2024 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FINALIST
MARCELLINE MANDENG NKEN
Image courtesy of the artist.
Marcelline Mandeng Nken (b. 1993 Yaounde, Cameroun) creates performance installations exploring the semiotics of desire, ancestral inheritance as metadata, and the mythical limits of human transfiguration. As a former social worker, she takes inspiration from her matrilineal line of nurse practitioners, understanding technologies of caretaking as a bi-product of Black women's relationships to the home and the market as sites sustained by disembodied attempts at repair. She mines from constructions of femininity across folklore and cinema, including the mother, high priestess, or the lady of the night, to uproot foundations of contemporary social issues and critique the enduring performance of feminine sacrifice as virtue signaling. She received an MFA from Yale school of Art and a Dance Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
Scales (2022)
Vanity Set (Waiting To Exhale) (2022)
In The Belly Of The Cave (2024)
How To Gut A Fish... (2023)
Honeymoon (2024)