Brilliant Ideas Episode #21: Wangechi Mutu

Most distinctive pieces by Wangechi Mutu would be collages of women, created by overlapping vivid colors and various images. The earlier works are based on the artist’s experience as a female student in Nairobi, and violation that had been prevalent in the context of the colonial culture in Africa. The collage method that represents her artworks started from that time, inspired by Dadaism and pop artists.
Mutu usually cuts out images from fashion, medical, or adult magazines, combines them into a collage, and applies ink or watercolors on the collage. Organic shapes of a female body and distorted faces seen from her works have a unique color and atmosphere that cannot be created by digital works, attracting viewers’ eyes. Completed through this process, the artworks of the artist demonstrate wrong views on women, while also criticizing esthetics, ethnicity, and eroticism presented in contemporary publications. Having lived in various cultural areas, Mutu has seen that Western countries such as the U.K. or U.S. as well as Africa regard women as a mere object of sexual desire. She was displeased about violence employed on women just because women are physically weak, and started to create works about this.

Growing up in Kenya, Wangechi Mutu had firsthand experienced the colonial era and the remains thereof in Africa. Even after being educated in Wales, U.K., and moving to New York to become an artist, Africa, the root of the artist, has always been inside her heart. For that reason, most of her works studies situations of today and in the past colonial era of Africa, and, in particular, perception on African women in the present and past societies. Through the views of the world on women felt by the artist, she proposes a new way of looking at wider range of subjects, such as poverty or change of perceptions and the consumer culture.

<Suspended Playtime>(2008) is another Afrofuturism work of the artist. The work is an installation which features multiple head-sized balls made by wrapping animal pelts with garbage bags: Dozens of balls hung from the ceiling by gold-colored strings remind the viewers of soccer balls that children in the suburbs of Africa play with. Mutu made this artwork to concentrate on many problems such as material deficiency, conflicts, and diseases in Africa existing behind a scene of children playing. Giving a repulsing feeling even at a glance, the work seriously discusses about the weight of social problems, showing the character of the artist’s works, in which many stories and meanings are included.
At an interview, Mutu said that she uses esthetics of resistance, poverty, and repulsion to express hope, or concepts further than hope. Her works are glamorous; they are also a little uncomfortable to look at for a while. Even so, people cannot take their eyes from Mutu’s works; it would be because the images she creates have a meaning further than what is being seen. ■with ARTINPOST

Born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1972, Wangechi Mutu is an artist who handles a wide range of subjects such as culture, colonial histories and the political situation in Africa. Especially, she expresses interest in issues regarding women. Mutu builds her unique style expressing such series of subjects by putting acrylic, watercolor, and ink drawings over a collage of images from different magazine. This is her interpretation of the inspiration she had from a Victorian medical diagram, which is the prototype of anthropology affected by bias against women, containing sexual repression. The works demonstrate her views on the form of women and in a way mentions the women of African descent represented in the media and violence generally committed against women. Mutu is now creating artworks in New York, emerging as one of notable artists after her exhibitions at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.