Sandra Mujinga: SONW- Shadow of New Worlds

Sandra Mujinga’s exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall will be the artist’s largest to date, and presents a new large-scale video installation in combination with a selection of works from recent years.

Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989) is an artist and musician who lives and works in Oslo and Berlin. Her most recent exhibitions include “{{B:Seasonal Pulses}}” at Croy Nielsen, Wien (2019), “{{I:Hoarse Globules}}” at UKS, Oslo (2018) and “{{I:Calluses}}” at Tranen, Copenhagen (2018). By way of a number of different media such as video, music, performance and sculpture, Mujinga’s works revolve around the manifestations and presence of the body in the world. Screens, clothing and skin are all treated as interfaces with the world, and are the objects of constant negotiation and an ongoing dynamic of power.

The exhibition “SONW – Shadow of New Worlds” gathers and develops a number of themes Mujinga has worked on over the past few years, where she explores among other things the relationship between visibility and invisibility as survival strategies – relating both to science fiction and the political reality of our time. With inspiration from women writers from the African diaspora (for example Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler), as well as post-humanist thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, Mujinga works with the idea of existence as a kind of shadow play. With a background in a world that was not made for certain bodies, and which is threatened with destruction, the survival strategies cannot build on the maintenance of an existing order, but must reach out towards something else. With a starting point in the science fiction genre’s idea of “world-building”, Mujinga outlines alternative worlds where the interplay between visibility and invisibility, the transparent and the opaque, reflection and camouflage, renders new modes of existence possible.

Curators: Maria Rusinovskaya and Steinar Sekkingstad

www.kunsthall.no