About a decade ago, when Sandra Mujinga visited Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she relished her time people watching, as travelers are wont to do. But Mujinga was not exactly a foreigner—she was born in Goma, another Congolese city, and had returned to the country multiple times since leaving it as a child—and so her version of people watching entailed observing not just how locals acted but how they dressed.
“I felt like there was this innate, underlying agreement that we all have to create beauty when we are in the streets through what we wear and the colors we wear,” Mujinga, who is now based in Berlin and Oslo, told me on a recent trip to New York this past November. “It’s almost like, I’m going to be this beautiful flower. Even if it’s the same shirt I wore yesterday, it’s still like the best shirt that I have.”
She then drew my attention to what she wore to our interview at the Park Avenue Armory, where she was getting ready to unveil a new performance. She mentioned that her dress was much less colorful than the clothes she had recently seen in Kochi, where she had visited ahead of participating in the city’s closely watched biennial. “Look at me now,” she said, smiling and gesturing toward her gray cotton dress. “I’m also from Scandinavia.”
For Mujinga, one’s wardrobe is more than just something to be donned—it’s also a signifier of identity, a way of explaining who we are to the rest of the world. “I think of fashion as something like data or storytelling,” she said. That line of thinking has informed has she has clothed her sculptures, which often resemble monumentally scaled beings sheathed in cotton and fabric. Those sculptures, like the rest of her art, contend with the parts of ourselves that we want to present to—and hide from—the rest of the world.
“I’ve always been drawn to this idea that you can communicate, without saying a single word, through what you’re wearing—and communicate where you want to belong, where you have been,” Mujinga said. “There’s also something futuristic about it, too. In that sense, it can say something about our times too, whether to be more nostalgic, to want to go back, or to speculate on the future.”
For her performance Sunless Mouths at the Park Avenue Armory, Sandra Mujinga conjured a group of siblings who were “not really humans.”
Photo Christopher Garcia-Valle/ARTnews
This time-traveling, shape-shifting quality has also characterized Mujinga’s sculptures, videos, photographs, and performances, which have figured in a multitude of biennials and international museum shows over the past five years. Often, the works have a sci-fi flavor, with tall figures from other worlds bathed in an acrid shade of green, evoking both alternate realms and our digital present.
Such is the case with Skin to Skin (2025), a vast installation by Mujinga that is finishing its run this week at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam before traveling to the Belvedere museum in Vienna later in the month. The 55 lithe figures in the work, each with tentacular arms, resemble an army of wraith-like beings. Differently sized groupings are assembled around seven mirrored columns that invite viewers to gaze at these towering figures, all of which rise nine and a halffeet into the air. But Mujinga’s beings refuse to make themselves fully visible, as they are covered in textiles of the artist’s own making.
Melanie Bühler, a Stedelijk curator who worked with Mujinga on the installation, described the piece as “a green universe with a light structure that changes over time” and praised Mujinga for the fluidity of her work. “She really is a renaissance woman,” Bühler said. “She can do so many things. She works in this sculptural way that extends to crafting and building a world that she also achieves by bringing in sound and light.”
Sandra Mujinga, Skin to Skin, 2025.
Photo Peter Tijhuis
When experiencing installations similar to Skin to Skin, visitors tend to mention that they had to let their eyes adjust to the light to see the art on view. The harsh green of gallery given over to her sculpture Sentinels of Change (2021) in the 2022 Venice Biennale left me with whitish afterimages that lingered long after leaving it. Did she want her work to alter viewers’ vision? “Oh, yes,” Mujinga said, noting that the intense green of her art did not always make everything so easy to take in. “I definitely think of the green as a cloak.”
