Art Brussels: Brussels, Belgium
AFIKARIS is pleased to present, for the 2026 edition of Art Brussels, a solo exhibition by Jean David Nkot. This new body of work continues the artist’s ongoing research, notably developed in his exhibition Théâtre des corps, drame de la matière (2025), while marking a shift toward a more explicitly three-dimensional visual language, in which painting and sculpture increasingly converge.
Rooted in a practice that is both material and emotional, Jean David Nkot’s work is driven by a central concern: the logics of resource extraction and systems of labour exploitation. This reflection is closely intertwined with an attention to the historical, memorial, and political dimensions of exploited bodies, in particular Black bodies, whose fundamental contribution to global economies and the construction of infrastructures remains largely invisible. Through a body of works encompassing paintings, textile works, and sculptures, the artist develops a dispositif in which bodies, materials, and environments resonate with one another, outlining the contours of a sensitive “echology.”
The paintings extend the artist’s research into raw materials, focusing here on coal and cobalt within both an ecological and political framework. The bluish bodies, stretched out and absorbed into masses of organic and mineral matter, appear to merge with their surroundings, dissolving the boundary between the human and the world. Blue, derived from cobalt, structures the works as an autonomous visual language. At once a trace of extractive economies, a marker of violence, and an ambivalent sign of transformation and protection, it condenses the tensions running through this body of work. Through this fusion of body and matter, Nkot offers a sensitive reading of the relationships between resource exploitation, landscape transformation, and the becoming of bodies.
In this new series, the artist shifts his practice from jute bags toward textile and the form of the flag, intensifying its political dimension. Used as supports for stitched portraits, these materials—drawn from global commodity circulation networks—make visible economic systems and their social and environmental consequences.
Through their material presence—exposed stitching, tears, and layered surfaces—these works bear the marks of history and contemporary conditions of exploitation. Inspired by African traditional textiles (such as Kente, Faso Dan Fani, or Ntuture) and colour palettes associated with national flags, they do not refer to any specific country, but instead question the flag as a symbolic construction of power and identity. Screen-printed images and texts, deliberately fragmented or altered, open up a reflection on memory, the opacity of economic agreements, and the invisibilisation of bodies. Gathered under the title Behind a Flag, this series unfolds as a space of critical remembrance.
In the ceramic sculptures, Jean David Nkot’s research takes form in volume, affirming the continuity between body and matter. Coated in cobalt blue and marked by a patinated texture, they evoke both mineral presence and a long temporal dimension linked to processes of extraction. Titled www//essorage de Gaïa.com, the series refers to Gaia, a figure from Greek mythology embodying the Earth itself, perceived as a living, nurturing, and primordial entity. Through this reference, the sculptures evoke a land under tension, transformed by contemporary extractive logics. The predominantly female figures embody this relationship of dependence and transformation, where the body becomes the very site of pressures exerted upon the living world.
At Art Brussels, Jean David Nkot’s solo exhibition unfolds as a space of correspondences in which each medium—painting, textile, sculpture—contributes to a broader reflection on the relationships between body, matter, and power. By articulating historical memory, economic critique, and ecological sensibility, the artist highlights the invisible dynamics that structure our relationship to the world. His work thus proposes a complex and embodied reading of contemporary systems, in which bodies—human as well as terrestrial—appear both as sites of exploitation and as spaces of resistance. Through this “echology” of forms, Jean David Nkot opens up a field of resonance that invites us to rethink the deep connections between history, matter, and the living.
