Sandra Mujinga at Munch Museet
Set in a single sparsely lit room on the Munch Museet’s tenth flooring, Sandra Mujinga’s excellent set up Closed House, Open World, 2022, includes three video sculptures. Their ambient soundtrack lasts all of ten minutes, but it sends the customer across area and time, shifting between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism, mid-century workplace areas, late-twentieth-century animation, Nineteen Eighties sci-fi, Nineteen Nineties rave aesthetics, 2000s-era display screen savers, and posthumanism. This cosmos (within the correct sense of the phrase) is as acquainted as it’s disorienting, each enthralling and distressing. This can be a shadow world, the place every little thing is bigger than life however at all times at a take away.
Although the room lacks the gangly specters that always populate Mujinga’s worlds (intriguingly, given their resemblance to Edvard Munch’s best-known determine), it does comprise three big metallic worms, stationed amongst three semi-transparent Plexiglas cubicles. Their scales are sharp and pronounced, however their interiors are hole, the one pulse that of the electrical wiring operating by means of their our bodies. The eerie inexperienced mild subtle from their tails is directly otherworldly, the colour of reptilian aliens and effervescent slime, and all too recognizable because the glow emitted by a sport server or the laser of a pc mouse. These postorganic creatures challenge colourful, kaleidoscopic digital sequences paying homage to automated music visualizations onto the cubicles. The footage is suggestive of perspectival motion, the foreground frequently overtaken by the background as if the immobilized viewer had been touring by means of area at warp pace—by means of wormholes, you would possibly say. Inside the animation, a single however shape-shifting (and thus multiplicitous) humanoid character repeatedly seems and disappears down these wormholes. One hopes that they know the place they’re going; to be misplaced right here, on this shadow universe, is to show into one among Mujinga’s skinny ghosts.
— Timotheus Vermeulen
