Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga

October Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, October Gallery, Fragile Responsibility, 10 May-16 June 2018

'For this project, I've been creating a series of paintings depicting Black people in vulnerable poses, porcelain objects, Toby Jugs and ideograms. The figures appear with integrated circuits that are drawn in by hand. They refer to the violent exploitation of mineral such as cobalt, tantalum (coltan), and others in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This illustrated by attempt to assume personal responsibility (by raising awareness, awakening others). By exposing the lack of responsibility in our leaders who are complicit with the West, I try to interrogate the utopia of a social-democratic state and expose the treat of losing the historical roots that are crucial lines of thought, essential to each individual.'

-Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Fragile Responsibility, October Gallery, May 2018

The present lot is part of Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga's 'Fragile Responsibility' series, which the young Congolese artist completed and exhibited at the October Gallery in London in 2018. In this striking body of work, the artist explores the history of the Kongo Kingdom, calling into question the heritage passed from leader to leader and its impact on present-day Congolese society. Fragile 1 showcases Kamuanga Ilunga's fascination with porcelain and Toby Jugs from the 17th and 18th centuries, which he encountered during a research trip to the village of Mbutu Kiniati in the Kongo Central Province, DRC. These porcelains were used by Portuguese traders to entice Kongo Kingdom royalty and nobles into participating in the slave trade by convincing them that they were imbued with powers that would allow them to reign over other Black Kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa.

Believing that it is his responsibility to shed light on the conduct of leaders, both past and present, Kamuanga Ilunga's work challenges the rapid socio-economic development of the DRC at the hands of the West and the loss of a unifying historical and traditional anchoring or lineage. In the same vein, it is the artist's hope that by honoring the responsibility he feels in himself, he will expose the lack of responsibility felt by local leaders. Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga seeks to break the utopic veil that he believes has covered the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the year post colonialism. Whilst the present lot exemplifies Kamuanga Ilunga's in-depth exploration of yet another facet of his country's complex history, it still raises the same concern that unifies the artist's wider oeuvre—the cultural decline and vulnerability of a unifying traditional history. The artist includes a gray background to emphasize this point.

In this series, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga revisits several elements that have come to be considered hallmarks of his intricate and considered practice, namely the dramatic and vulnerable positioning of his subjects' bodies, as well as their microchip-etched flattened skin, adorned with ornately rendered Dutch wax cloth. Developed as a reference to the abundance of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an ore crucial to the production of microchips used in smartphones, the artist's motif serves as a commentary on the destruction of many local settlements and villages in pursuit of this ore, and the struggle to maintain cultural praxis associated with a bygone pre-colonial age in the face of an increasingly technological world.