PRESENTATION: Sandra Mujinga-Skin to Skin

The Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga maintains a multidisciplinary practice driven by a profound interest in the body, skin, and its visibility and invisibility. In her installations, which are as much sculptural as sound- and light-based, ghostly figures and  fantastical hybrid creatures function as prisms through which to pursue her investigations. Taking inspiration from animal survival strategies such as camouflage and nocturnality, science fiction’s concept of world- building, posthumanism, and Afrofuturism, Mujinga proposes a futuristic world where cyborg existence and duplication do not necessarily signal.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Stedelijk Museum Archive

Descending into the Stedelijk Museum’s subterranean gallery feels like entering a parallel atmosphere. The usual white-cube neutrality has been replaced by a charged, otherworldly terrain: sound hums at a low frequency, green light drifts and mutates, mirrors catch and scatter every movement. Sandra Mujinga’s “Skin to Skin” is less an exhibition than an environment, a realm where sculpture, light, and sound fuse into a single, disorienting organism. At the heart of this world stand fifty-five figures—life-sized, elongated, and eerily identical. Their sheer number delivers an immediate shock. Clad in dark fabrics that swallow and reflect the shifting light, they seem at once singular and collective, like a single body caught mid-transformation or a clandestine society gathered in quiet assembly. Mujinga calls this strategy “concealment through multiplication”: by repeating the form until it becomes uncountable, she destabilizes the very notion of an individual body. Are we witnessing one being across multiple temporal states, or an entirely new species preparing for its debut? The sculptures offer no answers. They simply stand, mute witnesses to a world that might be just around the corner—or already here. Light and sound are active agents in this ecosystem. Green illumination seeps across surfaces, bleaching familiar skin tones, making textiles glint with unexpected textures. Shadows ripple as if breathing. Every few minutes a dense electronic composition swells and recedes, grounding the visitor only to release them again into perceptual drift. Time dilates. Reality wavers. Mujinga’s figures evoke digital avatars: almost human, unnervingly alike, as if fragments of a single consciousness have been copied and uploaded. Through them she asks urgent questions about identity in an era of infinite replication. When a self can be duplicated, scattered across networks, or rendered as data, what remains of its original presence? If one can be seen everywhere, is one truly visible—or merely diffused into invisibility? These inquiries carry a particular resonance for Black embodiment. Mujinga foregrounds the paradox of a body that is hyper-visible to systems of surveillance yet systematically excluded from full recognition and power. Her towering silhouettes register both protection and threat, like sentinels who guard while reminding us of the forces that demand such vigilance. The sculptures hold this tension in their very posture: upright, watchful, withholding. Mirrors compound the unease. Art history and cinema have long treated the mirror as a site of revelation or punishment—a place where the subject confronts an undeniable truth. Mujinga overturns that tradition. Her mirrors fragment rather than clarify, offering not a single reflection but a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Here, the mirror becomes a refuge, a speculative surface where identity can multiply, distort, and evade capture. The cumulative effect is an atmosphere of radical uncertainty. “Skin to Skin” stretches and dissolves the category of the human, urging viewers to reconsider the very mechanics of looking. What do we assume when we believe we can fully “see” another being? What kinds of power—and vulnerability—are embedded in that act of recognition? Mujinga’s speculative vision is strikingly clear: safety is not found in exposure but in opacity; agency is not secured through singular self-definition but through collective multiplicity. Her doppelgängers are not ghosts to be feared but kin to be joined—spectral allies who resist possession precisely because they are never singular, never still. To stand among them is to sense a different model of survival, one that privileges collaboration over individuality, camouflage over spectacle. Art, in Mujinga’s hands, becomes a form of protection and a rehearsal for futurity. Her mirrored, unknowable figures offer an escape route from the trap of being endlessly defined and consumed. They propose a world where disappearance is not erasure but strategy, where unreadability is a shield, and where to be multiple is to endure. As visitors exit the gallery and re-enter daylight, they carry with them a quiet challenge: to imagine a future in which liberation might reside not in being fully seen, but in remaining gloriously uncontainable.

Photo: Installation view “Sandra Mujinga – Skin to Skin”, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2025. Photo: Peter Tijhuis

Info: Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Duration: 13/9/2025-11/1/2026, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.stedelijk.nl/