Magic

A native of Kenya, Wangechi Mutu describes her cultural heritage by blending Western sources that range from high fashion and pornography with the past and present history of violence on the African continent. The massive relocations of populations on the African continent, its multilingualism (Kenya alone has 61 living languages), and the influence of the increasing globalization of commerce and culture seem mir rored in Mutu's complex, multilayered imagery. (In addition to English, Mutu grew up speaking Swahili and Gikuyu.) Her intricate, collaged drawings of women, for instance, made on translucent Mylar inscribe postmodern global horrors onto African identity. Yet, despite their often maimed appearance, Mutu's hybrid female figures are symbols of empowerment and aggression. Embellished with cut-outs from magazines, glitter, hair, and fur, Mutu's fig- ures are often disturbingly twisted and "amputated," recalling both the system- atic and widespread dismembering of the limbs of civilians by African rebels in Sierra Leone, as well as the erotic, contorted nude bodies in the paintings by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele. Mutu's ink drawings mimic the transparent quality of Schiele's painterly surfaces without adhering to his characteristic economy of line and color. Less absorbent than paper, Mylar causes the ink to pool on the surface, which lends Mutu's drawings their distinctive translucency. On another level, Mutu's tortured and shape-shifting images of human bod- les bring to mind the sequence of psychotic events described by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that occurs during the infantile transformation from the child's insufficiency (its lack of resources) to anticipation of itself as adult. These stages take place between the ages of six and eighteen months when the infant recognizes itself for the first time in the mirror and its psyche extends from a point of corporal dislocation (the "fragmented body-image") to an "orthopedic" totality, and ultimately, to the "armoring of the self." Aside from drawing on Mylar, Mutu also works directly on gallery walls, often violating them by inflicting "wounds" that recall the bullet-ridden walls of the Middle East or Sarajevo. These "wall drawings" are frequently combined with "bleeding" bottles that are filled with red wine or ink and suspended upside down from the ceiling. Their liquid content slowly drips onto the floor, creating pools of red fluid that mirror the ink accumulations on the Mylar. The wine bottles also invoke religious references that may have their origins in Mutu's Catholic upbringing. On the occasion of a recent installation at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Mutu talked about putting herself in the role of the violator in order to create "a cycle of responsibility": "The institution or gallerythat I place these wounds on has to come back to heal them. It is about creating a cycle of responsibility and it is part of the piece." Mutu's installations are about assuming responsibility, the necessity of cleaning up after violence and aggression, and, ultimately, about healing wounds. Rather than historicizing Africa and blackness as a race, Mutu envisions the existence of African elements in a future culture. Thus, her works are both traditional and utopian, pointing towards what the African-American scholar Paul Gilroy defined as a new "planetary humanism"-one that turns away from African archaism, racial hierarchy, and colonial myths toward a future that reconnects to "democratic and cosmopolitan traditions that have been expunged from today's black political imaginary." Mutu's existential explorations combine aesthetic innovation with a powerful vision for hope and redemption.
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.