A few decade in the past, when Sandra Mujinga visited Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she relished her time folks watching, as vacationers are wont to do. However Mujinga was not precisely a foreigner—she was born in Goma, one other Congolese metropolis, and had returned to the nation a number of instances since leaving it as a baby—and so her model of individuals watching entailed observing not simply how locals acted however how they dressed.
“I felt like there was this innate, underlying settlement that all of us need to create magnificence once we are within the streets by way of what we put on and the colours we put on,” Mujinga, who’s now based mostly in Berlin and Oslo, informed me on a current journey to New York this previous November. “It’s virtually like, I’m going to be this lovely flower. Even when it’s the identical shirt I wore yesterday, it’s nonetheless like the most effective shirt that I’ve.”
She then drew my consideration to what she wore to our interview on the Park Avenue Armory, the place she was on the brink of unveil a brand new efficiency. She talked about that her gown was a lot much less colourful than the garments she had just lately seen in Kochi, the place she had visited forward of taking part within the metropolis’s intently watched biennial. “Have a look at me now,” she mentioned, smiling and gesturing towards her grey cotton gown. “I’m additionally from Scandinavia.”
For Mujinga, one’s wardrobe is extra than simply one thing to be donned—it’s additionally a signifier of identification, a approach of explaining who we’re to the remainder of the world. “I consider vogue as one thing like knowledge or storytelling,” she mentioned. That line of pondering has knowledgeable has she has clothed her sculptures, which frequently resemble monumentally scaled beings sheathed in cotton and cloth. These sculptures, like the remainder of her artwork, take care of the elements of ourselves that we need to current to—and conceal from—the remainder of the world.
“I’ve at all times been drawn to this concept that you would be able to talk, with out saying a single phrase, by way of what you’re sporting—and talk the place you need to belong, the place you may have been,” Mujinga mentioned. “There’s additionally one thing futuristic about it, too. In that sense, it could actually say one thing about our instances too, whether or not to be extra nostalgic, to need to return, or to invest on the long run.”
For her efficiency Sunless Mouths on the Park Avenue Armory, Sandra Mujinga conjured a gaggle of siblings who have been “not likely people.”
Photograph Christopher Garcia-Valle/ARTnews
This time-traveling, shape-shifting high quality has additionally characterised Mujinga’s sculptures, movies, images, and performances, which have figured in a large number of biennials and worldwide museum exhibits over the previous 5 years. Usually, the works have a sci-fi taste, with tall figures from different worlds bathed in an acrid shade of inexperienced, evoking each alternate realms and our digital current.
Such is the case with Pores and skin to Pores and skin (2025), an unlimited set up by Mujinga that’s ending its run this week on the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam earlier than touring to the Belvedere museum in Vienna later within the month. The 55 lithe figures within the work, every with tentacular arms, resemble a military of wraith-like beings. Otherwise sized groupings are assembled round seven mirrored columns that invite viewers to stare upon these towering figures, all of which rise 9 and a halffeet into the air. However Mujinga’s beings refuse to make themselves totally seen, as they’re coated in textiles of the artist’s personal making.
Melanie Bühler, a Stedelijk curator who labored with Mujinga on the set up, described the piece as “a inexperienced universe with a lightweight construction that adjustments over time” and praised Mujinga for the fluidity of her work. “She actually is a renaissance lady,” Bühler mentioned. “She will accomplish that many issues. She works on this sculptural approach that extends to crafting and constructing a world that she additionally achieves by bringing in sound and lightweight.”
Sandra Mujinga, Pores and skin to Pores and skin, 2025.
Photograph Peter Tijhuis
When experiencing installations just like Pores and skin to Pores and skin, guests have a tendency to say that they needed to let their eyes modify to the sunshine to see the artwork on view. The cruel inexperienced of gallery given over to her sculpture Sentinels of Change (2021) within the 2022 Venice Biennale left me with whitish afterimages that lingered lengthy after leaving it. Did she need her work to change viewers’ imaginative and prescient? “Oh, sure,” Mujinga mentioned, noting that the extreme inexperienced of her artwork didn’t at all times make every part really easy to absorb. “I undoubtedly consider the inexperienced as a cloak.”
