Goethe-Institut Boston Announces Its Next Studio 170 Artist Residency

As a 2025 Studio 170 artist-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut Boston, Marcelline Mandeng Nken will create, install and preview the first two acts of Rush Hour, a performance installation that unfolds inside a moving train as a cinematic narrative structure. 

From themes of migration, displacement, and time travel, Rush Hour links the concept of Sankofa, a call back into history to remember, with the theory of self-reference as fertile ground for sculptural forms, spatial interventions, and movement phrases. Through a surrealist lens, the work disrupts dichotomies between body and machine, nature and industry, and stellar motion and mechanical time. Staged in three acts, Rush Hour affirms language as a care tool that shapes self-determination beyond feminine sacrifice into storytelling and dreams. The choreography and suit of objects in the work point to the cyclical nature of history. As a vehicle, the train is a liminal space that reflects the motives of colonialism, journeying to paradise for discovery as a measure of conquest. 

Mandeng Nken presents Vestibule or Act 2, in which the body animates a projection of images as a fleeting, playful exercise with light, and silhouette. She will also present Act 1, Conductor, where the train's operator becomes a storyteller who combines banal observations with cosmological mysteries. Set inside and around a miniature train set, the rhythm of this section follows the repetition of a ticking clock that breaks into a glitch.

Marcelline Mandeng Nken (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an interdisciplinary artist working with concepts of syncretism, non-human intelligence, and the labor traditions of the Global South. As a former social worker, she's inspired by her matrilineage of nurse practitioners, understanding caretaking as a byproduct of Black women's relationships to home and the market, sites sustained by disembodied attempts at repair. In sculptural and movement installation artworks, she unpacks constructions of femininity to critique the endurance of feminine sacrifice as a form of virtue signaling.

Mandeng Nken earned an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2024 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recently, she completed a Dance Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The fellowship culminated in a performance presentation titled "Queening The Knight: Baryshnikov's Vulnerability and Masculinity On Display," which premiered at the Performing Arts Library in January 2025.

Studio 170│Residency: Marcelline Mandeng Nken: Rush Hour

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