Fifty-five figures stand together in Sandra Mujinga’s Skin to Skin. They are tall, made from heavy textile, and similar enough to suggest that one form has been repeated. Their number changes the room. Four such figures might appear to be a group a visitor has come to inspect. Fifty-five become a population, and the lone visitor has to find a place among them. Mujinga described that reversal in a 2025 interview about the installation. The figures do not acquire faces or a declared species. They gain power through arrangement, scale and the viewer’s inability to see all of them at once.
Presented at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the work has been described in detail by Mujinga herself: seven mirrored portals, six mirrored pedestals, three elevated figures, a cycling green light and a soundtrack that periodically activates the installation. The mirrors multiply an already numerous company. The light alters what can be read from the fabric. For a viewer moving through the space, recognition is never a single event. A figure that looked like a person at one angle may suggest an elephant or an aquatic creature at another. Mujinga resists fixing them with names. The refusal is part of the work’s form, rather than a riddle awaiting an official answer.
The installation makes a question about visibility physical. To be visible can mean safety, recognition and a place in a shared world. It can also mean exposure to a gaze that sorts people before they can speak. Mujinga’s figures stand where that bargain becomes uncertain. They do not disappear, but they do not offer the intimate information a viewer might expect from an image of a body. Their wool surfaces are tactile, even inviting, while their repeated shapes and reflective surroundings make the space hard to master. The artist has built a future-facing environment from the problem of being seen now.
A form that will not settle
Born in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mujinga is identified by Malmö Konsthall as a Congolese-Norwegian artist working in Oslo and Berlin. She studied at Malmö Art Academy from 2010 to 2015 and at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. Those dates matter less as a résumé than as a map of a practice moving across the Nordic region and Europe. Her work has taken sculpture, video, textile, performance, music and installation as ways to test what a body can become in an image-filled world.
Her 2022 installation Closed Space, Open World, first commissioned for MUNCH’s SOLO OSLO programme and later shown in Malmö, gives the inquiry a different architecture. Three monster-like sculptural forms projected moving images of an avatar onto partly transparent screens. The figure on screen was created by Mujinga, and the outlines of visitors could mingle with it. The work refused a neat separation between the person observing and the body being observed. In Malmö Konsthall’s account, its visual world draws on science fiction, Afrofuturism and internet culture.
The screens were important because the avatar did not simply replace a human performer. A projection depends on a surface and on light; a visitor’s silhouette can interrupt it. The installation turned a familiar digital promise, the ability to create another self, into a spatial encounter with other bodies. One cannot choose every condition under which an image appears. A green-lit figure may seem to escape the usual rules of a portrait while remaining subject to the room, the apparatus and the movement of strangers through it.
MUNCH’s SOLO OSLO presentation placed this work amid questions about shadows and the many ways a person can be tracked. The museum’s description notes a tension in digital life: platforms document people in fine detail while also letting them make avatars, clones or disguises. Mujinga did not turn that tension into a simple warning about screens. She gave viewers a figure that could be partly theirs and partly other, visible yet difficult to locate. The installation’s title pairs enclosure with possibility. A closed space can still produce an open world if its arrangements change how people look.
The artist has spoken about clothes as a means of building a body. In a 2024 interview with Autre, she connected garment making to speculative fiction and to her experience of electronic music. She described the possibility of imagining shapeshifting and presence without a stable outline. A garment in this account is neither a costume placed over a complete self nor a symbol that announces an identity. It is a form of construction: fabric can enlarge, shield, disguise or transform the body it carries.
That distinction helps explain the sculptural figures that have become a recurring part of her practice. They are made of material familiar to clothing and often stand at a scale that clothing cannot accommodate. A hood or a drape might recall what a person wears, but a figure several metres high cannot be mistaken for someone ready to step into the street. It keeps the intimacy of dress and changes its proportions. The viewer recognises a bodily outline, then has to reconsider the assumptions brought to that recognition.
The right to withhold
Mujinga’s work has sometimes been described in terms of invisibility. That word can suggest erasure, especially when applied to a Black artist in European institutions. She gives it a more difficult meaning. In an interview with The Berliner, she explained that hiding in plain sight can be a strategy rather than a failure. She was discussing I Build My Skin With Rocks, a 2022 video installation made for Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, and an imagined hybrid body between elephant and human. By becoming too large to take in from one position, the body could evade a controlling gaze.
The work began, she said, with a text imagining the last elephant. The figure’s scale mattered because the spectator would have to shift position continually to see it. Size becomes a way to interrupt certainty. The body is present, but the viewer cannot turn it into a single captured image. Mujinga’s green light performs a related operation. She has explained its connection to the green screen, a colour field that can be replaced in digital production. In her installations, green is not simply a technological effect. It changes skin, fabric and space while the viewer is in the room. What appears to be a stable surface can become a field of possible substitutions.