Different items by Mujinga contain figures transferring out and in of sight. Pervasive Mild (2021), a 16-minute video set up that debuted at that 12 months’s New Museum Triennial, options the musician Mariama Ndure inside a black void that she seems to emerge from and recede into. Set to a thrumming rating the artist likened to a heartbeat, the video can typically really feel as if it’s looping due to Ndure’s rhythmic actions, though it isn’t. Whereas it typically seems as if the video was shot in darkness, it was in reality made by having Ndure put on inexperienced materials that have been closely altered in post-production by way of digital results. Whereas producing the piece, Mujinga considered how troublesome it’s for cameras to {photograph} Black pores and skin. “I’ll use it to my profit, that I’m not seen, that it’s exhausting to seize my pores and skin,” Mujinga recalled pondering on the time.
Sandra Mujinga, Pervasive Mild, 2021.
Courtesy the artist and Croy Nielsen
“Sandra is especially keyed into the understanding that expertise, and notably surveillance, is the subsequent frontier that we’re going through, when it comes to the hazard of sight and the form of domination that stems from it,” mentioned Ashley James, a Guggenheim Museum curator who included Pervasive Mild in her 2023 exhibition “Going Darkish: The Modern Determine on the Fringe of Visibility” on the museum. “After which Sandra can also be taking part in along with her personal technological instruments of opacity to then counteract that. She additionally speaks about hypervisibility, which stands in distinction to the invisible ways in which Black folks—Black ladies and everybody, actually—are seen and identified. What does it imply to journey the sting?”
It’s a query that has haunted Mujinga ever since she was a child within the DRC. Rising up, she was constantly conscious of her race. She would watch Disney motion pictures and “uncover that the villain is at all times darker,” she mentioned, main her to marvel what that meant. “And being dark-skinned myself, I grew up with my mother saying, ‘By no means bleach your pores and skin.’ I might later perceive that that is very political.”
Her upbringing was peripatetic, along with her household transferring to Oslo whereas she was nonetheless younger after which to Nairobi when she was a young person. Her transnational existence was formative, main her to understand how a lot a spot can form an individual. “The way in which I used to be taught about colonialism in Nairobi versus the way in which I used to be taught about colonialism in Oslo was fully totally different,” she mentioned. “One turns into conscious of a lot erasure that’s taking place, even in actual time.”
With the hope of combating that erasure, she turned to the web within the early 2010s, to “archive myself,” as she put it. She was in artwork faculty, in Vienna and the Swedish metropolis of Malmö, on the time and have become fascinated by the then nascent post-internet artwork, work that enlisted the modern aesthetics of Net 2.0 and muddied it, typically by porting the look of inventory pictures and browser home windows offline. Although she immersed herself in works such because the Jogging, a preferred Tumblr created by a gaggle of artists that was identified for its absurdist posting, Mujinga mentioned she was extra drawn to the work of Zach Blas, who used the instruments of digital surveillance in opposition to themselves, rendering queer folks unseeable by the machines that sought to choose up their picture. Blas’s writings and artwork led Mujinga to ask herself: “What if not being seen, not being captured on digicam, can also be a profit?”
Works by Sandra Mujinga on the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Photograph Giuseppe Cottini/Getty Photographs
Working below the signal of sci-fi writers comparable to Octavia Butler, Mujinga has since aspired to “decenter the human,” as she put it. She spoke of an curiosity in deep sea creatures, which exist primarily in darkness, and mentioned her analysis into them impressed Sunless Mouths, her Park Avenue Armory piece, a efficiency that was a few group of siblings with godlike powers. Clad in black clothes just like the loose-fitting ones seen in Mujinga’s sculptures, her performers moved slowly and methodically amid panels of frosted Plexiglas, unraveling a obscure narrative about an overbearing, sun-like mom and the kids who escape her grasp by producing snowstorms.
“They’re not likely people,” Mujinga mentioned. “I used to be pondering quite a bit about: how one could be in the identical house, in the identical room, the identical home, after which have totally different experiences? You bear in mind various things.”
Mujinga didn’t specify whether or not Sunless Mouths was rooted in her personal upbringing, however she was raised alongside two different siblings, and it might not have been the primary time her personal life had influenced her artwork: Flo (2019), a big projection of a mysterious determine with a purple glow that has been proven on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, was named after her late mom. It will appear as if she have been remaking her private historical past—and even herself—by way of her artwork. Her remarks on Sunless Mouths recalled an earlier remark she made about her life spent in a number of cities spanning two continents and 1000’s of miles.
Doing so led her to “see that it’s at all times attainable to begin from scratch,” she mentioned. “You’ll be able to at all times transfer someplace and begin once more.”
