Pierre Mukeba

Born in 1995 in Bukavu, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pierre Mukeba grew up in the shadows of civil conflict. At the age of three, Mukeba’s family sought safety in camps in Zambia and Zimbabwe as a result of the Second Congo War (1998-2003). Food was scarce and conditions were dangerous, and so his family resettled again with Mukeba’s uncle in the capital of Zimbabwe, Harare. Living with his uncle proved to be formative as Mukeba’s uncle was a sculptor who introduced him to the practice of drawing.

Early memories of his uncle’s work describe a transformative process, “I was most fascinated with the drawing, because you’d have this blank paper and after half-an-hour or so, there’d be something on it.” As changes in Zimbabwean government took hold, Mukeba’s family was unsafe once more and sought asylum in Australia. In 2006 they were granted residency in Adelaide, where Mukeba has lived and worked since.

Mukeba has channelled his observations and experiences of early life in central Africa into distinctive textile-based works. Frequently large in scale, the indelible ink and pen drawings not only reflect trauma and violence, they also celebrate the lives of his family and friends and explore contemporary portrayals of African-Australian experience.

Despite the sheer scale of his works, the techniques behind Mukeba’s work reflect domesticity, the importance of his family and a relationship to the body. He began his practice using his own bed sheets as a drawing surface, the closest material to hand that emulated canvas. Working from his desk in his family home, he would fold up the sheets into manageable segments and rotate them to work on one section at a time; “I just fold the canvas to the exact part I want to draw on.” This process is responsible for Mukeba’s unique use of negative space – the blank canvas surrounding his subjects or incorporated into the bodies of his figures.

Eventually, Mukeba also incorporated swatches of his mother’s clothing fabrics, in particular the brightly patterned wax resist textiles famous to West Africa. Mukeba integrated this new element using appliqué – a decorative needlework technique in which small pieces of fabric are sewn onto a larger textile surface. Appliqué helps Mukeba quickly fill negative space with geometric patterns and strong colours as a shortcut to painting. The combination of these techniques sees Mukeba piece together the past and the present, where larger-than-life scenes reflect an intimate process of reconciliation.

The word kitenge refers to the African wax resist fabrics featured in Mukeba’s double panorama. The brightly coloured, boldly patterned textiles are common to West, Central and East Africa. Kitenge is described as ‘the communicating textile’ due to the combinations of colour, pattern, symbolism, text, and the occasional political slogan that make up its striking visual language.

The textile itself embodies a complex history of cross-cultural translation. In the early 1800s the Dutch imitated the wax resist techniques of Javanese batik for a European market. Failing in popularity, the fabric was subsequently introduced to West Africa, following Dutch colonial trade routes, where it has since become deeply localised and culturally significant to the region. Mukeba’s use of kitenge is twofold. Having navigated violent political upheaval and relocation to a new country, Kitenge (Part I) and Kitenge (Part II) (2020) is a joyful assertion of his cultural heritage whilst also capturing the deeper histories of economic, racial and cultural interdependencies between Asia, Europe and Africa.

Kitenge (Part I) (2020) and Kitenge (Part II) (2020) can be described as a tableau – a grouping of characters, people or objects arranged as an unfolding dramatic scene. Unlike the historic tableaux of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where subjects appear unaware of the viewer, Mukeba’s figures stand astride with an outward gaze that meets your own. They assert themselves in your presence. The troupe of characters reflects Mukeba’s fusion of influences. Some figures don the traditional dress of Pende tribesmen whilst others wear street fashion. There is also a reverence for classicism – an adherence to classical Greek and Roman ideas on form, proportion, balance and composition. This is evident in the contrapposto stance of Mukeba’s nude male subjects or the cheeky reference to Botticelli’s Venus, where a scallop shell is swapped out for a wristwatch and trainers.

Although Mukeba never undertook formal art training, his travels to Europe in early 2019 formed a type of self-education. Having visited some of the most famous art museums in the world, he reflects on the experience: “When I came back from Europe, it opened my whole mind on what I should be making in art, what my work should be and what I need to be showing. Most of my works have one or two, three or four figures on them… but bringing them all together one day would really be a documentation of these people’s lives.” Although classicism is typically concerned with depicting royalty, historically significant or mythological figures, Mukebasays, “it’s not about what is really happening to the normal people”. He has borrowed the visual language of classicism to elevate the lives and histories of his subjects; “I want to make art that’s as beautiful as I possibly can… where it’s not too scary to look at, but you learn something from it. You see a different view on life.”