, cardboard, and copper wire, and drawings of ink from ballpoint pens. His home city of Lubumbashi is a mining town rich in esoteric minerals, but its citizens have vastly unequal access to the kinds of technology, like high-efficiency light bulbs, that their extracted wealth is used to produce. As a political or economic problem, this one is as firmly rooted as they get: Overcoming it demands the kind of imagination which Mukendi’s works incite. The works in this proposal describe the supporting materials for his vision of an enriched Africa and an equalized, futuristic world economy, in which the benefits of the developed world are shared with the countries from which the raw materials are taken.

Photo: Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Migration, 2015. Paper, cardboard, copper wire 160 × 95 × 98 cm | 63 × 37 × 39 in

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Frieze Los Angeles 2024