Jean Katambayi Mukendi, born 1974 in Democratic Republic of Congo. He lives and works in Lubumbashi. Mukendi sculpts, draws, paints. Machines, electricity, light. He's a builder of a whole alternative universe: his electri-city. He collaborates with his kids; they are building the future. His impossible machines don't work; but these bright polychromatic models of social circuitry do work as art. Not waiting for decolonization to happen - making it out of cardboard, right now.

This exhibition is a collection of treasures, some of his greatest still-existing works, cobbled together from a decade of international storage efforts by his die hard supporters. Five recent Afrolampes, in series, and two Afrolampes made earlier, on different paper. Three iconic, rare Mukendi sculptures: Lester, from 2011, the title a reversal of dèlestage, which Mukendi says means "you don't deserve electricity every day" - because the power and water goes on and off, in the very country that supplies most of the raw materials for the rest of the world's electronics.

Mukendi is not thinking about the money, he's thinking about power - real power, raw electricity. Lester, according to Mukendi, is the diminutive of Simultium, a larger tower resembling an apartment building, which functions like a set of rotating cylinders, a combination lock, a circuit modeling the homemade interventions made by people in Lubumbashi to regulate their unstable flow of electricity. Trash TV is both a DIY version and a literal critique; what separates art from trash, other than our desire to preserve one and discard the other? And finally Voyant, which Mukendi himself describes as "the seer." A photo op in front of the gallery next to the Centre Pompidou was too good to be true; deconstructed colonizer, meet the reconstructed decolonized. - M.Egan

Mukendi has previously exhibited in France at Centre Pompidou Metz and the Palais de Tokyo. His work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Energies at the Swiss Institute in New York. Mukendi's work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Thanks to Simon Delobel and Tim Wouters for preserving Mukendi's works.

Vernissage September 4, 7–9PM