Other pieces by Mujinga involve figures moving in and out of sight. Pervasive Light (2021), a 16-minute video installation that debuted at that year’s New Museum Triennial, features the musician Mariama Ndure inside a black void that she appears to emerge from and recede into. Set to a thrumming score the artist likened to a heartbeat, the video can often feel as though it is looping because of Ndure’s rhythmic movements, even though it isn’t. While it often appears as though the video was shot in darkness, it was in fact made by having Ndure wear green fabrics that were heavily altered in post-production through digital effects. While producing the piece, Mujinga thought about how difficult it is for cameras to photograph Black skin. “I will use it to my benefit, that I’m not visible, that it is hard to capture my skin,” Mujinga recalled thinking at the time.
Sandra Mujinga, Pervasive Light, 2021.
Courtesy the artist and Croy Nielsen
“Sandra is particularly keyed into the understanding that technology, and particularly surveillance, is the next frontier that we’re facing, in terms of the danger of sight and the kind of domination that stems from it,” said Ashley James, a Guggenheim Museum curator who included Pervasive Light in her 2023 exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” at the museum. “And then Sandra is also playing with her own technological tools of opacity to then counteract that. She also speaks about hypervisibility, which stands in contrast to the invisible ways that Black people—Black women and everyone, really—are seen and known. What does it mean to ride the edge?”
It’s a question that has haunted Mujinga ever since she was a kid in the DRC. Growing up, she was consistently aware of her race. She would watch Disney movies and “discover that the villain is always darker,” she said, leading her to wonder what that meant. “And being dark-skinned myself, I grew up with my mom saying, ‘Never bleach your skin.’ I would later understand that this is very political.”
Her upbringing was peripatetic, with her family moving to Oslo while she was still young and then to Nairobi when she was a teenager. Her transnational existence was formative, leading her to realize how much a place can shape a person. “The way I was taught about colonialism in Nairobi versus the way I was taught about colonialism in Oslo was completely different,” she said. “One becomes aware of so much erasure that is happening, even in real time.”
With the hope of fighting that erasure, she turned to the internet in the early 2010s, to “archive myself,” as she put it. She was in art school, in Vienna and the Swedish city of Malmö, at the time and became fascinated by the then nascent post-internet art, work that enlisted the sleek aesthetics of Web 2.0 and muddied it, often by porting the look of stock photography and browser windows offline. Though she immersed herself in works such as the Jogging, a popular Tumblr created by a group of artists that was known for its absurdist posting, Mujinga said she was more drawn to the work of Zach Blas, who used the tools of digital surveillance against themselves, rendering queer people unseeable by the machines that sought to pick up their image. Blas’s writings and art led Mujinga to ask herself: “What if not being visible, not being captured on camera, is also a benefit?”
Works by Sandra Mujinga at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Photo Giuseppe Cottini/Getty Images
Working under the sign of sci-fi writers such as Octavia Butler, Mujinga has since aspired to “decenter the human,” as she put it. She spoke of an interest in deep sea creatures, which exist primarily in darkness, and said her research into them inspired Sunless Mouths, her Park Avenue Armory piece, a performance that was about a group of siblings with godlike powers. Clad in black garments similar to the loose-fitting ones seen in Mujinga’s sculptures, her performers moved slowly and methodically amid panels of frosted Plexiglas, unraveling a vague narrative about an overbearing, sun-like mother and the children who escape her grasp by producing snowstorms.
“They’re not really humans,” Mujinga said. “I was thinking a lot about: how one can be in the same space, in the same room, the same house, and then have different experiences? You remember different things.”
Mujinga did not specify whether Sunless Mouths was rooted in her own upbringing, but she was raised alongside two other siblings, and it would not have been the first time her own life had influenced her art: Flo (2019), a gigantic projection of a mysterious figure with a purple glow that has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, was named after her late mother. It would seem as though she were remaking her personal history—and even herself—through her art. Her remarks on Sunless Mouths recalled an earlier comment she made about her life spent in multiple cities spanning two continents and thousands of miles.
Doing so led her to “see that it’s always possible to start from scratch,” she said. “You can always move somewhere and start again.”
