Mutu, an artist of the globalized twenty-first-century world\u200a\u2014\u200aborn in Kenya, raised in England, trained and for some time living in the US, and now based in both New York and Nairobi\u200a\u2014\u200ais extremely well versed in the history of modern art. This became obvious in the early 2000s, as her striking collages caught the attention of influential collectors. Her irreverent, distorted, and dislocated mythological polygender characters incessantly gesture toward a breakdown of the humanist binary system that has defined Western culture, and with that most of the planet, for the past four hundred years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"Wangechi-Mutu_install\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_HD_Aloi_Wangechi-Mutu_install_134.jpg\")
Intertwined<\/em>, exhibition view,
New Museum, New York, 2023.
Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy of New Museum, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Early modern art, from Monet and Duchamp to Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Picasso, had already identified realism as its number one enemy, charging that it was a draconian tool that could shackle the imagination and limit the bandwidth of thinking and expression. Stripping away the veneer of bourgeoise normalcy became one of the most important drives behind Dada and Surrealism\u200a\u2014\u200amovements that Mutu\u2019s work is deeply indebted to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The irreverent artistic voice of Hannah H\u00f6ch echoes through Mutu\u2019s early collages. A queer and marginalized voice of the Dada movement, H\u00f6ch had bravely pioneered new conceptions of race and gender in the 1920s and 1930s. In Mutu\u2019s work, this desire to disrupt societal conventions, something she also admired in the work of American artist Romare Bearden, is further complicated by the acknowledgement that in the art world, Blackness is almost always in-
escapably prone to objectification and fetishization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Wangechi Mutu<\/strong>
People in Glass Towers Should Not Imagine Us<\/em>, 2003.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Another modernist reference dear to Mutu is the sculptural stylization of Constantin Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i, the Romanian artist who, in the same era as H\u00f6ch, reinvented Western sculpture. Mutu\u2019s \u201cdecapitated heads\u201d gain contextual strength as they weaponize Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i\u2019s own fascination with primitive modernist visions against the highly fetishizing discourses that racialized African aesthetics at the beginning of the last century. Unlike other artists, however, Mutu does not seem to seek revenge\u200a\u2014\u200aher approach is discursive and indexical, nuanced and grounded. Her will to decolonize is based on integration rather than rejection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In conversation with Isaac Julien and Claudia Schmuckli, Mutu said, \u201cI realized that material has its impact, its energy, its life cycle, its desire to be alive, its wish not to be dead.\u201d The violence that marred the past should be neither forgotten nor condoned. But Mutu is well aware that in its material essence, it still constitutes the cultural foundation of what can be seen and said today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Intertwined<\/em>, exhibition view, New Museum, New York, 2023.
Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy of
New Museum, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Curiously, much of what has been said about Mutu\u2019s art, this recent show included, insists on locking her work in the binary of humanist thinking. Oftentimes, the cultural references that critics deploy are anchored in dated dichotomic conceptions of natural and artificial or gesture vaguely to non-political, decontextualized, and pacified forms of hybridization. Bizarre, grotesque, freaky, and dreamlike are among the most frequent adjectives used to describe Mutu\u2019s mythological characters. In these instances, too, terms that imply a pejorative connotation only reinforce the binaries of a humanist thinking system that Mutu is keen to evade. These semantic impositions take place even when she eloquently expresses her wish \u201cto pay homage to the notion of the sublime and the abject together, and using the aesthetic of rejection, or poverty, or wretchedness as a tool to talk about things that are transcendent and hopeful \u2026 we really do have to pick up pieces and remake and rework things and translate them into something new and hopeful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Work after work, these processes of recuperation and reconfiguration emerge into Afrofuturist assemblages that encompass posthuman ecologies of the kind that can truly foreground new conceptions of emancipated blackness. This colossal task entails renegotiating a generative fluidity of African diasporic identities through the emerging intersection between technology and nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Yo Mama<\/em>, 2003.
Photo: Robert Edemeyer, courtesy of the artist & Vielmetter, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
It is in this context that Mutu\u2019s collages engage with pornographic imagery as a form of decolonization of the sexualization and objectification of the (Black) female body. Photography\u2019s indexical root anchors her mythology to the unstable truth of mediatic evidence. A similar positioning informs the use of wood and soil that Mutu collects from the surroundings of her studio in Nairobi. These become the flesh and bones of many of her sculptural pieces, including her Sentinels<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ahuman\/natural guardians of the soil and history. Their silent solemnity conjures traditions of both Western and African sculpture in the acknowledgment of their shared and fraught historical development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emblematic of the overwhelmingly visionary exhibition are Mutu\u2019s gigantic kikapus\u200a\u2014\u200abaskets woven, often by women, in different parts of the world\u200a\u2014\u200awhich might be seen to allude to the speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s \u201ccarrier bag theory of fiction\u201d in which she retells the story of human civilization by reconfiguring the history of technology starting from a carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. The carrier bag, the basket, the sling\u200a\u2014\u200alife-giving containers and community-forming primordial technologies\u200a\u2014\u200alike the New Museum containing Mutu\u2019s work, they hold narratives that can make space for the emergence of speculative fictions: visions of alternate worlds that can help us better live in this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New Museum, <\/strong>New York An author and curator specializing in the history and theory of photography, representations of nature, and materiality in art, Giovanni Aloi has edited and authored more than ten books. He is the editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture<\/em> and the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Wangechi-Mutu_install\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/109_HD_Aloi_Wangechi-Mutu_install_06.jpg\")
Wangechi Mutu<\/strong>
Intertwined<\/em>, exhibition view, New Museum, New York, 2023.
Photo: Dario Lasagni, courtesy of
New Museum, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
March 2\u200a\u2014\u200aJune 4, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n