Paul Maheke was born in Brive-la-Gaillarde, France to a Congolese father in 1985. He completed his MA in Art Practice at l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2011 and then settled in London, where he took up a graduate residency at the South London Gallery and completed a course at Open School East. Maheke's multidisciplinary practice spans video, installation and sculpture through to interventions, dance and public conversations, focusing on the body as an archive and a territory and working to defuse the power relations that shape Western imaginations.
Performance and installation artist Paul Maheke was born in Brive-la-Gaillarde, France in 1985 to a Congolese father. After completing his MA in Art Practice at l'École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2011, he lived in Montreal, Canada, for two years. In 2015–16 he was awarded the South London Gallery Graduate Residency and subsequently completed a programme of study at Open School East. Maheke's multidisciplinary practice spans video, installation, and sculpture through to interventions, dance and public conversations, focusing on the body as both an archive and a territory. With particular attention to dance, he proposes to defuse the power relations that shape Western imaginations.
Interested in the community groups of East London with whom his school shared a building, Maheke produced the two-channel video installation Mutual Survival, Lorde's Manifest in 2015, recording the women of the Tropical Isles Carnival Dance Troupe as they rehearsed in a Hackney basement and captioning the video with words from the American poet Audre Lorde. Maheke's work has developed in response, he says, to the ways in which performances presented inside art institutions tend to amplify the violence that those same institutions underpin: ‘the impoverishment of the discourse through which so much black art is filtered has driven his social criticism to the surface. The intellectuals who inspire the art receive explicit citation, as the works themselves respond to and fulfil the need to produce the intellectual conditions necessary for their adequate reception’ (Ciarán 2018, p. 169). In his 2016 exhibition I Lost Track of the Swarm at South London Gallery, exploring the question of visibility through Georges Bataille’s notion of formlessness, a three-channel video showed the artist dancing with a light attached to his waist, held in his hand, or positioned behind him, creating a disorienting play of shadows. In the second room, which contained his work Installations, Maheke created a kind of dance floor and encouraged visitors to use it, with a soundtrack comprising electronic beats, traditional Leele (Congolese clan) songs, and West African club music produced in collaboration with sound artist Nkisi of NON Worldwide. In 2017 Maheke's performance MBU premiered at Tate Modern. As Ciarán Finlayson wrote in Artforum, 'Titled after a word for ocean in the Bantu dialect spoken by the artist's father, the piece threaded together deconstructed dances from the globally dispersed cultural and subcultural heritage of Africans […]. Dislocated fragments from feminist and postcolonial theory, printed, spoken, or projected, are among Maheke's artistic materials, the constant accompaniment to his dances' (Finlayson 2018, p. 169).
Maheke exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2018. Previous solo exhibitions included What Flows Through and Across, Assembly Point, London (2017) and In Me Everything is Already Flowing, Center, Berlin (2017). Selected group exhibitions include (X) A Fantasy, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Ten Days Six Nights, Tate Modern, London; Diaspora Platform project, Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale; Posthuman Complicities, Akademie der Künste, Vienna (all 2017) and Seeking After *deep within*, Grand Union, Birmingham (2016). In 2019 Maheke's work was included in the Transcorporealities exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, which looked at human bodies and museums 'as open-ended systems in constant exchange with their environment' (e-flux website, 19 September 2019). In 2020 Maheke was among the artists awarded the Acme's Fire Station Residency 2020-25, which provided work/live studio accommodation and a programme of support and professional development. In 2021 his work was included in the British Art Show, the largest touring exhibition of contemporary art in Britain curated by Irene Aristizábal and Hammad Nasar.
Paul Maheke's work is represented in several UK public collections, including Art Council Collection, Liverpool Walker Gallery and Tate. He currently lives and works in London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Paul Maheke]
Publications related to [Paul Maheke] in the Ben Uri Library