Wangechi Mutu

About this book

Since her appearance in the late 1990s, Wangechi Mutu's collage-drawings depicting black women, tampered with and prey to strange bodily mutations, have generated much debate and interest on the international art scene. The broad range of raw materials she uses - magazines on fashion and current events, geography and ethnography, motorcycles and pornography - allows her to tackle the stereotypes of media representation, particularly of women, head on. While presenting an overview of new and recent work, this publication is centered on the installation Moth Girls, 2010, recently acquired by the Musée. In the recurrence of a half-human, half-animal, female figure, the product of an extreme hybridization, the work reintroduces the notion of taxonomy, along with the volatile notion of classification and hierarchization of species and, by extension, peoples and races.