Franck Kemkeng Noah (Cameroon, 1992)

Born in Yaoundé in 1992, Franck Kemkeng Noah graduates with a Master in Fine Arts from IBAF. In 2017, he moves to Amiens (France) and follows a second Master in Artistic Research at Université de Picardie. Soon, he starts painting on abandoned carpets. These discarded household objects he finds on the streets become a new support for a series of works which for him symbolize narrative points in the history of migrations.

Often labelled hybrid art, Franck Kemkeng Noah's practice is a unique experimental approach mainly characterized by painting. The artist's aesthetic research, at the core of which mixed productions are born, adds a vibrant perspective to notions of interculturalism, identity, and civilization. The blending of human cultures and traditions thus constitutes the central pillar of his art and philosophy.

" My traditional Bamileke culture constitutes for me a true richness and my main source of inspiration which, in my creations, will merge with that which opens to me but also which is imposed by means such as globalization or immigration creating a kind of Palace of Memory. The confrontation with the works born from this experience encourages personal questioning about oneself, about the other, about our human and cultural nature. This idea of fusion between my traditional origins and the culture of the other, for the creation of a new self, is equally inspired by Oswald de Andrade's Brazilian Anthropophagy."

Articulated through various means of artistic expression such as painting, sculpture, interactive performance, or installation, the dialogue between traditional African dances and masquerades, and mostly Western geographical and architectural spaces is the true protagonist of Kemkeng Noah's artistic universe.

His distinctive style and artistic approach brought his work to global attention in exhibitions like On the Road to Chieftaincies of Cameroon at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac (Paris, 2022), at Fondation Blachère (Marseille, 2021), or more recently at the Texas Southern University Museum (Houston, 2023). Since 2021, the artist has been living and working in Brussels (Belgium).

FRANCK KEMKENG NOAH

1992

CAMEROON

Possession de la Grand-Place

2021

Acrylic on Canvas

175 x 240 cm