Adrienne Edwards

Binyavanga Wainaina

Wangechi Mutu

Nguva Na Nyoka

Wangechi Mutu is fond of using the body as vocabulary for expressing human experience, personal narratives and as a way of exploring ideas of cultural identity. Mutu turns "the figure" into a malleable field on which realities are collapsed, disputes are fought, psychology is physically apparent, disappeared tribes are found and a love of sensual surfaces is rekindled. For Wangechi, collage is the ultimate form through which to emphasize the visceral capacities of imagery, using and misusing found pictures, Mutu so enjoys the act of discovering, touching, dissecting and reconfiguring narratives. Her works underhandedly pick at myths about physical appearance emphasizing the love of material, trends towards excessive wastefulness, revealing that rage born from the desire to unevenly scramble and distribute natural resources.

A Shady Promise

Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal

Josée Bélisle

Since her appearance in the late 1990s, Wangechi Mutu's collage-drawings depicting black women, tampered with and prey to strange bodily mutations, have generated much debate and interest on the international art scene. The broad range of raw materials she uses - magazines on fashion and current events, geography and ethnography, motorcycles and pornography - allows her to tackle the stereotypes of media representation, particularly of women, head on. While presenting an overview of new and recent work, this publication is centered on the installation Moth Girls, 2010, recently acquired by the Musée. In the recurrence of a half-human, half-animal, female figure, the product of an extreme hybridization, the work reintroduces the notion of taxonomy, along with the volatile notion of classification and hierarchization of species and, by extension, peoples and races.

Wangechi Mutu

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