Born in 1989 in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and deceased in January of 2021, Dorine Mokha was a dancer, choreographer, and author. He was the Artistic Co-Director of ART’gument Project in Lubumbashi, and an associate artist at Studios Kabako in Kisangani.

Mokha was a Digital Earth Fellow (2020–21), and a Laureate of the YALI Regional Leadership Center East Africa program (2020). He participated in the 2018 International Coproduction Fund of the Goethe Institute, and the Séminaire en Avignon at the 2017 Avignon Festival, and was an Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellow (2014–15). He participated in exp. 2 as part of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020), and was a Pro Helvetia Johannesburg artist in residence at Kaserne Basel (2019). Dorine frequently toured, both in his own country and internationally.

Since 2013, Mokha had been developing a distinctly personal body of work dealing with political and social issues, including his autobiographical trilogy Entre deux (2013–2020) and the recent oratorio piece on Congo’s mines Hercules of Lubumbashi (2019), co-created with the composer Elia Rediger. Mokha also worked and collaborated with, among others, Eva Maria Bertschy, Desire Davids, Faustin Linyekula, Franck Moka, Nicolas Mondon, and Carina Riedl.

In 2020, Mokha created his solo against homophobia Entre deux: Testament, which premiered at Kaserne Basel, before being presented at Le Manège–Scène Nationale, Reims. Among other activities, in 2020 he also contributed to Letters from the Continent, a film produced by Studios Kabako, and joined On-Trade-Off, a transnational artist-led platform dealing with economic and social inequalities caused by the electronics industries. He recently co-authored a cross-border music and video installation based on his Hercules of Lubumbashi, which premiered in August 2020 at Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich.

Mokha held a Masters Degree in Social and Economic Law from the University of Kisangani (2013) and regularly wrote for theatre, music, and film, as well as contributing to literary journals.

Image credits: Art Mustache