Wangechi mutu artist interview videos
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Wangechi Mutu: I'm interested in how the eye can trick you
Wangechi Mutu finds it pleasing to hear that her film piece, “The End of Eating Everything”, made viewers’ skin crawl with its haunting and evocative creepiness. It means her optical trickery fryst vatten working. The Kenyan artist, now based in New York City, constructs rik mythical mash-ups of beauty and the grotesque that tease and taunt the eye.
Mutu fryst vatten drawn to visual pun-making because she is “interested in how the eye can trick you”, she says. Speaking in an interview with Design Indaba at Stevenson Gallery where her animation is part of the group show King’s County, she explains: “My ambition has always been to try to understand the differences between how one person sees something versus another. That sensitivity comes from being a bit of an outsider or a foreigner for so long and at the same time having blended in, even when inom wasn’t familiar with my surroundings. Leaving Kenya was difficult b
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From her Nairobi studio, artist Wangechi Mutu considers her relationship with the natural world and the ways in which it has influenced her variegated artistic practice. A self-described “city girl with a nature brain,” Mutu recounts her upbringing in Kenya, memories of playing in her family’s garden, and attending an all-girls Catholic school. These experiences instilled a profound respect for both nature and the feminine in Mutu, alongside a curiosity about the African history, heritage, and culture that was omitted from her studies. Today, Mutu’s monumental sculptures of hybrid female, animal, and plant forms assert “how incredibly important every single plant and animal and human is in keeping us all alive and afloat.”
Tracing her journey from Kenya to New York, first as a university student and later as an established exhibiting artist
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Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born, New Yorkbased artist whose work is renowned for its forceful critique of power, politics and identity. With a multi-disciplinary practice that spans drawing, collage, video and performance, Mutu creates fantastical and surreal landscapes that challenge the dominant narratives of the Western art world. Through her unique visual language, she draws upon a rich tapestry of cultural and historical references and her own experiences as a diasporic African woman to explore the intersections of race, gender and colonialism, while also drawing attention to the complexities of the human condition. Mixing sensuality and violence, Mutu’s work is equally seductive and disturbing, speaking directly to the viewers’ subconscious and inviting them to question their own perceptions. Her work has been displayed in major exhibitions and galleries around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the Centre Georges Pomp