Ghostly Matters by Kenny Dunkan and Anthony Ngoya

Ghostly Matters
Kenny Dunkan & Anthony Ngoya
Curated by Karel Op ’t Eynde

Jester proudly presents Ghostly Matters by Kenny Dunkan and Anthony Ngoya, from October 19 to January 11. In this exhibition, both artists suggest that confronting the past may be the most urgent way to imagine the future. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and image, they ask what is preserved, what is silenced, and how haunting renders absences visible.

The exhibition lends its title from writer Avery Gordon's book Ghostly Matters (1997), where she indicates how haunting “alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future.”

Ghostly Matters shows new work by both artists, and marks Dunkan's first institutional presentation in Belgium. Ngoya's work was produced during his residency at Jester. Dunkan and Ngoya present a vast spectrum of memories, heritages and experiences in both intimate and disquieting ways. Ghosts of the past manifest themselves in the exhibition space, showing contradictions and complexities that persist across time. Guadeloupean carnivals and spiritual talismans find personal archival footage while hovering, overlapping and encountering each other in front of violent bonfires and polluting oil rigs.

Genk's landscapes and communities carry traces of an industrial history that, while no longer visible in daily labor, continues to shape its collective identity. In this context, memories have become burdens and resources alike as “without memory, there is no history. Without history, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no justice.” (Gordon, 1997)

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Ngoya's practice investigates memory, displacement, and the speculative potential of archives. Throughout the exhibition, the artist de- and reconstructs archival images and video clippings into layered photographic works. While allowing these images to dissolve into one another and reappear in altered form, Ngoya alludes to the fleeting qualities of history and how its absences can be as telling as its presences. Through woven textile, lantern shaped sculptures and intimate videos, he collapses personal and public histories into each other, radiating other ways of remembering.

In Mbótó (2025) Country Nkulu (2025), a series of jacquard tapestries on stands, Ngoya turns to the language of textiles to question how memory is produced and circulated through images. Borrowing from digital archives and mass media, he reconfigures these stills into woven textures that blur the line between documentation and blatant invention. This translation resists the speed of circulation, proposing material memory as a slower, more deliberate form of seeing.

By opening up Jester's own archive with the video work Tout vas bien, thanks (2024), the artist reveals the gaps and repetitions that exist within it, allowing the past to leak into the present.

As Gordon puts it: “What's distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes obliquely. I use the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with bones are alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view.”

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Dunkan's work is deeply rooted in the visual culture of Guadeloupean carnival, where social and political hierarchies are inverted through ritual and exuberance. Raising questions on the influence of the past on the present and its modes of representation,

Dunkan shows GENTLE CARE (2025), a carnivalesque installation composed of garlands and other ornamental structures, all assembled out of hundreds of Eiffel tower keyrings. The work refuses the power that clings onto it, shedding and shaking until only celebration remains.

Framing this installation, Dunkan shows HIGH POROSITY (2025), a large-scale photographic work, depicting fragments of the artist's body that morph and twist into a landscape. This intimate image expands into a monumental presence that engulfs the exhibition space. Draped in an endless scattering rainbow, the work asserts Black skin as multiple, and self-determined, sensual, queer, and spectral.

With BOUKAN (2025), Dunkan presents a large video installation centered on a boukan—a traditional bonfire made by residents of Guadeloupe, burning garden waste (leaves, grass, branches) in order to clear the land and purify the soil. The thick white smoke from such fires can often travel for miles. Although officially prohibited, the practice remains culturally ingrained and continues across Guadeloupe. Dunkan shows his memories of this ritual and its distinctly scented smoke, burning away the waste in protest while imagining a brighter tomorrow. Nature, to Dunkan, can be fertile and seductive, but also always dangerous and violent—like carnivorous flowers or earthquakes. His sculptures tremble, and scatter like spirits. Humor, camp, and sensuality all run through his practice, opening space for heaps of joy.

Ghostly Matters shows haunting as a way of living with what refuses to disappear. In the trembling of Dunkan's sculptures and the layered images of Ngoya's archives, the artists remember in ways that keep time with the future.