The dugong is East Africa’s version of a manatee: a gentle, herbivorous, sea-dwelling mammal. Thanks to hunting and environmental damage, it’s slowly going extinct. “They’re extremely friendly,” explains Wangechi Mutu. “A little bit stupid but very kind. Now there are so few that you rarely see them.” A different type of aquatic chimera populates the walls of Mutu’s home studio in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on the July afternoon of my visit: all works in progress that will make their debut at Victoria Miro in London on October 14. Sinewy, and, in instances, genuinely frightening, these beings are distinctly female. They have facial features pulled disarmingly from fashion magazine cutouts; snakes wrap around their limbs; the reproductive system of one feathery-tailed mermaidesque creature is visible amid the fuchsia-and orchid-colored swirls that make up her body.While Mutu’s fictional creatures have little in common, visually, with the slightly dazed, bovine sea cow, female dugongs are an important part of this story. They’re related to the figures that give the exhibition its title — “Nguva na Nyoka,” or “Sirens and Serpents.” Nguva are the queens of the sea, so to speak, and the dugong, with its forked tail, is the real-life inspiration for these sirens’ mythology, passed through oral culture. “She’s seen as a possible version of a woman: She turns into a dugong because she couldn’t be caught in her real form. It’s layered — it’s amazing,” says Mutu. “But there’s an element of the belief system dying off with the stories, and it’s uncanny to me that there’s a relationship between these stories, the animal, and the waning power of those East African belief systems. They’re still strong, but not as strong as they were when I was back home 10 years ago or before.”Mutu was born in Nairobi, moving to Wales for school at age 17, and later to New York. She has lived and worked in the same brownstone, on a quiet block lined with trees and small plots of flowers, for eight years; her light-filled first-floor studio, around which are piles of collage-ready source material, is decorated with eclectic ephemera including a pair of hot-pink-heeled camo mules, an array of succulents, and an extensive selection of patterned and colored duct tape. She speaks only positively of the neighborhood, emphasizing its relative distance from the Manhattan art world, and its vibrant immigrant population — not to mention its proximity to the Brooklyn Museum, where a major survey of her work was on view last winter. The exhibition gathered videos, drawings, and sculptures from as early as the mid 1990s, as well as the collages on Mylar for which she may be most famous: images of women with Afrofuturist leanings, sometimes violent, as in 2004’s One Hundred Lavish Months of Bushwhack, in which blood spills from the leg and head of a woman swathed in gray vines, who is pushed up by her one high-heeled foot by a smaller, nude female with glowing patterned skin. Borrowing from fashion magazines, and creating texture with ink that pools on the nonabsorbent Mylar background, these works are imbued with the struggles of colonialism and race and gender politics, but they also empower.The artist has long taken an interest in the sea and its inhabitants in her work. While the figurative visuals she employs are largely products of her imagination drawn from Kenyan oral tradition, there are very real implications to these pieces. Early ocean-themed works, particularly one for an exhibition in Miami in which she performed a sea baptism, became a way to think about the African diaspora — “a way to connect myself with people who had disappeared in the ocean as they tried to come here or who through forced movements, slavery, were lost in the ocean,” she explains. With regard to the Kenyan mythology from which her current work draws inspiration, she emphasizes that even as their prevalence begins to wane, “these stories are still alive and present as a belief system. There’s a warning nature to them. There’s a sense that they set parameters for human behavior, that these women are at the threshold.”Just as imagery of nguva, the sirens or sea women, produces a physical manifestation in East African culture, one could argue that American imagery of women found in Hollywood, advertising, and so on, does the same, if to a more sinister end. In addition to a selection of children’s drawings and a book containing vivid photographs of deep-sea plants, Mutu’s studio contains stacks of magazines — a variety of titles, but with a particularly extensive archive of recent issues of Vogue and W. Initially something she pursued as a way to upend what she refers to as “the beauty standard,” the artist’s relationship to such imagery is both critical and curiously respectful. “The fashion magazines stuck with me as a blueprint for composition,” she says. “A lot of poses used in these photos are so uncomfortable, which is why they’re so interesting. And I was also using these images as a way to work it out for myself: Why are other women and myself so taken with these things? They’re also something I looked at as a young girl in Kenya. It’s not quarantined in one culture.” Whereas the nguva are “always evil, powerful seductresses who have this transformational quality,” the Western images of fashion models she alters are far more static.With her hand, Mutu recast these figures to produce something with the power to generate. Now, moving between these and other cultural imaginings of women, she produces a female character who is ultimately highly personal: “My whole thing is to start with my own interests,” she explains. “It’s the only thing I can know and stand behind.” Female power, albeit a take on it that is at times dark or even fearsome, is a central theme throughout her work. Pieces in progress for the London show mix beguiling elements like fake pearls and deep, swirling colors with female inhabitants who possess strange animal features; a sculpture of one such creature, placed at viewers’ eye level, is a serpentine beast rendered in an inviting plush fabric. “The nature of these pieces is to make something that I find alluring, but at the same time, it’s way more like our myths at home: posing a lot of questions, rather than a resolution,” Mutu says.However, a recent shift in material led to some definition in her characters’ narrative. While she once painted on Mylar, she recently switched to vinyl, a material whose heft allows her to layer materials without concern for the base buckling beneath their weight. Mutu, who describes herself as an “untraditional” painter, found herself considering the setting for the figures she constructed, situating them in a specific place. “Originally, these women had been floating, as if floating in the imagination,” she explains. “There was no real sense of the geography. I’ve been forced to locate them.” She crafts the backgrounds by layering vinyl and collaging in other media — like hairnets or actual hair — floating lively metallic islands above the dusty teal waters in which her nguvas swim. By depicting these characters in relationship to terrestrial and even urban space—in Nguva, the video that accompanies the exhibition, one of the sirens walks out of the ocean to explore the land—she ties them geographically to our present, entering a sort of interstitial space between imagination and reality.This sense of location may be the locus of the political power of these works. Mutu describes an increased concern with environmental violence, with the ocean providing a vehicle through which to confront her own fear of impending catastrophe. “There’s a sense of self-destructive behavior we are completely embodying, this communal suicidal thing: like, we’re going to fuck up this world if it’s the last thing we do,” she says. “The ocean is invisible to most people, but it’s alive. It’s our birth pool, our mother pool. I’m interested in putting a certain dignity and focus on the sea.” Her previous work focused on a collective fear of female power, and here she builds on this by exploring not just ignorance but fear of the ocean’s depths—a feminine space, by her description. Whereas an artist like Allan Sekula may illuminate a Marxist critique of transnational exchange by focusing on ports and shipping containers, Mutu opens a space that challenges without being defined by ideology, and that space remains open. Indeed, she’s adamant that it’s the viewer’s job to participate in producing a response. “I’m not going to be able to answer some questions about this work,” she says. “Is that a snake in her mouth, or a tongue? If you encounter her, or encounter her in your imagination, you’ll have to ask that question. It’s a way to introduce a counter persuasion: There are other chapters to this narrative.”A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
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