Lost in Translation
Artist Talk with Mukenge/Schellhammer
Mukenge/Schellhammer provides insight into current work processes and focuses in particular on the role of translation in the duo’s artistic work: in their current multimedia series, visual translations between digital and analog space give rise to a unique aesthetic. The duo examines and observes what is lost, added, or changed in this process.
In addition, Mukenge/Schellhammer engages in interdisciplinary approaches and collaborates with various authors and theorists to establish a dialogue between visual art, theory, and literature. This collaboration has led to the creation of multilingual publications that connect continents and languages while incorporating intercultural misunderstandings and artistic traditions into the translation process.
As part of the lecture, Mukenge/Schellhammer will present their current multimedia series of works. The duo will show excerpts from the performance series “Stretching the Notion of Painting” (including at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, 2025), the exhibition “Forward Flight” (Galerie Barbara Thumm, March 2024), and their contribution to the group exhibition “Between pixel and pigment: Hybrid painting in post-digital times” (Marta Herford, July-November 2024). They will also present the publications “Pool Malebo” (2023), a collaboration between Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Marian Kaiser, and Mukenge/Schellhammer, and the project “Kokende Liboso Eza Kokoma Te” by Laboratoire Kontempo, curated by Dzekashu MacViban (2025).
Biographies
Christ Mukenge (born in 1988 in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) and Lydia Schellhammer (born in 1992 in Konstanz, Germany) have been living and working as the artist duo Mukenge/Schellhammer between Germany and the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2016. Their work is influenced by various Congolese and Western painting traditions as well as contemporary popular culture.
In recent years, a third style has developed between the methods, modes of expression, and visual habits of the two artists: the visual language of the “duo.” The duo has become an independent entity with its own formal characteristics and aesthetics, a two-headed monster shaped and deformed by the pressures of our present. The result is a collective visual language that eludes common attributions and stereotypical assumptions about authorship, artistic tradition, and geographical location.
Mukenge/Schellhammer extends the painterly approach to various media, including working with virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), video, and performance.
Mukenge/Schellhammer’s works have been shown internationally, including at the pan-African video festival “BodaBoda Lounge” (2020), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2020/2021), the ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2022), the Yango Biennale Kinshasa (2022), the Marta Herford Museum (2024), the Fellbach Triennale (2025), and the Galerie Barbara Thumm (2024). In 2021/22, Mukenge/Schellhammer was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and in 2023 at the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg.
