"Wangechi Mutu: I am Speaking, Are you Listening?"

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Күн бұрын

Join us for a poetic and intimate exploration of Wangechi Mutu’s latest exhibition, “I Am Speaking, Are you Listening?” Directed by Dawit N.M. and narrated by Mutu herself, the film takes viewers on a journey of Mutu’s work as it is dispersed throughout the Legion of Honor galleries. The film invites you to consider Mutu’s belief of the artist as a healer and to reflect on art histories and the possibility of a world defined by care and protection of both people and the planet.
About the Filmmaker
Dawit N.M. is a director and photographer currently based in New York. Born in 1996 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he later moved to Hampton Roads, Virginia, with his family at the age of six. After establishing a deep interest in the visual arts, he became an ardent autodidact, committing himself fully to learning the art of filmmaking and later photography. His subjects have taken audiences into worlds of loss, devotion, intimacy, and innocence. In the same vein, the images question the transparency of narratives that are shaped by western influences. This relationship between identity and stereotypes inspired his first self-published photography book, Don’t Make Me Look Like The Kids On TV (2018). His directorial debut-a visual accompaniment for Ethiopian-American singer/songwriter Mereba's debut album entitled The Jungle Is The Only Way Out (2019)-earned him a nod for Emerging Director at the 2019 American Black Film Festival. Dawit’s first exhibition, The Eye That Follows (2020), was on view at The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA, summer of 2020.
About the Composer
Nyokabi Kariũki is a Kenyan composer and sound artist based between Kenya and the US. Her sonic imagination is ever-evolving, with compositions ranging from classical contemporary to film, sound art, electronics and further includes research into (East) African musical traditions. She performs as a pianist, vocalist, and plays several instruments from the African continent, including the mbira. Her collaborations with filmmakers, choreographers and other artists have been seen at events from the Out of Africa Film Festival (Nairobi) to Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival (New York), and her concert works have been performed by piano duo Chromic, Grammy-winning percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion, among others - with additional commissions from ensembles including Tetractys New Music, the Heartland Marimba Quartet, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Men’s Ensemble. Her art seeks to bridge her many influences - from her African upbringing to her Western classical training - together into a mélange of accessible, evocative, and meaningful art.
About the Exhibition
Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies-the productive friction of opposites beyond simple binaries and stereotypes-Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. At once seductive and threatening, her figures and environments take the viewer on journeys of material, psychological, and sociopolitical transformation. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York home, she moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist, and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, post-humanism, and feminism. Mutu’s sprawling exhibition at the Legion of Honor, a museum built for the showcase of European art from antiquity through Impressionism presided over by Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, aims to spur “a purposeful examination of art histories, mythologies, and the techniques of archiving and remembering.”
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All artworks by Wangechi Mutu are © Wangechi Mutu, All Rights Reserved. Special thanks to Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, Victoria Miro, London and Vielmetter, Los Angeles. Music by Nyokabi Kariũki.

Пікірлер: 11

@sameoldsameold264 3 жыл бұрын

Powerful artist, astounding body of work. Also, just to clarify, she's speaking Kikuyu, not Swahili.

@zenzeleisoke8544 4 ай бұрын

breathless...wow

@AprilMartinChartrandMS 3 жыл бұрын

Just got back from the exhibition. This is an exceptional AfroFuturistic body of Work. Exceptional exhibition. Wow... this message is seriously needed in San Francisco. CA.