Jean David Nkot

On the occasion of Art Brussels 2026, AFIKARIS gallery presents a monographic exhibition by Jean David Nkot, bringing together a new series of works that extend his research on bodies, matter, and systems of extraction, in continuity with Théâtre des corps, drame de la matière (2025). Painting, textile, and sculpture construct an expanding language, where forms circulate and transform within a resolutely three-dimensional approach.

After cotton and cocoa, the artist continues his reflection on extractivism and its historical, memorial, and political layers, now turning to coal and cobalt. On the canvas, Black bodies, traversed by this mineral blue, appear as essential yet invisibilized presences within global economies, becoming matter themselves, absorbed into environments of organic and mineral residues. This blue palette runs through all the works as a guiding thread: a trace of exploited soils, an index of extractive chains, but also a symbolic and ritual threshold of transformation, notably referencing mourning practices in certain Bassa traditions.

This logic is also developed in the silkscreened backgrounds, where imaginary maps, archival photographs, and fragments of the Harkin-Engel protocol, deliberately rendered illegible, are overlaid, highlighting the circulation of resources, logics of appropriation, and zones of opacity linked to systems of exploitation. It continues in the series Behind a Flag, where jute bags (used to transport cocoa and coffee) are reassembled into textiles evoking flags. Inspired by West and Central African weaving traditions and tinted with national colors without a single referent, they question narratives of identity and power. The seams, tears, and blue threads function as bodily marks, extending the presence of cobalt and the colonial and contemporary memories of labor.

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