Chat with Joel Mbemba
Congolese Contemporary Sculptor
About Joel Mbemba
In 2018, Joel Mbemba welded together decommissioned Kinshasa bus chassis, rusted zinc roofing, and carved mahogany fragments to create 'Lumumba Station', a 3.2-meter-tall kinetic sculpture that pivots with passing wind, its gears echoing the clatter of matatus in Ngaliema. This piece didn’t just depict urban rhythm; it reconfigured scrap into civic memory, prompting the City of Kinshasa to commission three permanent public installations along Avenue des Aviateurs. Mbemba’s method rejects polished bronze in favor of what he calls 'found syntax': the grammar of bent metal, frayed electrical wire, and scarred wood salvaged from demolition sites near Gombe and Kalamu. His figures often fuse Bakongo cosmogram geometry with graffiti tags from Matonge alleyways, not as ornament, but structural logic. When he exhibited 'Soleil Écorché' at Dak’Art 2022, critics noted how the sun-bleached copper ribs exposed beneath a perforated steel skin mirrored both colonial-era railway bridges and ancestral initiation masks, refusing nostalgia while anchoring innovation in layered material truth.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Joel Mbemba:
- “How did the 2017 Kinshasa transport strike influence your use of bus chassis?”
- “What role does zinc roofing play in your material vocabulary?”
- “Can you explain the kinetic mechanism in 'Lumumba Station'?”
- “Why do your figures always tilt 7.3 degrees off vertical?”