Pierre Mukeba

Pierre Mukeba was born in 1995 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He fled the country with his family as a result of the civil war, travelling as a refugee through Zambia and Zimbabwe before seeking asylum in Adelaide, Australia, where he has lived and worked since 2006. Without formal art training, Mukeba began making art as a refugee in Zimbabwe, where he learned from his uncle. He was also influenced by his grandfather, a Congolese artist. His practice developed from these familial and personal connections, with drawing becoming an important means of processing and communicating experiences of displacement and memory. Drawing partly from lived experience and partly from imagination, Mukeba creates works that address memory, family, violence, trauma, and exploitation. His compositions combine drawing and painting on fabric with appliquéd pieces of African wax-print textiles, producing densely layered, surreal and collage-like images in which figures, patterns, and narratives overlap. Mukeba’s early works were made on bedsheets. Working at a small table in his bedroom, he experimented with pencils, brush pens, and charcoal, incorporating pieces of his mother’s brightly patterned clothing into his compositions. These materials became an important part of his visual language, connecting the intimacy of domestic and familial life with broader histories of displacement and cultural identity. The fabrics incorporated into Mukeba’s works also carry complex cultural histories. Often referred to as African wax prints, these textiles originated in nineteenth-century Dutch attempts to reproduce Indonesian batik and were subsequently introduced and distributed across West and Central Africa through colonial trade networks. Their patterns and circulation have since become closely associated with particular African communities and forms of cultural expression. In Mukeba’s work, the textiles therefore function not simply as decorative elements but as materials carrying histories of migration, colonialism, identity, and cultural exchange. Through this combination of drawing, painting, fabric, and collage, Mukeba transforms personal and inherited memories into layered visual narratives. His practice brings together intimate experiences of family and displacement with wider histories of violence, exploitation, and colonial encounter, using materials and images that themselves carry traces of these histories.