Wangechi Mutu at the Venice Biennale
Posted: 03/03/2016 Filed under: Blog, Contextualisation 1 CommentAt last year’s Venice Biennale, All The Worlds Futures, an artist whose work particularly resonated with me, was Kenyan born, Wangechi Mutu, who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She was given her own room within the Giardini to exhibit her work, which in itself is an indication of her current popularity and importance as a contemporary artist. Mutu’s room revealed an apocalyptic vision of the end of materialism, which manifested as three individual art works (in their own right) that fused into one installation. The sculpture: She’s Got the Whole World in Her, is of a woman transitioning from one world to another. The old world is represented as a cage and the new world is shown as free and unconfined. She leaves a world of materialism, depicted by the many symbolic objects placed inside and around the cage. The film: The End of Carrying it All, was an animation of how Mutu sees the world ending, which she had depicted as a black woman walking the earth on her journey through life. Mutu’s woman accumulates unnecessary possessions along the way that only weigh her down, burdening her every step, revealing to us a world consumed by desires and endless materialism. The third piece, Forbidden Fruit Picker (a collage painting), portrayed Eve picking the forbidden fruit, representing humankind’s insatiable appetite for wanting everything, be it good or evil. Mutu’s use of mixed-media does not limit her to just one way of creating, or indeed exhibiting, but celebrates the concept of different worlds existing contemporaneously. The use of different media symbolises the diversity of different cultures – societies and people that unify together as one world.
Mutu’s work is compellingly symbolic and directly addresses issues of, race, gender, identity, globalisation and capitalism. In a recent interview with Louisiana Channel she states: For me, part of the process is a way of destructing certain hierarches that I don’t believe in. the process of combining the manmade, the magazine, with something that is crafted is important because it is unclear where one thing ends and where another starts, where does fiction or fantasy blend with reality? For me every bit of culture can be used to investigate any other bit of culture. Although my work addresses my influences of African women, the ingredients that come to me for my work come from places that pay no attention to those women, so it’s a kind of ironic thing that I’m producing that image from the very lack of it. The hierarches that Mutu talks about here represent capitalism and she reveals that capitalism does not pay any attention to black women. At The 56th Venice Biennale, Mutu directly protested issues of power, race and equality. Issues that were executed in the very same institution that endorses a hieratical system constructed and controlled by capitalism.
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[…] – The Chapman Brothers, Fiona Hall, Wangechi Mutu and The Venice Biennale. Although there have been significant artists in the past year that have […]