Art Brussels | Jean David Nkot: Brussels, Belgium

This dynamic continues in the portrait series created on jute bags, Corps//matière.cm.org. Initiated in 2025 and further developed during a residency in Japan, it marks a shift in the artist’s practice toward modest supports laden with silent histories. By working with materials drawn from cocoa, coffee, or cotton circuits, Nkot does more than inscribe figures onto them: he reactivates their memory. The portrait thus lies at the intersection of material and human experience. It brings individual trajectories into dialogue with the forces of labor, capital, and consumption that traverse and shape the world. Visible seams, tears, and perforations function as bodily marks, evoking scars left by colonial history as well as contemporary working conditions.

In the series Behind a Flag, these same portraits are now deployed on textiles reminiscent of flags. Inspired by strip-weaving traditions from West and Central Africa, these textiles are dyed in colors associated with national flags, without referencing any specific country. The aim is not to represent a flag, but to question what it embodies: a symbol of power, identity, and collective narrative. The screen-printed backgrounds combine archival and contemporary images with fragments of text drawn from the Harkin-Engel Protocol—an agreement by the chocolate industry to comply with the Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO, 1999). Deliberately rendered barely legible, these inscriptions point to the opacity of such international agreements and the persistence of invisible forms of exploitation.