ART-PRESENTATION: Wangechi Mutu-Ndoro Na Miti

 Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen. © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brusselsorn in Nairobi, Wangechi Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Wangechi Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures that are part human, animal, plant, and machine, in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. In 2001, after graduating from Yale with an M.F.A. in sculpture, she created a series of works on paper titled “Pin-Up”, a collection of twelve images of seemingly beautiful women in the form of “calendar girls” that, when looked in detail, actually reveal mutations and inflicted malformations. The series was provoked by the diamond trafficking in Sierra Leone, whose violent disputes resulted in countless disfigurements among civilians. In 2007 Mutu directed attention to the genocide in Rwanda. A massive pile of clothes was laid on platforms that resembled those upon which murdered bodies were placed in the 1994 massacre. In “Ndoro Na Miti”, her solo exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, Wangechi Mutu presents new works. The title for the exhibition comes from the Gikuyu* words for mud and trees, the primal materials for this body of work. Expanding her sculptural practice, this installation proposes an alternative to the systemic modes of representation in both Western and Eastern traditions by reimagining and recontextualizing the relations between the body, the natural world, and social forces. Mutu transforms the gallery space into a terrestrial cosmology that spans the microscopic to the mythic. Drawn from the dirt and brush in areas around her studio, she conjures a world replete with chimerical paradox. Faces of women, ornamental footwear, and patterned spheres evoking viruses emerge from natural materials that elaborate on the traditions of Makonde** carving. Adding gravity to these roughhewn totems, each invokes the psychic and social struggle for control over bodies through capitalism, the fetish, and disease. Seating of grey blankets grounds the installation, inviting audiences “To enter a place and re-think themselves”. This environment sets the stage for two new cast bronze sculptures that directly confront the myths of representation. A large-scale sculpture of an nguva (a water-woman of East African folklore), is at once familiar and otherworldly. In another work, “Second Dreamer” (2016), she challenges the stasis of the bust and the appropriation of African masks through a self-portrait that captures the potential of psychic life. In this way, Mutu’s sculpture acts as a corrective to a violent cultural consciousness, while offering an alternative narrative of embodiment and being in the world.

* Gikuyu is one of the five languages of the Thagichu subgroup of the Bantu languages, which stretches from Kenya to Tanzania, spoken primarily by the Kikuyu people of Kenya, Numbering about 6 million population, they are the largest ethnic group in Kenya.

**Makonde people are an ethnic group in southeast Tanzania and northern Mozambique. The Makonde developed their culture on the Mueda Plateau in Mozambique. At present they live throughout Tanzania and Mozambique and have a small presence in Kenya.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, New York, Duration: 27/1-25/3/17, Days & Hours: 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com

Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Water Woman in Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen, © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels
Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Water Woman in Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen, © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels

 

 

 Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen. © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels
Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen. © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels

 

 

 Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen. © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels
Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen. © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels

 

 

Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Prayer Beads in Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen, © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels
Wangechi Mutu, Installation view of Prayer Beads in Ndoro Na Miti at Gladstone Gallery- New York, 26/1-25/3/17, Photo: David Regen, © Wangechi Mutu, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York/Brussels