The real African renaissance
Wangechi Mutu is at the forefront of the continent’s art revolution.
A CHIMERICAL creature with the head of singersongwriter Santigold, her hair a mass of Medusa like serpentine locks, glares ominously at a flock of dark birds in a smog-filled industrial noman’s land. Throwing her head back, the creature — limbs straggling from a planet-like body that is dotted with bulbous cells — descends on the birds, devouring them.
The animation video made in 2013 is called The End of Eating Everything and its themes of gender identity, how the black female body is represented, commercial consumption and ecological threats recur often in the work of its creator, Wangechi Mutu. The piece is one of two that the Kenya-born, New York-based Mutu will present at this year’s FNB Joburg Art Fair as the featured artist in a programme with a special focus on the dynamic and increasingly visible art scene of East Africa.
While Mutu has previously exhibited in South Africa as part of King’s County, a group show at Stevenson Cape Town in 2014, it’s perhaps fitting that she arrives in Johannesburg as the star of what is becoming one of the continent’s premier art events at a time when many of the themes in her work are in the foreground of cultural and political examination around the globe.
As she told an interviewer for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Mutu has committed her life and practice to “talking about myself and women who look like me and women who live and manoeuvre in the world in a body, a skin colour, an accent, a hair texture like myself, because their story is not told to the masses as maybe others are”.
She has often been linked to the increasingly popular Afro Futurist movement, which uses techniques and imagery from science fiction to imagine different futures for the black experience through the eyes of diaspora communities. Nairobibased artists the Nest Collective (also exhibiting at this year’s fair) describe it as a way to “explore our troubling modern identities and remix our futures” which dissects and subverts “the layers of how Africans are seen and unseen, what Africans can and cannot do, where Africans can and cannot go, and what Africans can and cannot say”.
Born to middle-class parents in Nairobi in 1972, Mutu left Kenya in her teens to study art first in Wales and then in New York, where she has made the majority of her work over the last 15 years.
Initially it was her collages that caught the attention of the art world. Fashioned out of pictures cut from magazines bought from the news stands of her adopted city, the collages provided Mutu with an opportunity to give new life to the representation of women who looked like her but whose images were sorely missing from mainstream media.
Her figures in these increasingly painterly collages were notable for their careful assemblage and otherworldly appearance — combining elements of African folklore and myth with commentary on Western attitudes to women and the continent. Influenced both by her heritage and her reality as an African artist working in the centre of the contemporary art world, Mutu’s work is, like the evershifting identities of those in the diaspora, a continuous exchange between where she comes from, where she finds herself and where she feels the world is moving towards.
She told Canadian magazine Mother Jones, she thinks “about hierarchies . . . about evolution . . . about how we stack up, how we sit on top of each other . . . how we pray that we know what we’re up to”. In these ever more perplexing and uncertain times, those are all things that we would do well to reflect on.
As the boundaries between borders, genders and national identities increasingly shift and become the subjects of heated global debate, Mutu’s work — which now includes sculpture, installation and video and raises questions about so many of these problematic pigeonholes — has become much commented on and sought after.
Her visit to Johannesburg also coincides with a change in her own life. She has recently returned to Kenya where she has established a studio and now spends time between there and Brooklyn.
While she is the founder of an organisation called Africa’s Out, which supports oppressed LGBTQ communities on the continent, Mutu is not a didactic issue driven artist, preferring to harness her “nervous human existential energies” towards making work that “speaks for the culture that I live in” and that is relatable to audiences from all levels of social experience irrespective of their artistic education.
Her talent may have been developed in the art schools of the West but her work, which critic Chiwoniso Kataino described as “a rich, unctuous and sustaining broth”, is meant to feed the hearts and minds of as many people as she can serve it to. Like the powerful, grotesque but intriguing beast in her video, Mutu is devouring preconceptions of the art world and misconceptions about Africa.
She may not “know what Africa is exactly”, as she told Mother Jones, but she knows “that it’s not some of these simplified sound bites that you hear in America”.
Together with other artists from the region, including Ethiopia’s Aida Muluneh, Kenyan Jim Chuchu and Ugandan Sanaa Gateja, Mutu is coming to Johannesburg this week to provide a much-needed wake-up call to both the local and international art scene. She’s the figurative warrior leader of a creative army that demonstrates that Africa is rising fast.
It’s an army that carries with it the hope that, as Mutu said in an interview for an episode of Bloomberg’s Brilliant Ideas show in 2013, “These magnificent spells that we are capable of creating through art are what will ultimately turn the dial.”
The FNB Joburg Art Fair takes place at the Sandton Convention Centre from September 9-11. www.fnbjoburgartfair.co.za
‘These spells we are creating through art are what will ultimately turn the dial’