Wangechi Mutu’s New Museum Show Weaves a Dazzling Web of Interconnectedness

Something preternatural takes over the screen in the final seconds of Wangechi Mutu’s video The End of Carrying All (2015): At the edge of a barren hill, a woman carrying a too-heavy basket is suddenly swallowed into the Earth. A disquieting blue light begins to glow from underneath the ground that has consumed her until the surface of the Earth cracks open, breaking the soil into an eruption of terrifying luminescence. The soil soon settles back into silence, yet the force of this strange transfiguration remains, lingering underneath the skin.

Indeed, that unsettling aura permeates the air in “Intertwined,” Mutu’s retrospective at the New Museum—an exhibition that unfolds in the unnerving shifts, mutations, and entanglements between the natural and supernatural, the human and the superhuman.

Stretching across the entire museum, “Intertwined,” which is on view through June 4th, brings together over 25 years of Mutu’s work. It takes its title from the artist’s longstanding investigation into the absolute mutuality between all things—between the human and the ecological, the self and the other. While the questions she raises have implications for the whole planet as we face the problems of the Anthropocene, Mutu’s work is particularly interested in how they emerge from and weigh on postcolonial, Black, and female bodies.

The sculptures, collages, and films on view here are unflinchingly complex negotiations with the overwhelming totality of our interconnectedness, fomenting a powerful concoction of expression that is variously strange, ecstatic, and violent.

The exhibition’s conceptual focus on joining and relationality is unmistakably attached to Mutu’s incredible and nuanced command of assemblage, which shines across the floors and walls of the museum. In Mutu’s collages—which first launched her into prominence after she graduated from Yale’s MFA program in 2000—ink and watercolor patterns collide with disjointed human body parts (often cut from magazines) to form uncanny creatural conglomerations.

These collages are not easy to behold. They are cacophonies of confounding disarrangement in which the expectations of visual coherence, scale, and perspective are jumbled up and unraveled. But they are also difficult in that they are painful: The bodies in them are made through unmaking, fracturing, and brutal disfiguration.

This You Call Civilization? (2008)—which is hung on the second floor among several large-scale works on mylar and paper—features a body that seems to have expelled itself from its casing, contorted to the point of being unrecognizable. The title, content, and style of the piece collectively call our attention to the brutality of civilizing missions and colonial conceits that have left physical and sociopolitical bodies warped, mutilated, undone.

In Mutu’s sculptures, assertive textures and materials run together in dense confabulations between human forms and non-human materials—both biotic and synthetic. Take, for example, Mutu’s “Sentinel” sculptures, several of which are on view on the museum’s third floor, where walls are painted a clay-ish brown to match the sculptures.

In the back of the gallery, the sentinels strike various poses that recall human—specifically feminine—gestures and affectations. Yet their anthropoid shape is also almost beastly, gnarled by organic matter that transforms the sculptures into untameable, even monstrous bricolages abundant with and deformed by feathers, wood, clay gourds, and crystals.

In Sentinel VI (2022), the paper pulp which underlies the sculpture is embedded with shells and wood that protrude from the body and throw its coherence into disarray. This transfigurative adornment is splendorous, yet also redolent with the violence that leaks from Mutu’s collages elsewhere in the galleries: The beauty of the embedded materials is also grotesquely reminiscent of wounding, of punctured and ruptured flesh.

In their perturbing and hybrid beauty, the sentinels unsettle gendered myths of “Mother Nature” as a gentle female figure that gives plentifully—a configuration that has been vital to the logic of colonial extraction and hierarchies of being which subordinate the Earth to human control.

Mutu’s sculptures revel in fantastic symbiosis not only by fusing the human body to organic material, but also by emphasizing its oneness with other living creatures. Here, mixed-media assemblage is abandoned, yet the theme of suturing things together remains: Instead of using multiple materials to suggest the corporeal and metaphysical intertwinement between humans and non-humans, Mutu melds their physical forms together with metal.

For example, in Crocodylus (2020), a Black feminine figure rides the back of a monumental crocodile and is simultaneously fused to it, her skin bulging with a musculature that the animal shares. Her features—which are at once humanoid and slightly alien—call something futuristic to mind, yet also evoke ancient Egyptian and Indian mythologies, which include goddess hybrids of women and reptiles.

In this work and others, there is a literal welding together not only of the anthropic and the animal, but also of the past and the future. An Afrofuturist imaginary mingles with Mutu’s rigorous attention to history, to the divine and majestic things which have come before.