When we met over a video call recently, she was at her studio in Oslo—and I realized we were not totally alone.
“I am interested in world-building,” she said.
Currently, she has a solo presentation at the Munch museum in Oslo, and will have solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin later this year .
Courtesy the artist, Croy Nielsen, Vienna, and The Approach, London.
Sandra Mujinga’s Installation view at Munch Museum in Oslo, 2022.
“The older I get, the more I understand my mother’s decision to move—she wanted to give us this experience of not always being visibly the Other.
Moving to the more international city of Berlin, Mujinga still found the art world very white.
The desire to free herself from societal strictures flows into her work.
Installation view of “Witch Hunt,” Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2020.
Her best known pieces are her large textile sculptures, hooded shadowy figures that stand tall in the room.
In another gallery, a draped form called Sentinels of Change looks like the hull of a ship or a dinosaur carcass, basked in an eerie green light.
I have received—just by wearing a hoodie as a Black person who does not have long hair—the idea of being a fearsome Black man.
We discussed the “rush” to correct the absence or Black artists in long-exclusive spaces.
The constant talk about the art world’s hyped moment of racial awareness is unpleasant.