Sandra Mujinga, the artist who 'builds her skin with rocks'

Her works irritate people, and that is just what they are meant to do. That much was evident at this year's Biennale art show in Venice.

Sandra Mujinga's primordial-looking sculptures blended into the weather-textured walls of the exhibition space in Venice, the Arsenale historic shipyard. The Congolese-Norwegian artist had the rooms and her sculptures illuminated in neon green, giving visitors the impression that the she might be looking into a future caught up in decay. 

Mujinga won the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2021, an accolade that comprises an exhibition and an accompanying catalog. Her solo show now opens on December 9 at Hamburger Bahnhof, a museum for contemporary art in Berlin.

Between Oslo and Berlin

"I am very honest with myself, and through this honesty I can touch people," Mujinga told DW. She says that she is used to different audiences, that it's even what she needs. She has performed a lot as a DJ and enjoys the direct contact in the clubs, the dancing.

Born in 1989 in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mujinga grew up in Norway. She has well observed the idiosyncrasies of the white majority society; her work also deals with aspects of racism and colonialism.

"Of course, you grow up with the experience of being made a stranger, and that's really bad," she says, adding that the older she gets, the more she sees being a stranger as a kind of gift. "Do you really want to belong in a world that is bad?"

Art and science-fiction

"World-building," that is creating imaginary worlds like in the science-fiction and fantasy genre, plays a large role in Mujinga's work.

"We are so focused on the human experience. But science-fiction gives us the opportunity to imagine other worlds," Mujinga says. "I like to rethink existing structures, to think differently about how we live together as humans, how we live on this planet, even coexist with non-human creatures."

Her creatures function as a kind of portal into these worlds. For example, in the large hall at Hamburger Bahnhof, a large black floor-to-ceiling box-like object is covered with projections that envelop it like skin. In the projections, Mujinga works with textures of leather and artificial leather, relates them to human skin — dark skin.

Skin color 'is coded' 

She uses the dark to emphasize the space open to action: "Skin color is very political, it's coded and used as a weapon," she says.

The exhibition is called "I Built My Skin with Rocks," a reference to a quote from French poet, writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant, a Martinique-born pioneer of postcolonial identity and cultural theory. In 1969, he wrote "Je bâtis a roches mon langage" (I build my language out of rocks).

For the multimedia sculpture, she kept in mind an elephant, with its thick, robust skin, Mujinga says. She had been thinking about the death of the species, and how much of a responsibility it is to be the last of its kind, the last elephant.

Her sculptures increasingly combine the human and the animal — shapeshifting is another key element in Mujinga's work, perhaps also because she experiences the world as volatile, multilayered and vulnerable.

Whether visitors look at her objects up close or from a distance plays a big role. And Mujinga plays with that, too. "Because of its scale, the body becomes invisible when you zoom really closely. In a way, the closer we get, the harder it is to see the big picture," she says. It's also about questions that cropped up in her 2021 work "World View": "What is real?" and "Who is watching whom?"

'A reminder of our vulnerability'

"All of us have developed survival mechanisms, coping strategies," Mujinga argues. "Having a thick skin is one thing, but skin is just as much a reminder of our vulnerability. What scares me is the numbness, the rigidity."

With her art, she hopes to open a space to activate something. The irritating aspect of Mujunga's work remains powerful: Her new work, with its mysterious complexity, either gets under the skin or bounces off it.

This article was originally written in German.