Kim Mupangilaï's poetic critique of Belgian art nouveau through seating design

In a new series of work for the New York-based gallery Superhouse, Belgian-Congolese interior architect and designer Kim Mupangilaï expands on her formal exploration of the appropriation of Congolese heritage in 18th and 19th century Belgian visual culture through contemporary furniture designs. Mupangilaï's sculptural pieces skirt the tension between art and design, function and playfulness, allowing for subjective interpretations, as she mentions when speaking about her 2023 debut collection. Taking the visual language of Belgian art nouveau as inspiration, the NY-based designer's wooden furniture, seemingly an ongoing series with consistent themes, is a means to make sense of the colonial cultural networks that, on the one hand, produced the image of modern Belgium and, on the other, concealed the violence inflicted on their colonies. Her own cultural identity, tied to both Belgium and the Congo, becomes a point of negotiation in her artistic practice.

The new sculptural designs, which debuted at the recently concluded FOG Design+Art in San Francisco which took place from January 23 - 26, 2025, include a chaise with an undulating form, a chair design and a stool. The pieces are crafted with traditional Congolese materials such as teak, rattan and banana fibre, underscoring Mupangilaï's focus on hybridity and cultural production. In a bid to contextualise the 'universality' of modernism, it engages with its images to spotlights histories otherwise hidden or unattributed, re-evaluating the understanding of design.

The details in the seating series—for instance, the sinuous forms made popular during the art nouveau period, the hollow, curved back of the chair and the repeated use of a distinctly shaped cavity in all the pieces—are references to the lash, the vine and the elephantine motifs in the art movement popularly called Style Congo. As the official release elaborates, the designer's work is derived from art historian Debora L. Silverman's research on the rise of the art movement in France.

While the motif of the vine abstracted the 'sinuous coils' of the rubber vine, as research has shown, the lash of the chicotte or a flogging whip made of hippopotamus hide, was the precursor to the whippy, fluid lash motif. In the product designs, Mupangilaï reinterprets and, hence, recontextualises these within a Congolese vernacular. Apart from the volumes of the furniture that mimic the lines of art nouveau artefacts, the distinct surreal touches are akin to her debut collection, also presented with Superhouse.

For the design fair in California, Superhouse's display took the form of a parlour in a bourgeois Belgian home at the turn of the 20th century. Apart from the seating, the Mupangilaï invited fellow Superhouse artist Maris Van Vlack to display a hanging fibre artwork meant to mimic a large panelled stained-glass window, which traces its stylistic language to the Congo as well.

For Mupangilaï, beyond functionality, design serves as a tool of communication, facilitating conversations and critically engaging with those narratives that are otherwise neglected. Becoming a tool through which people conceive of their identity, making sense of their own heritage, upbringing and cultural landscape, Mupangilaï's work takes the beautiful, giving it a sinister twist.