Wangechi Mutu
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu has trained as both a sculptor and anthropologist. Her work explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and makes reference to colonial history, contemporary African politics and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction and funkadelia, Mutu’s works document the contemporary myth making of endangered cultural heritage.
Her drawings couple collaged parts of idealized women clipped from fashion magazines with drawn and ink-soaked passages. Subtly and painfully twisted images reference traditionally-clad African women. As a process of mutation is recognized through careful scrutiny, the images prove hard to stomach. Kenya’s past of enormous resources and privilege now faces a crisis of confidence in tackling poverty, civil strife and political instability. This dichotomy is reflected in the work of Wangechi Mutu. (Momenta Art)
In the above piece, Wangechi Mutu creates a glamorous, yet barbaric centrefold. Working in painting and collage on paper, Mutu exploits the physical qualities of her media to create a self-referential sensuality: the translucent crispness of the vellum relates easily to film, spilled paint stains diffuse as the subtle bruised texture of skin, and cut out blond hair and gams lend an appropriated lusty ideal. In picturing female sexuality, Mutu offers a futuristic totality of womanhood that’s both fiery and liberated. Comprised of motorcycle parts, she’s a machine built for speed: corpulent, sexy, with the dazzling power creation. (Saatchi Gallery)
Wangechi Mutu’s collage process mimics amputation, transplant operations and torturous prosthetics. Her figures become parody mutilations, their forms grotesquely marred through perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or self-inflicted improvements of plastic surgery. In Ectopic Pregnancy, Mutu converts an image of reproductive malfunction into a stillborn expression; the mouth/vagina bloodied and empty, her scarred figure struggling to voice her identity. Mutu designs this portrait with sex-organs as face, dressed up with glistening hair and lip-gloss: a freakish pastiche of feminine ideals. (Saatchi Gallery)
Wangechi Mutu harnesses the fear of the unfamiliar as a tool of power. Formed from cut and paste, Mutu’s creations are hybrids of multiple sources referencing the scars of cultural imposition. Placed atop medical diagrams, they feed off their cancerous classifications, directly confronting cultural preconception and bias. Set around image of an invasive gynaecological procedure, the woman in Primary Syphilitic Ulcers of the Cervix (below) garners her strength from the source of her molestation. Disaffected and immune, Mutu’s distressing figure is comprised of the horrific myths of our own making. (Saatchi Gallery)