Tendai Mutambu on Skin to Skin, Sandra Mujinga’s new installation at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where murmurming, mirrored figures blur the lines between what is human and what descends from other worlds.
Sandra Mujinga’s new installation at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam hums with fragments of melody stretched thin, with tones that arrive and dissolve like a light wind. On mirrored plinths, fifty-five grey, tentacled figures stand in formation, all turned toward a single wall as if awaiting a command, or already receiving one to which we are not privy.
Skin to Skin, Mujinga’s most ambitious exhibition to date, is the culmination of two years of working and thinking, though the artist might emphasise the term listening. “I try to listen to what the materials are doing,” she tells me over lunch one afternoon. It’s the day after the exhibition’s opening, and the requisite pageantries have been and gone. She’s immaculately turned out in head-to-toe white, bright-eyed and—as always—her manner is composed but never forbidding. Mujinga exudes the kind of quiet charm that puts one at ease in her presence.
Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and raised in Norway from age two—with a three year stint in Kenya during her teens—Mujinga has become synonymous in the world of contemporary art with large-scale, sci-fi-inspired environments, often populated by hooded figures and aglow with a lurid chroma-key green which is becoming something of a trademark, the way blue was for Yves Klein. With Skin to Skin, Mujinga returns to both signatures while further expanding her fascination with the idea of a collective.
Flocks, herds, murmuration, even crowds in airports have all found their way into her research on grammars of the communal as a means through which the individual is protected. In a conversation with the poet and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, included in the exhibition’s catalogue, Mujinga says her performance practice (for which she made costumes which have since evolved into standalone sculptures) emerged out of a desire—as a Black woman raised in a predominantly white Scandinavian country—to gather people of colour.
For Time as a Shield, her solo show at Kunsthalle Basel in 2024, Mujinga explored the collective potentials of voice, employing echo and reverb as key devices by placing, for the first time, speakers inside her fabric sculptures—all of which emitted a mix of sounds by a choral ensemble. In the main exhibition hall, five towering figures were draped in swathes of upcycled textiles with cables at their feet curling like a subterranean root system.
The nonhuman—be it trees or animals—is foundational to Mujinga’s practice. IBMSWR: I Build My Skin with Rocks (2022) at Hamburger Bahnhof projected an elephant-human hybrid wandering a post-industrial ruin; the central figure was an organism too vast to be contained even in the enormous nine-by-four-metre LED screen. Something of that logic of excess finds its way into this new body of work at the Stedelijk, which will open at Vienna’s Belvedere 21 from late January 2026. As you move through the labyrinth of sculptures, you find yourself ensnared in the recursiveness of that hall of mirrors effect the artist has so cannily constructed. A disorienting kind of multiplicity pervades the space, leaving uncertain not only where you are but where other attendees, whose reflections you occasionally glimpse, are standing.
In response to a question by the scholar Nijah Cunningham, one of several recurring interlocutors and intellectual fellow travellers for the artist, Mujinga suggestively referred to the dimming and brightening lights overhead as “a compressed sun.” Is this her conjuring life on a planet other than our own, one on which a day is merely a few minutes long? Or is this something more foreboding—a vision of our own planet gone rogue, its cycles and rhythms run amok owing to some unknown phenomenon?
In her conversation with Mujinga for the exhibition’s catalogue, Gumbs invokes the convergence of the earthly and the otherworldly by likening Skin to Skin to a forest ceremony. It’s an image that aptly locates Mujinga at the crossroads of human and non-human intimacies, yet even that opposition feels inadequate when applied to a practice that has, for so long, complicated the very border between these two categories. In Mujinga’s universe—where all is illuminated by an alluring yet estranging light, one that obscures more than it reveals—our certainty about categories and ideas, much like the distinction between object and reflection, is rendered unstable.
