JEAN KATAMBAYI MUKENDI & ZANDILE TSHABALALA

at Wouters Sablon, Brussels

January 16 - February 22, 2025

opening Thursday January 16, 5-8pm

"Yllux alludes both to a car engine and to the illusory hope for the generation of perpetual and free energy in the future. The title is in fact a conflation of ‘illusion’ and ‘Hilux’, the name of a Toyota pickup truck commonly used in sub-Saharan Africa."

'Trained as an electrician, Jean Katambayi Mukendi (1974, Lubumbashi, DRC) uses the power grid as a metaphor for human society, its ambitions and shortcomings. System overloads and outages, energy theft and accidental electrocutions are emblematic of the shambolic public services that people in the Congo (and elsewhere in the ‘global south’) have to contend with – and indeed of the fundamental disrespect with which they are treated by those who set the rules for them, in their own countries and globally.

No one has done the political and administrative work necessary to provide a reliable supply of energy to those living at the ‘heart of darkness’ where the minerals needed for manufacturing the contemporary instruments of ‘seeing’ – LED lamps, smartphones, laptops – are mined at horrific cost to workers and to the environment. Katambayi Mukendi speaks of all this, but he is a seer rather than an observer, a visionary rather than an activist. His reasoning and imagination are transformative rather than dystopian. His work is both deconstructive and mind-opening. In this sense he is a true Afro-futurist.'

excerpt of exhibition text by Anders Kreuger, at the ocassion of ‘Jean Katambayi Mukendi: Seer’, Katambayi's solo exhibition at KOHTA, Helsinki, in 2022

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Zandile Tshabalala was born in 1999 in Soweto (Gauteng, South Africa) and lives and works in Johannesburg. She is a female voice of a young South African urban and self-confident generation of Black artists. Her characters - Black women, including herself defy racist and sexist stereotypes that have been invented in order to pigeonhole Black female identity in narrow boxes. They do not subscribe to one- dimensional, superficial and disparaging role attributions. Thus they assert themselves against the representation of the Black women within Western-influenced art history. With her painting, Tshabalala aims to change the common narrative by immortalizing these women on canvas with idiosyncratic brushstrokes: “For so long we have been seen only as stereotypes, but we are so many things: sometimes we stand alone, sometimes we are in a group, sometimes sad, sometimes happy. And before we can address broader issues, we have to be properly perceived.“ (Zandile Tshabalala)