Speaking about your work in an interview you asserted that it is an “attempt to remove myself from the representational aspect of memory politics in order to find new ways to address questions of erasure and permeability in the construction of identity.” Is this a sort of mapping and translating of interiority, i.e. identity, into visual forms?

No, I think what I meant back then was that images/representations can only be an impairment to our understanding of how politics moves through us. In my opinion it constitutes us to a similar degree than flesh and bones. 

As with language, a translation can only be partial. The problem with representation is that it sometimes seems to prevail over everything else in our Western and image-obsessed society: Optics versus embodied politics. For that reason, it’s important for me to push against the belief that something can only exists if it can be seen (or portrayed). 

You seem to have an ambivalent relationship to images. On the one hand you scout for images and integrate them into your works, like for example in Du ciel, à travers le monde, jusqu’aux enfers (III), where you engrave the Lucifer by Franz Von Stuck inside the glass cube; on the other hand there is a proclivity to communicate without representation, for example leaving formless traces on the copper surface like in The Moss Has a Got a Pair of Eyes. How does your relationship with images enter and shape your practice more in general? 

I would qualify my relationship to images as tensed rather than ambivalent. Although very present and integral to the work, my practice is also considering other dimensions. For example, the work you describe is also using materials that are highly conducive of energy, namely glass and copper. So, as much as the eye may be drawn to the images, the rest of our body may interact with the objects on other levels.
I would like to think of my artworks as facilitators of experience in the sense that they often explore various forms of channeling.  

Ooloi, one of the works displayed in Temporary Atlas, takes its name from the characters of the alien species in sci-fi novel Xenogenesis by Octavia Butler. These creatures are a third gender being, shape shifting and able to gather genetic material from other living beings. This reference highlights your interest in characters that question the dominant narratives, aliens, just like ghosts, are a way to reimagine possible pasts or futures. How do you see these pasts and futures? How do you imagine them?

The short answer would be: multiple and complex. 

Speaking of regimes of visibility and estrangement of the self, I am interested in how you yourself ‘read’ your works. Can you step outside Paul Maheke for a moment and let me know what you see or unsee?

If I would be able to step out of myself and look at my work, I would probably see the deep resonance my work entertains with positionality. My position being altered, I may then be able to truly embrace what has been left untold or unseen. 

I do believe that my work has a form of agency and sometimes even preexists my doing. So, from the outside the many things I’m unaware my work is doing might eventually come to the light; I’m sure that shadows will form in unexpected places too. 

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Matt Mullican