Sandra Mujinga makes a bold statement with a single artwork exhibition in Berlin

Visual artist Sandra Mujinga's solo exhibition, IBMSWR: I Build My Skin With Rocks consists of only one work. It should be considered a bold move for any artist, to occupy the massive historic hall of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, a former train station, with only a single piece. But it is an especially daring decision for an artist who is labelled ‘young,’ a designation reinforced by the fact that her solo show is part of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, awarded biennially to Berlin-based artists considered to be in the early stages of their careers, albeit on a steady trajectory of global recognition. As the recipient of the 2021 prize, Mujinga joins an impressive cohort of former awardees that includes Anne Imhof, Cyprien Gaillard, Monica Bonvicini, and Elmgreen and Dragset, among others. She unveiled her single-work exhibition in December 2022. But to describe IBMSWR as simply a work, as in 'an object,' would be gravely misleading. It is rather a presence, a spectre that permeates the space and fills the largely empty white hall with allusions, invocations, and the sort of immaterial articulations that cohere the realm of visual art with language, psychology, and somatic effect.

Visitors encounter a monumentally sized screen, installed in the far end of the art museum’s elongated main hall. The screen itself forms the front face of a mammoth rectangular sculpture, painted all black, which viewers can walk around. A deep, bass-heavy droning sound, composed by the artist herself (who is also an electronic musician and DJ), reverberates throughout the space. It’s an ongoing loop of suspenseful cues, as if announcing the imminent arrival of something substantial, potentially menacing, even. It holds viewers in expectant tension, which, for me, didn’t dissipate throughout my entire visit. On the screen, a fleeting image appears, only to retreat back into the screen’s blackness. It is a glistening scab, or maybe a mud-caked body, or perhaps a CGI landscape of hardening magma. Suddenly, it appears again, only momentarily, revealing an eye. Seconds later, there’s movement again, this time a foot becoming discernible. Little by little, a realisation dawns on the viewer that a living being, an unimaginable creature, is being shown on the screen in fragments. But it will never be contained within the frame; it won’t be presented to us in its entirety. It will always elude being consumed by our gaze. "I don't necessarily treat spaces as exhibition spaces, but am more interested in creating a narrative through this speculative lens," Mujinga, tells me over a video call from Norway, where she prepares for a slew of upcoming exhibitions, taking place across Europe this spring, before heading to New York to join a residency programme and participate in a group show at the MoMA. “With this work particularly, I was very much interested in the idea of something just appearing in the world, like a spaceship.” 

"Even the way it's placed—it's not in the middle of the space, which would be the typical way of thinking of sculpture,” she adds. “It's placed a bit further behind. I was thinking of the distance from the audience walking towards it. It’s as if it were on guard, life-like, like an elephant that is almost retreating in a way, to protect itself.” Indeed, the artist describes the imperceptible, abstracted figure on the screen as an elephant, the last of its kind, a majestically proportioned survivor of devastation and cruelty inflicted by humans.

Elephantine figures recur in the artist’s body of work. The Norwegian artist, born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, participated in the 59^th Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani in 2022, with a sculptural ensemble made of leather and other textiles, featuring a herd of towering figures standing tall on two legs shaped like an elephant's. It is an animal rich with symbolic and idiomatic meanings, not the least standing for the taming and devastation of nature that goes hand-in-hand with conquest and colonisation.

"For me, the elephant hosts all these elements that I want to study," says Mujinga, counting tough skin, perseverance and survival as qualities associated with the largest existing land animal. "But also the size. Thinking about a body that you can't really measure. And that was really the project, because, as I often do in my works, here too I was thinking of ways to evade being captured or evade surveillance. I once read about a parade of elephants in Kenya that were slowly becoming nocturnal to escape poachers. I am thinking of the work as a body without borders that turns into a landscape.”

The creature, although it sometimes appears in the video as if it were computer animated, was actually meticulously designed and created by Mujinga, who constructed the costume and makeup that the performer wore to embody the giant. She often works with textiles, mostly leather, which she shapes and moulds as if it were clay. There's an undeniable craftsmanship that goes into her sculptural pieces, and she describes sitting in the studio with materials as an act of ‘listening’—a lengthy process, that concludes only when the materials ‘speak’ to her, and tell her what they can be morphed into. Indeed, Mujinga’s practice straddles the material and the digital—video, music—in skilful ways, not highlighting one aspect of her practice over the other. In that sense, IBMSWR: I Build My Skin With Rocks is an exquisite amalgamation of all the mediums that she employs. It’s thrilling to see what’s in store for this fascinating, strong voice.

Sandra Mujinga’s IBMSWR: I Build My Skin With Rocks is on display till May 1, 2023 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.