CURA.

More terrifying than the appearance of the monster is the threat of this appearance. Monstrosity is that which hides and lurks: it is always coming to get you, waiting in the dark until visibly enfleshed. It precedes itself. In other words, horror draws its power from the uncertainty of the conditional tense, brewing at an imagined but anxiously anticipated horizon.

Sandra Mujinga’s art dwells in this unsettling zone of non-disclosure. Her sculptures, videos, garments, and installation works stir the unknowable, unseeable side of the threshold that demarcates the encounter between the monster and the supposedly righteous, normative subject. Not to say that it can’t be encountered. Rather, there is something/one brooding beneath the skin of her artwork that isn’t preoccupied with being revealed or recognized, which won’t follow the path that stretches from being known to being governed.

The particular darkness that holds Mujinga’s art is Blackness, that marker of racial alterity whose putatively demonic nature has so often been constituted either as the shadowy lack of anything human or the supernatural excess of it; variously articulated through the “monstrous birth” of Shakespeare’s Othello, Kipling’s “sullen peoples/half devil and half child,” Hillary Clinton’s “super-predators,” etc. etc.

Or as Fanon puts it simply: “Maman, look, a Negro: I’m scared!”

Grounded in Black post-humanism, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction, Mujinga’s work faces this demonic script head-on. It dares to ask: What does it look like when we simultaneously trouble the idea of monstrosity while cultivating an ethic that—to use Mujinga’s language—“cheer[s] for the monsters”? How can those who have been brutally linked to a monstrous ontology harness it in conspiring toward an expansion of unruly and fugitive tendencies? How might such a maneuver help us deal with the actually horrific phantoms of slavery and colonialism?

Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick point out that in computer science, the term “demonic” or “daemon” describes systems that do not have a determinable outcome (again, we meet that edge of anxious anticipation). I’m reminded of this technological unpredictability as my eye wrestles and races with the figures that play in the sci-fi darkness of Mujinga’s videos like Flo (2019) or Pervasive Light (2021). In both, glowing holographic bodies slip interminably in and out of the black screen. Dressed in wearable sculptures designed by the artist, these very real bodies have stepped into a new skin, a more-than/other-than/beyond human skin. It’s the way that they move in these garments that gets under your skin: they slip in and out of the darkness like ghosts wavering between this world and some other beyond it. Spectral figures, they suggest ways of being—specifically being Black—that go beyond being coherent, that are assembled in the disjoint between visibility and invisibility. Refusing an uncomplicated appearance, theirs is a demonicly unstable presence.

In its Hegelian way, modernity’s episteme loves a good face. Not good as in beautiful, but good as in readable, as in capable of furnishing an exchange of glances and recognitions through which the subject can be confirmed and comprehended. Repudiating any imperative to participate in this dialectic of identification, many of Mujinga’s humanoid figures lack a visage, evoking monstrous mythologies of the faceless and headless. For example, sculptures like Mókó and Libwá (2019) or Spectral Keepers (2020) wear great, fabric hoods that enshrine the head, calling to mind the hoodies which the anti-Black imaginary has linked to its idea of threatening Black criminality. Gaping black holes open up in lieu of faces, barring any external entry into the interior life of these seemingly floating, hyper-elongated sentinels (they stand nine or ten feet tall). Amplifying the intensity of this uncanny physiognomic absence, the Spectral Keepers are cast in a shocking and disorienting green light that seems pregnant with sci-fi futurity. The sculptures are literally cloaked in their right to opacity and wondrous abnormality. They are fearless and fearsome in their irresolvability.

Mujinga’s way of listening to ghosts and monsters has nourished a careful attunement to the animal world and its entanglements with the scary other, the wildly frightening, the supernaturally fantastic. There is no shortage of affinities between Black people and those animals who have been interpreted as perennially dangerous, always menacing. Mujinga’s work takes this seriously.

Growing up, Mujinga was often warned by her family not to visit the lake which they lived nearby. Its dark, watery depths were, they told her, too capable of breeding haunted/ing or evil life-forms. This warning stayed with the artist, and over time, fermented an artistic interest in the harmonies between Blackness and marine ecology, underwater animals, and sea monsters. Her eight-hour-long video Worldview (2021) is set in Norway’s Gudvangen fjords, a eerily sublime landscape that was once the site of Pagan and Norse cult rituals (these too have been cast as horrific forms of dark/black magic). Our eyes rest on a still shot of the landscape that is interrupted only by the furtive flash of creatures whom the artist describes as animals, deities, and monsters. They are barely detectable in the vast grandeur of the landscape, fleeting and fleeing like the Black human bodies in Mujinga’s other videos.

In I Build My Skin With Rocks (2022–23), an installation at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Mujinga turns to the hybrid meeting between other animal species and our own, imagining a half-human, half-elephant creature. Over the course of the video, the creature grows so large that it is no longer perceptible as a body: freed from the conscripts of “the human,” its skin, which cannot be fixed or encoded with race, begins to resemble a topography or landscape. Perhaps gargantuan “beasts” like elephants can teach us what it means to outgrow our skin, to inhabit a new one entirely. While Worldview situates animals in the landscape, I Build My Skin With Rocks describes animals as landscape, there is something. Both, in their discomfiting intensity, wonder what happens when we submit to our kinship with all that is beyond the category of the human and the racial hierarchies which subtend it.

Not dissimilar from the way that one experiences fear, one experiences Mujinga’s work as a total environment. A grip of unease. The work doesn’t deny that it is frightful when the ground of humanness crumbles beneath our feet, when ontological stability evaporates like a ghost into thin air. Rather, it requests that we don’t deny this fear, that instead, we use it, enliven it, make worlds with it.