Born in Yaounde, Cameroon, Marcelline Mandeng Nken pairs curious objects with movement phrases to unpack dominant narrative structures and the societal conditions that produce them. Her practice is grounded in research, focusing on Greco-Egyptian mythologies and sociopolitical situations that address the semiotics of desire, ancestral knowledge systems as metadata, and the biological limits of human transfiguration. From this foundation, unique visuo-tactile motifs emerge as hybridized, masked, and fragmented forms recast into materials like acrylic, wood, or iron to construct a black feminine subjective interior space. The resulting installations are built on a series of inversions. Dramatic shifts in environmental scale and the passage of time, marked by decaying organic matter, transform audiences into unsuspecting performers. They become test subjects in a lab that considers vital the influences of non-human entities like bees, fungi and ancestral figures.
Drawing from her matrilineal line of nurse practitioners, she appropriates the spiritual capacity and pointed utility of domestic objects to reflect technologies of caretaking as by-products of Black women's relationships to home and the market - sites sustained by disembodied attempts at repair. Caretaking is a counter ritual to the exploited female body consumed throughout the production of industry. It roots her understanding of an African woman's labor and its impact on the community on a global scale. By deconstructing archetypes of femininity across historical time, folklore, and cinema, she uproots and critiques the enduring labor of feminine sacrifice as virtue signaling.