Jean Katambayi Mukendi

Jean Katambayi Mukendi was born in 1974 in Lubumbashi, in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and continues to live and work there. Trained as an electrician before turning to art, he works with wire, hand-drawn diagrams, circuitry, and schematic notation to produce installations and works on paper that function as speculative technical systems. His drawings resemble electrical diagrams, architectural plans, or engineering blueprints — they have the formal authority and graphic clarity of technical documents — but the systems they describe are imaginary, operating by rules that exist only within the work itself.

Katambayi’s practice can be read in relation to the political and economic history of Katanga, a province whose identity has been defined by massive mineral extraction — copper, cobalt, uranium — and whose relationship to technology, infrastructure, and industrial system carries enormous political weight. His imaginary circuitry proposes alternative systems of connection and power, bringing together the formal vocabulary of technical drawing with a logic of speculation and play that opens the diagram toward meanings that no engineer could have intended. The wire works that extend his diagrammatic practice into three dimensions share this quality: they are materially humble but conceptually ambitious.

Katambayi has exhibited internationally, including at the Swiss Institute in New York and at major institutions in Europe. He is recognized as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from Lubumbashi’s contemporary art scene, a context that has generated a remarkable cluster of experimental practices over the past two decades. He is represented by Micki Meng in San Francisco, Wouters Gallery in Brussels and Ramiken in New York and Athens.