Sandra Mujinga

Sandra Mujinga was born in 1989 in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, grew up in Norway, and is based in New York. Her practice — spanning sculpture, installation, performance, music, and sound — engages with questions of surveillance, camouflage, visibility, and the politics of the Black body in digital and physical space. Working with oversized, shrouded figures constructed from steel, fabric, and wire, and with environments engineered to frustrate legibility, she creates works that propose concealment and opacity as ethical and political strategies.

Mujinga's work draws on the philosophy of Édouard Glissant, whose concept of opacity has become a touchstone for artists thinking about Black self-determination in the face of the objectifying gaze. Her figures — draped in materials that absorb or reflect light rather than revealing the bodies beneath — propose forms of presence that resist identification and instrumentalization. Fossils and science fiction inform her speculative imagination of creatures from the past and future. There is also a sonic dimension to much of her work: recordings, sound environments, and voice works that engage with the relationship between language, recognition, and power. She is also active as a DJ and musician.

Mujinga has had major solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (Time as a Shield, 2024), the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (I Build My Skin With Rocks, 2022/23), and at institutions in Leipzig, Madrid, Copenhagen, and Yokohama. She was included in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Signals: How Video Transformed the World at MoMA, New York (2023), Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility at Guggenheim, New York (2024), and For the Time Being at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2026). She received the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2021. She is represented by Croy Nielsen in Vienna, The Approach in London, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich.