Mukenge/Schellhammer consists of Christ Mukenge (Kinshasa, DRC, 1988) and Lydia Schellhammer (Konstanz, Germany, 1992). Living and working between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Germany their work is characterized by a clash of Congolese and Western painting traditions: from Congolese “Academisme” via its various counter movements like “Partagisme“ or Kinshasa’s urban performance movement to Surrealism and contemporary popular culture. Mukenge/Schellhammer explore new possibilities of painting in the post-digital age, extending their painterly approach to various media, including AR, VR, video and performance.

By co-signing their works Mukenge/Schellhammer blur common classifications of authorship, artistic tradition, and geography. Over years of collaboration a third style emerged from in-between their respective methods, modes of expression, and visual habits: the imagery of the “Duo”. This Duo has become an independent being with its own formal specificities and aesthetics, a double-headed monster, shaped and deformed by the conditions of our present.

The Duo responds to expectations that are commonly placed on it for being a Congolese-German entity less with political counter-proposals than with formal artistic means. The specific work process and the actual conditions under which the Duo produces art correspond to a formal approach based on constant translation processes. Their multilingual publications, performances, and videos artistically examine power dynamics in globalized contemporary art scenes and imagine new collective narratives, often in collaboration with writers, theorists, YouTube stars, Sapeurs (Congolese fashionistas), or other artists. Rather than trying to bridge differences and continents, the Duo’s relentless translation process feeds on the intercultural misunderstandings it highlights.

Through the everyday confrontation with the radically different effects of planetary forces on local reality, the duo has developed a highly subjective approach to contemporary issues such as globalisation, post-colonialism and interculturality. The Duo‘s work can be described as a micro-examination of individual and social realities, highlighting shared beliefs, thoughts, patterns, affects and everyday actions in which contemporary global contradictions, epistemologies and ontologies of our colonial, neo-colonial and post-colonial world manifest themselves.

Mukenge/Schellhammer‘s works has been shown internationally, among other venues at the pan-African video festival ‘BodaBoda Lounge’ (2020), National Museum of Kinshasa (2021), ifa Galerie Stuttgart (2022), Yango Biennale Kinshasa (2022), documenta fifteen (2022), Marta Herford (2024), Fellbach Triennial (2025) and at Galerie Barbara Thumm (2024). They were fellows at the Akademie Schloss Solitude In 2021/22 and at the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in 2023.

Mukenge/Schellhammer is being represented by Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin.