Sandra Mujinga’s Shadowy Figures Hit the International Spotlight

When Sandra Mujinga visited Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, about a decade ago, she enjoyed spending time under people’s gaze, as travelers are accustomed to. But Mujinga isn’t exactly a foreigner—she was born in Goma, another Congolese city, and has returned to the country several times since leaving it as a child—so her observations of people require observing not just how locals behave, but also how they dress.

“I feel like there’s an innate, basic consensus that when we walk down the street, we all have to create beauty through what we wear and the colors we wear,” Mujinga, who now lives in Berlin and Oslo, told me during a recent trip to New York last November. “It’s almost like, I’m going to be this beautiful flower. Even if it’s the same shirt I wore yesterday, it’s still the best shirt I’ve ever owned.”

She then called my attention to what she was wearing during an interview at the Park Avenue Armory, where she was preparing to unveil a new show. She mentioned that her clothes were much less colorful than those she had seen recently in Kochi, where she visited before attending the city’s high-profile biennale. “Look at me now,” she said, smiling, pointing to her gray cotton dress. “I’m also from Scandinavia.”

For Mujinga, one’s wardrobe is more than just something to wear, it’s a symbol of status and a way of explaining who we are to the rest of the world. “I think fashion is like data or storytelling,” she said. This way of thinking informed her that her sculptural pieces often resemble giant creatures wrapped in cotton and fabric. These sculptures, like the rest of her art, compete with the parts of ourselves we want to show and hide from the rest of the world.

“I’ve always been attracted to the idea that you can communicate through what you wear without saying a word, and communicate where you want to belong, where you’ve been,” Mujinga said. “It also has a bit of a futuristic feel. In that sense, it can also express something about our time, whether it’s being more nostalgic, wanting to go back to the past, or speculating on the future.”

This time-traveling, shape-shifting quality also characterizes Mujinga’s sculptures, videos, photographs and performances, which have appeared in numerous biennales and international museum exhibitions over the past five years. The works often have a sci-fi feel, with towering figures from other worlds bathed in pungent shades of green, evoking parallel worlds and our digital reality.

this is the case skin contact (2025), a large-scale installation by Mujinga, will end its exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam this week before traveling to the Belvedere Museum in Vienna later this month. The 55 lithe figures in the work, each with tentacles, resemble an army of ghostly creatures. Groups of varying sizes gather around seven mirrored columns, inviting viewers to gaze upon the towering figures, all of which stand nine and a half feet tall. But Mujinga’s creatures refuse to make themselves fully visible, as they are covered in textiles made by the artist himself.

Melanie Bühler, director of the Stedelijk Museum, who collaborated with Mujinga on the installation, described the work as “a green universe whose light structure changes over time” and praised the fluidity of Mujinga’s work. “She was truly a Renaissance woman,” Buehler said. “She can do so much. She works in this sculptural way that extends to crafting and building a world, which she also does by bringing in sound and light.”

When encountering similar installations skin contactVisitors often mention that they have to adjust their eyes to the light in order to see the artwork on display. her sculptures are reflected in the gallery’s harsh green sentinel of change (2021) left a white afterimage in me at the 2022 Venice Biennale that lingered long after I left. Does she hope her work will change viewers’ perspectives? “Oh, yes,” Mujinga said, noting that the strong greens in her art don’t always make it easy to swallow. “I definitely think green is a cape.”

Mujinga’s other works involve figures moving in and out of view. light everywhere (2021) is a 16-minute video installation that debuted at that year’s New Museum Triennial in which musician Mariama Ndure is in a black void from which she appears to emerge and recede. Set to a rhythm that the artist likens to a heartbeat, the video often feels like it’s playing on a loop due to N’Dour’s rhythmic movements, even though that’s not the case. While the video often looks like it was shot in the dark, it actually features Ndure wearing green fabrics that were heavily altered in post-production through digital effects. While making this piece, Mujinga thought about how difficult it is for cameras to capture dark skin. “I’m going to use this to my advantage because I’m invisible and it’s hard to capture my skin,” Mujinga recalled thinking at the time.

Ashley James, director of the Guggenheim Museum, said: “Sandra understands particularly that technology, and surveillance in particular, is the next frontier we face because of the dangers it brings with it, the dangers of sight and the domination that comes with it.” light everywhere She is in the museum’s 2023 exhibition “Going Dark: Contemporary Figures on the Edge of Visibility.” “And then Sandra is also playing with her own opaque technological tools to counteract that. She also talks about hypervisibility, which contrasts with the invisible ways in which black people — and indeed black women and everyone — are seen and known. What does it mean to navigate the edge?”

This question has troubled Mujinga since she was a child. Growing up, she was always aware of her race. She said she would watch Disney movies and “find the villains were always darker,” which made her wonder what that meant. “I myself have dark skin, and growing up my mom said ‘never bleach your skin.'” I later understood that this was very political. “

She had a carefree upbringing, with her family moving to Oslo when she was young and then to Nairobi when she was a teenager. Her international life has had a profound impact on her, making her realize how much a place shapes a person. “The way I learned about colonialism in Nairobi was completely different from the way I learned about colonialism in Oslo,” she says. “People will realize there’s so much erasure going on, even in real time.”

With the hope of fighting this erasure, she turned to the Internet in the early 2010s to, in her words, “archive herself.” At the time, she was attending art school in Vienna and Malmö, Sweden, and became fascinated by the then-nascent post-Internet art, which adopted the sleek aesthetic of Web 2.0 and often cluttered it by porting the look of stock photography and browser windows offline. Although she devoted herself to such projects as ” joggingMujinga said she prefers the work of Zach Blas, who uses digital surveillance tools to monitor himself so that queer people cannot have their images captured by machines. Brass’s writing and art led Mujinga to ask himself: “What if not being seen, not being caught on camera, was a benefit?”

Mujinga, who writes under the guise of science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler, has always longed to, in her words, “decentralize humanity.” She spoke of her interest in deep-sea creatures that exist primarily in the dark and said her study of them inspired mouth without sunshineher Park Avenue Armory production, a show about a group of siblings with godlike powers. Wearing baggy black costumes similar to those in Mujinga’s sculptures, performers move slowly and methodically through panels of frosted Plexiglas, telling a vague narrative about a domineering sun-like mother and the children who escape her control by creating blizzards.

“They’re not really human,” Mujinga said. “I think about it a lot: How can someone be in the same space, the same room, the same house, and have different experiences? You remember different things.”

Mujinga did not specify whether mouth without sunshine Rooted in her own upbringing, but growing up with two other siblings, this isn’t the first time her own life has influenced her art: Flo (2019), a monumental projection of a mysterious figure with a purple glow, has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and is named after her late mother. She seems to be reshaping her personal history, and even herself, through her art. her remarks mouth without sunshine Recalling her earlier comments about her life spent in multiple cities spanning thousands of miles across two continents.

Doing so, she said, allowed her to “discover that it’s always possible to start from scratch.” “You can always move somewhere and start over.”