"A ratio is a relationship between two elements. Today, many kinds of relationships are at play. We can speak of the North-South relationship, the economic relationship, the balance of power, but also, possibly, of support—the relationship of backing or care."

In RATIO, Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi (b. 1974, DRC) questions the dualities that shape our world—the natural and the artificial, growth and destruction, wanted and discarded materials, and the relationship between resources and power.

Katambayi’s practice is deeply informed by his training as an electrician and his sustained interest in engineering and mathematics. His work examines contemporary technological developments, while simultaneously addressing the social, economic, and ecological imbalances he witnesses as consequences of global structural inequities in resource extraction and power distribution. For Katambayi, there is a direct correlation between who possesses literal power (energy)—copper is extracted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to power other nations, yet he lives with permanent power outages—and the broader geopolitical axes along which power is distributed between countries.

The sculptures, paintings, and drawings featured in RATIO, the first exhibition by the artist in Germany, were created during a residency at KW in 2025, using materials gathered from various locations in Berlin, such as KW’s storage and the city’s recycling yards. At its center sits mukendi kabongo Air hybird Wings RDC26FG, a large sculpture inspired by machines from the fields of aviation, agriculture, and the military. Katambayi merges and combines components of these machines to imaginatively multiply their functions, exploring the ecological potential of technology through a process of recycling and repurposing.

Two large-scale paintings frame the installation. Divina resembles a printed circuit board, a structure fundamental to nearly all electronic devices. Its title is an anagram of Nvidia, a leading US-based technology company for AI computing hardware. Combining technical schematics with spiritual symbolism—most notably the hand at its center, evoking the divine—the painting draws attention to the extraction of raw materials such as copper and cobalt in the DRC, essential to global electronics production. With Vita, Katambayi reflects on the social fracture shaped by competition over natural resources and living systems within a capitalist order that struggles to find balance. The painting evokes tectonic, floral, and faunal illusions to suggest nature’s own capacity for equilibrium, structured through invisible axes that govern the Earth. Growing from geometric figures and lines, the artist’s drawings—placed between windows—form speculative reflections on human experience in relation to ecology, technology, and the economy, ranging from the impact of climate on human routines to cryptocurrency.

Curators: Emma Enderby & Linda Franken