PRIMARY MATERIALS
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3889
Link to installation views of work by Kingelez at his major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2019). Be sure to watch the video (embedded in the MoMA page) in which the artist talks about his work (and in which you can also hear cool Congolese music).
https://www.fondationcartier.com/en/exhibitions/bodys-isek-kingelez
Link to installation views of work by Kingelez at his first major (solo) exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (1995).
No need to watch the entire videorecorded MoMA symposium. But do listen to the speaker named Chika Okeke-Agulu (starts at 23:15 mins./stops at 45 mins.). Okeke-Agulu is a well-known art historian. You might also find it interesting to listen to Hannah Beachler (the production designer for Marvel’s Black Panther films), to get a contrasting view. Beachler comes from a Hollywood production design/fashion studies perspective. She follows Okeke-Agulu in the sequence.
Downloadable copy of slideshow (in pdf) on Kingelez and the historical context for the Democratic Republic of Congo / Zaire / Belgian Congo (“Congo Free State”)”
SECONDARY MATERIALS
This short video documents a collaboration between the Johannesburg-based (South African) artists Hobbes/Neustetter and students at the central art school in Dakar (Senegal). The house that is the support of their projections, Maison 46, was built in 2000 in a working-class neighborhood but never finished before it became slated for demolition 10 years later. Dakar and Johannesburg are very far apart, culturally as well as geographically, and both are very far — culturally as well as geographically — from Kinshasa (DRC), where Kingelez was from. My intention in sharing the film with you is to give you a comparative perspective on questions about architecture, development, and public space in post-colonial cities in Africa.
This is a downloadable pdf of ‘Urbanism Beyond Architecture: African Cities as Infrastructure’, an interview with two well-known thinkers of African urbanism, Filip de Boeck (Belgium) and Abdou Maliq Simone (USA). Both are particularly well-known for thinking about the infrastructures of cities beyond buildings, and beyond even physical or material networks (roads, transportation networks, etc.), to include things like people, social and technological interactions, or ways of experiencing time.
SUPPLEMENTARY/OPTIONAL MATERIALS
This is a downloadable pdf of Roberta Smith’s review of the Kingelez exhibition at MoMA (2018-2019). Smith is a well-known art critic writing for The New York Times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodys_Isek_Kingelez
Link to Kingelez’s bio on Wikipedia.
READING AND LOOKING QUESTIONS
Downloadable file with questions (also below).
Bodys Isek Kingelez, Selected works (“extreme maquettes”) (1980-2015)
Getting started…
- Spend as much time as you need to look closely at the installation photographs of Kingelez’s work in both the 1995 and 2018-19 exhibitions (in Paris and in New York, respectively). These are two major solo exhibitions, one at an earlier point in his career and one after his death (in 2015). Write down some questions that arise for you as you engage with this material for the first time. Be prepared to share 1-2 of these questions in class.
- What do you feel or think about when you see these “maquettes” (the French word for “model,” which is also sometimes used in English to refer to an architectural model)? What is interesting or potentially interesting, to you, about the fact that Kingelez’s sculptures are presented as models? Do you believe, when you look at them, that they will ever be built?
- The art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu describes Kingelez’s maquettes as “objects that are in excess of what is possible.” What is the point of such an object, in your view?
- What is interesting or potentially interesting, to you, about the fact that Kingelez’s sculptures are made mostly out of recycled materials? …recycled food packaging, cans, cartons, carved up pieces of cardboard tubes and boxes, scraps of colored paper… How does the nature of the materials the artist uses impact your impression, or interpretation, of the work?
- Scholars and critics have been fascinated by the array of architectural styles, movements, and structures that are referenced by Kingelez’s work: from Las Vegas casinos to Chinese pagodas. Others note that his structures and cities are situated in, or designed for, cities all over the world: Japan, France, Australia, Holland, Korea, the USA, Spain, Palestine, Canada, the USSR, and Germany all appear in his geography. Why does this seem so surprising or interesting to scholars/critics? Is it possible that their interest/surprise in this diversity of references is biased, Eurocentric, or even racist?
Go the extra mile and know something about the artist and the context in which he is working…
There are “two Congos.” One is, today, sometimes called “Congo-Brazzaville” and the other is called “Congo-Kinshasa” or the Democractic Republic of (the) Congo (DRC).
–Which one was formerly colonized by the French?
–Which one was formerly colonized by the Belgians?
–Which one is Kingelez from?
–Who was King Leopold II and what was his relationship to the Congo that is today called Congo-Kinshasa? Is Leopold remembered as a kind and generous person? If not, how would you characterize his legacy?
–What other names has Congo-Kinshasa had, prior to its current name (one name is closely associated with King Leopold II, another is closely associated with Mobutu)?
–What was the main export of Congo in the colonial period?
–Who was Patrice Lumumba?
–How did Lumumba die?
–Who was Mobutu Sese Seko?
–What mineral indispensable to the chips in your cell phone and laptop almost certainly came from mines that rely on forced labor, child labor, and contemporary slavery in the DRC?
To learn more about mining in the DRC, and how all of our high-end consumer electronics (especially phones and laptops) are fueling armed conflict, funding paramilitary groups, and incentivizing mining/resource extraction that relies on forced labor, child labor, and slavery, start with these links:
https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/coltan-and-conflict-drc
https://issafrica.org/iss-today/child-miners-the-dark-side-of-the-drcs-coltan-wealth
(This last one is kind of surreal, given the heavy investment in/creative use of technology to clean up the supply chain, but not, say, to support Congolese people…)
Today, increasingly, the mining of minerals indispensable to EV batteries (not only lithium) are also reproducing “conflict mineral” scenarios in the DRC:
https://apnews.com/article/congo-mining-human-rights-73b3edcc2d485d07281db34dc3dcad2c