Through its everyday engagement with the radically different effects of planetary forces on local realities, it has developed a highly subjective approach to contemporary issues of globalization, postcolonialism, and interculturality.

Mukenge/Schellhammer explicitly does not understand its artistic work as political; the political, however, constantly plays itself out on it. Their specific collaboration makes it difficult to categorize and classify them according to binary notions of cultural context, artistic traditions and geographical origin. When working in-between different cultural, social, and economic spaces, predisposed personal perceptions and individual comfort zones are constantly challenged and regularly demolished. An everyday experience that leads to a fragmented, multi-layered perspective, in which the shreds and scraps of cultural and personal collision constantly mirror and question each other – allowing Mukenge/Schellhammer to develop inconsistency into a conceptual approach. Through the registration and interpretation of everyday trauma and cultural shocks, the duo is working on micro-investigations into individual and social realities, highlighting common beliefs, thoughts, patterns, affects, and every-day actions in which contemporary global contradictions, epistemologies, and ontologies of our colonial, neo-colonial, and postcolonial worlds manifest themselves.

The duo’s visual works are influenced by painting traditions such as the congolese academism of the first two decades of our millennium and its counter movements like the „Peinture Populaire“ and urban performance movements in Kinshasa. It also draw on styles from international art history such as the psychoanalytical approaches of Surrealism and Expressionism as well as contemporary popular culture. From these various influences, the duo has developed multimedia, transdisciplinary approaches and experimental formats that explore digital and analogue ways of creating images and visual narratives.

Mukenge/Schellhammer’s works have been shown internationally, including at the pan-African video festival „BodaBoda Lounge“ (2020), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2020/2021), the National Museum of the DRC (2021), ifa Galerie Stuttgart (2022), and the Yango Biennale Kinshasa (2022).