Sandra Mujinga at Croy Nielsen

Artist: Sandra Mujinga

Exhibition title: Love Language

Venue: Croy Nielsen, Vienna, Austria

Date: February 3 – March 18, 2022

Photography: Kunst-Dokumentation.com / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Croy Nielsen

In her second solo exhibition with Croy Nielsen Sandra Mujinga pursues to probe what it possibly means to be human, situated in a range of perceptual fields that continue emerging, elongating and extending beyond prescribed dominant ideologies.

Mujinga’s work has continually engaged with notions of world-building as a means to question simplistic categorizations in regards to human life via an interdisciplinarity that stimulates from physical into virtual realms and vice versa.

In Love Language, a next chapter in Mujinga’s world-building practice, the precarity of our conditio humana is re-examined carefully. In light of an enduring pandemic, global war zones and eroding social contracts, human detachment and alienation repeatedly appear to be symptomatic and become testament to earth’s nearly unhabitable con-dition. The gaping crack between interminable algorithms, prescribed manuals for a supposed happy or satisfying existence, tormenting optimization delusions and a gen-uine need for human connection, closeness and touch mirrors, like a crafted snapshot, this current moment. Such an insistent image demands a back door or an alternative version of planetary life leading out of this mess.

It’s not that Mujinga’s practice necessarily aims at proposing remedies or a quick fix but discernment that stretches, at times strains, a conditioned gaze or processes of cognition in order to debunk dominant realities. Layer by layer the artist peels off surfaces, skins while creating new forms; a process that fundamentally re-negotiates hegemonic conceptions of beauty, physicality, belonging and mechanics of inclusion/ exclusion. It is a technical and protracted undertaking cracking open, inverting and freezing temporalities. This procedure – as a performance of self-reference – lays bare modernity’s monstrous intricacies and blurs man-made lines between human and non-human, self and other.

The range of materialities Sandra Mujinga employs, from faux leather, aluminum, dried-up paper, acrylic paint to frosted plexi serve as building blocks or agents within an ever evolving cosmic arrangement hinting at possible, inevitable re-organizations and re-calibrations of our world. The artist’s practice is an invitation to witness and catch a glimpse of truth(s) that, in particular the western eye, has had to violently sub-due for several centuries now.

Love Language therefore is testament to an artistic praxis of care and insulation which is required to uncover modernity’s inner workings while foreboding beyond these con-fining perimeters. A praxis to hold space.

-Magnus E. Rosengarten

Sandra Mujinga, Love Language, 2023, exhibition view, Croy Nielsen, Vienna

Sandra Mujinga, Love Language (1), 2023, Aluminum, steel, Velcro, 116 × 58 × 192 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Love Language (2), 2023, Aluminum, steel, Velcro, 106 × 64 × 188 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Love Language (3), 2023, Aluminum, steel, Velcro, 110 × 60 × 195 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Slow Water (1), 2023, Plexiglass, paper, acrylic paint, invisible seal glue, 112 × 82 × 4 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Slow Water (2), 2023, Plexiglass, paper, acrylic paint, invisible seal glue, 112 × 82 × 4 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Slow Water (3), 2023, Plexiglass, paper, acrylic paint, invisible seal glue, 112 × 82 × 4 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Slow Water (4), 2023, Plexiglass, paper, acrylic paint, invisible seal glue, 112 × 82 × 4 cm

Sandra Mujinga, Slow Water (5), 2023, Plexiglass, paper, acrylic paint, invisible seal glue, 112 × 82 × 4 cm

Sandra Mujinga, And What Was Left (2), 2023, Faux leather, cotton, threads, eyelet, 83 × 38 × 20 cm

Sandra Mujinga, And What Was Left (3), 2023, Faux leather, cotton, threads, eyelet, 106 × 26 × 16 cm

Sandra Mujinga, And What Was Left (4), 2023, Faux leather, cotton, threads, eyelet, 69 × 32 × 14 cm

Sandra Mujinga, And What Was Left (5), 2023, Faux leather, cotton, threads, eyelet, 58 × 42 × 18 cm