The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) presents Kenyan-born, Brooklyn-based artist, Wangechi Mutu’s first major survey in Australia. This exhibition presents the artist’s practice of collage and drawing, sculpture, installation and video of the last ten years. It has evolved from a series of conversations between the artist and exhibition curator Rachel Kent over a period of seven years, and represents a unique collaboration between the artist and institution.
Using a combination of media, the artist reveals key concerns that have shaped her practice over time, including contemplations on beauty, consumerism, colonialism, race and gender in contemporary western society. Mutu addresses social and political issues; “in some ways she is holding a mirror up to the world around her,”
says Kent.
The exhibition is made up of five interconnecting spatial environments where visitors are invited to walk through and experience the world of Mutu. Her galleries are enlivened spaces, filled with makeshift forms and tactile surfaces; walls are pock-marked with red pigmented gouges that resemble flesh wounds, and gallery columns swathed in protective blankets to suggest ceremonial or healing trees. Mutu creates spatial environments in which the viewer must, however momentarily, exist and reflect.
Mutu’s lavish environments are bound by objects, collages and, in some instances, by videos that feature the artist herself in a range of roles associated with women’s work. In Cutting (2004) she hacks at a fallen log with a machete against an arid, rural backdrop. The dull clink, clink, of metal on wood echo through the surrounding gallery, inviting associations that range from forced labour to ethnic cleansing. Included in the exhibition are two installations featuring banqueting tables.
In a self-contained structure, Exhuming Gluttony: Another Requiem (2006), Mutu presents the setting of a ruinous feast, in which ceiling-mounted wine bottles drip their contents, rotting and staining the solid wooden table below to encapsulate themes of feasting and greed. “It’s about the idea of gorging, excess and devouring by a select few while others get very little – especially the gluttony by a few, post the global financial crisis,” Kent says.
In My Dirty Little Heaven (2010) the central structure is instead comprised of a series of slatted tables onto which a combination of wine and milk trickle; in the mixture of these liquids we witness a contrast between vice and innocence. The use of slatted tables in this work makes references to the benches on which bodies were stacked during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Mutu ‘dirties’ the rational white cube of the exhibition space and leads the viewer into a dim, nightmarish arrangement that recalls Africa’s bloody colonial history.
Reflecting on her practice, Mutu describes her interest in “tweaking reality and ideas of what normality is”. Reinventing her materials through accumulation, manipulation, and transforming the mundane into the extraordinary, Mutu invites viewers into a strange new world through her art. This world is both familiar and alien, with its nuanced interweaving of beauty and violence. Viewers are invited to enter and re-think themselves in a veritable labyrinth of identity prompts and cultural insignia.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Until 14 August, 2013
Sydney
Harenet, 2012, hare: ceramic, felt, rabbit fur, fox tail, ribbon, adhesive, collage: synthetic hair, fox head, adhesive, gold frame, glass, felt, packing tape, wood
Drowning Nymph I, 2007, ink, paint, mixed media, plant material and plastic pearls on X-ray paper
Courtesy the artist, MCA, Sydney, and Victoria Miro Gallery, London
