born in Yaounde, Cameroun in 1993. lives in New Haven and works between there and Philadelphia (remotely).
Marcelline Mandeng Nken creates performance driven immersive installations built on a series of inversions including shifts in environment scale, casting the audience as performing agents and the use of organic elements to measure time. Using fabricated and found sculpture; large scale video projections and original sound compositions, Mandeng Nken mines for parallels between mythic representations of feminine archetypes including the mother, healer or the whore and her lived experience, starting from childhood memories spent in her grandmother’s garden, kitchen and powder room to question common narrative arcs found in fairy tales and their resulting influence on western culture. Rituals passed down through her matrilineal lines serve as blueprints that shape her understanding of the origin of an African woman’s labor and its impact on the structure of a family and community on a global scale. The resulting installation artworks employ surrealist strategies of layering abstractions and figurative representations to legitimize the formation of interpersonal logic and historical memory. Her work re-evaluates the value of labor production within the semiotics of desire, access to cultural heritage and human transfiguration, weaving together obscure historical references with symbolic materials appropriated from holistic and herbal traditions of care found in African-based spiritual systems. She sees her practice as an evolving archive that expands traditional constructions of female subjectivity in mass media and popular culture.