Mujinga names Octavia E. Butler’s fiction among the work that enlarged her interest in science fiction. Her own speculative bodies test present systems of perception. Afrofuturism here does not require a spaceship. It can begin with a fabric figure under artificial light and a question about who is entitled to remain unreadable. Mujinga’s interest in animal survival tactics, digital duplication and posthuman forms broadens the field beyond a straightforward future city or heroic technological image.
Her first-person account also resists turning fiction into escape. Mujinga told Autre that learning more about the history of the Congo shaped her thinking about lives treated as expendable. She discussed haunting and the body’s capacity to carry histories that official systems have made hard to see. In her sculptures, the protective and the spectral can coexist. A form may seem ghostly because it refuses to become an easy object of knowledge, while still bearing the weight of a material world.
Fabric, sound and a community of copies
The material account of Skin to Skin is unusually revealing. In the 2025 interview, Mujinga said the figures are made chiefly of heavy, double-woven wool. She started with a tentacle-like part and worked from there, sculpting fabric almost as if it were clay. Assistants helped her sew the components, and cutting the fabric took considerable time. Those details keep the installation from dissolving into a metaphor about digital clones. Each repeated figure required physical labour. Similarity was constructed, cut and joined. A future-looking population was made by hands in a studio.
Mujinga has described the fifty-five figures as coming from one body, repeated. She suggested they might be read as versions across a life, or as kin. The figures’ sameness therefore does not settle whether the group represents duplication or community. In the interview she connected the title to touch and closeness, but also to the potentially brutal idea of moving from one skin to another. Those meanings coexist in the room. Repetition can threaten the singularity of a self, yet it can also make a company in which no member has to stand alone.
The seven mirrored portals intensify that uncertainty. Mirrors do not create another sculptural object, but they extend the number of figures a viewer perceives. They also insert the viewer into the composition. It becomes impossible to speak as though the work consisted only of fifty-five objects over there. The visitor’s own reflection is now another body under the green light, caught between an unfamiliar company and the familiar habit of looking for oneself. The installation does not offer a clean division between a watcher and the watched.
Sound supplies another kind of change. The soundtrack periodically turns the installation into an event, according to Mujinga’s account. A gallery can appear to hold sculpture in a timeless present; sound marks duration and gives the figures a shared rhythm. Mujinga’s music practice is not an extracurricular fact added to an artist biography. In her 2025 discussion of Skin to Skin, she described music as reaching listeners in a different way from visual art. The two disciplines give her different routes to a bodily response. The visitor may first try to interpret what the forms mean, then find that light and sound have altered the terms of that interpretation.
Worlds made from the present
The wider arc of Mujinga’s exhibitions shows how she varies the balance between an individual figure and an environment. Fleeting Home, made for the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in 2023, placed monumental metal and woven-fabric structures on a large terrace bounded by glass. The museum’s description says they look like primordial organisms in motion, as though messengers from another world were passing briefly through human space. The word home in the title sits uneasily beside that imagined transit. Shelter is not necessarily a fixed address; it may be the arrangement that lets a form survive while moving.
The terrace setting changes the relation between a viewer and Mujinga’s forms. In Closed Space, Open World, a projection needs a screen, and the visitor’s passing outline can join the image. On the Leipzig terrace, woven fabric meets metal and glass; the figures are set against an architectural edge rather than a theatrical screen. Neither work asks the visitor simply to recognise an invented creature. Both make the surrounding structure part of how the creature can be seen. The question of shelter is therefore also a question of placement: what supports a body, what frames it, and which boundary offers protection or exposure?
In a 2026 conversation with Metropolis M, Mujinga pushed back against the idea that her work could be placed safely in a distant science-fiction future. She described speculation as entangled with conditions already present. The point is borne out by her materials: surveillance is a current technology; digital multiplication is a current experience; a person’s ability to withdraw from constant observation is a current question. The speculative figure does not postpone those conditions. It puts them in a form that can be walked around, heard and felt.
That position gives the Norwegian part of her practice its specificity without making Norway its only frame. MUNCH commissioned a central work; Malmö later presented it; Berlin, Leipzig and Amsterdam offered other architectures and audiences. Mujinga was born in Congo, has worked in Oslo and Berlin, and draws from Black speculative literature alongside animal life, textiles and electronic sound. Each location changes the institutional and social context in which her figures appear. None exhausts what they can mean.
In Skin to Skin, the fifty-five forms return the viewer to a simple difficulty: they are numerous enough to look back. Their scale and repetition do not solve the problem of recognition. They rearrange it. A person entering the room may still try to sort the figures into human and animal, original and copy, garment and sculpture. Mujinga has made those categories less secure without making the work shapeless. Wool has been cut and sewn; mirrors extend a company; sound marks time. The future in this work is built from those exact decisions. It begins when the visitor has to accept being one body among many, with no privileged view of all the others.
Related reading at Krull
For another perspective on visibility and representation in Nordic art institutions, read Krull’s conversation with dancer Clyde Emmanuel Archer.