« All life, in order to develop, must pass through an irreducible multiplicity of forms. […] In this incessant carnival of figures at once rubbing shoulders with one another contemporaneously and constituting a line of succession, forms fade into one another, pour into one another, engender one another. » Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses
Kenny Dunkan (born in 1988, in Guadeloupe. Lives and works in Paris) regularly draws from the visual culture of the Caribbean and specifically the carnivals, periods of reversal of social, cultural and political roles, to develop a work which addresses the French colonial heritage and the persistence of its modes of representation. To do so, the artist often starts with his own black body that he stages through different mediums, from video to performance, through sculpture or “assemblage”.
“By playing with collages and the accumulations of symbols I try to translate my fragmented and ambivalent being. Being all at once contradictory and composite. A blend between natural and artificial, material and spiritual. The installation explores the mutation and the change of state, and also invites to contemplation. I use the Caribbean carnival as a filter to deploy in the space a series of ornaments, talismans and protective masks. It leads to a universe which is both sensitive and manifest, a world of ambiguous feelings. The dialogue of the sculptures creates a narrative and reveals a cosmogony of the intimate.” Kenny Dunkan
Graduated from the École nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2014, he won the ADAGP Prize for Visual Arts at the Salon de Montrouge in 2015. From 2016 to 2017, Kenny Dunkan was a resident at the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome. In 2018, he participated in the opening exhibition of Lafayette Anticipations. In 2021, he exhibited at the Galerie Les filles du calvaire in Paris and joined the CNAP collections with the installation “COSMOS”. The same year, he became the laureate of the first Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship and exhibited at the Studio des Acacias. Kenny Dunkan is represented by the Galerie Les filles du calvaire (Paris).