Kenny Dunkan (born in 1988, in Guadeloupe. Lives and works in Paris) regularly draws on the visual culture of the Caribbean and in particular that of the carnivals, moments of reversal of social, cultural and political roles, to develop a work that addresses the French colonial heritage and the persistence of its forms of representation. To do this, the artist often starts with his own black body, which he stages through various media, from video to performance, including sculpture and composition.

“Through a game of collages and accumulations of symbols I try to translate my fragmented and ambivalent nature. Being all at once, contradictory, composite, patchwork. A meeting of the natural and the artificial, of the material and the spiritual. The installation explores mutation and change of state, it also proposes freeze-frames inviting contemplation. I use the Caribbean carnival as a filter to deploy in the space a series of ornaments, talismans and protective masks. One enters a universe that is both sensitive and evident, a world of ambiguous sensations. The dialogue of the sculptures creates a narrative and reveals a cosmogony of the intimate.” Kenny Dunkan

Graduated from the National School of Decorative Arts of Paris in 2014, he won the ADAGP Prize for Plastic Arts at the Salon de Montrouge in 2015. From 2016 to 2017, Kenny Dunkan was a resident at the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome. In 2018, he participated in the opening exhibition of Lafayette Anticipations. In 2021, he exhibited at the Galerie Les filles du calvaire in Paris and joined the CNAP collections the same year with the installation “COSMOS”. The same year, he became the winner of the first Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship and exhibited at the Studio des Acacias.

Les filles du calvaire Gallery opened in 1996 in a 300m2 industrial building on two levels sheltered by a large glass ceiling.
The programming considers all the practices of contemporary art that intersect and enrich each other (painting, sculpture, video, photography and installations), with confirmed or emerging artists often calling on a plural writing. Their works are consistent with the choice of the gallery to propose committed points of view and diverse illuminations on the real and the world of ideas.
The gallery actively participates in fairs and collaborates with numerous institutions in France and abroad. It publishes a large number of reference publications, alone or in co-production.