Jean Katambayi Mukendi: RATIO

From June 6 to September 27, 2026, M HKA—Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp presents RATIO, Jean Katambayi Mukendi's first solo museum presentation, as part of M HKA's IN SITU programme, dedicated to newly commissioned work.

"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." —Jean Katambayi Mukendi

In RATIO, artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi 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 identifies 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, while he himself lives with recurring power outages—and the broader geopolitical axes along which power is distributed between countries.

RATIO features newly produced hybrid sculptures, large-scale paintings and a series of A1-format drawings. At the centre of the exhibition is mukendi kabongo Air hybird Wings RDC26FG, a large installation inspired by machines from the fields of aviation, agriculture, and the military. Katambayi merges and combines components from these machines to imaginatively multiply their functions, exploring the ecological potential of technology through processes of recycling and repurposing. Among the four large-scale paintings, 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 specializing in AI computing hardware. Combining technical schematics with spiritual symbolism—most notably the hand at its centre, evoking the divine—the painting draws attention to the extraction of raw materials such as copper and cobalt in the DRC, materials essential to global electronics production. With Vita, Katambayi reflects on the social fractures shaped by competition over natural resources and living systems within a capitalist order struggling to find equilibrium. The painting evokes tectonic, floral, and faunal forms to suggest nature’s own capacity for balance, structured through invisible axes governing the Earth.

Growing from geometric figures and lines, the artist’s drawings 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.

RATIO is part of M HKA's summer season of exhibitions, on view alongside the Nicola L. survey exhibition — When the Earth Turned the Other Way and other current presentations.

The exhibition is curated by Emma Enderby & Linda Franken (KW) and Anne-Claire Schmitz (M HKA) and co-produced with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

RATIO’s first iteration was presented at KW from February 21 to May 10, 2026.

The exhibition is accompanied by Jean Katambayi Mukendi: Circuits, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, published by Leuven University Press in partnership with the Contemporary Art Committee KU Leuven, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and M HKA. Spanning his career from its inception to the present, the volume combines richly illustrated pages with insightful texts that situate Katambayi’s work within contemporary art history, African thought, and the cultural context of present-day Lubumbashi. It includes interviews, two texts written by the artist, and a multidisciplinary exploration of his installations, performances, and drawings.

Editors: Johannes Muselaers, Stéphane Symons, Anne-Claire Schmitz, Emma Enderby 

Authors: Sandrine Colard, Simon Delobel, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Alexandre Mulongo Finkelstein, Julie Mukendi, Jean Katambayi Mukendi

Specifications: 240 x 170 x 11 mm, 152 pages, Illustrated, 76 pages full colour, English - Paperback and Epub edition