CURA.

Skin to Skin is Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga’s (b. 1989, Goma) immersive exhibition set in the lower-level gallery of Amsterdam art hub, Stedelijk Museum.

Mujinga’s practice consistently provides a platform for alternative realities, a result of incorporating multiple disciplines – from sculpture and installation to film and sound – to help elevate disregarded narratives. Her artwork disrupts homogenous representation by heavily exploring ideas of surveillance and visibility, applying a nonconformist lens to the streamlined art world.

In the exhibition Skin to Skin, Mujinga presents the viewer with a saturated landscape. The sterile white cube is swapped for walls covered in a bright, fluorescent green. Contained within this space, more than fifty identical, alien-reminiscent figures – tall stature, slender-built and pointy-shouldered. Some of them are elevated by pedestals while others are partially hidden, almost absorbed by shadows. Mirrors are strategically placed across the space, making the number of figures appear to be doubled, if not tripled.

This multiplication becomes Mujinga’s method of reconciling sensorial experience with social critique, with a targeted lens on our digital footprint. Though the figures seem identical, their repetition materialises existentialism and our collective anxieties – shaped by transformation, self-identity and representation in an age of mass replication. Mujinga’s daunting humanoids also delves into the tension of Black bodies and their representational paradox: hyper-surveilled and endlessly scrutinised, yet underrepresented both in public discourse and positions of power. Here, revealed how the visually perfect do too hold the weight of serious discourse, embodying the uneasy balance of being observed and overlooked at the same time. These sculptures are mesmerising yet evocative – mute corpuses succumbed to a dystopian world more macabre than ever.

Skin to Skin becomes a twisted cabinet of curiosities, one that doubles as a raw testament to authenticity and injustice. Mujinga’s extraterrestrial display becomes a springboard to the challenges in our golden age of replication. She draws attention to belonging and sameness, this goldmine of nothingness where authenticity and fakery blur. Who is there to distinguish identity and who has this superior power anyway? The exhibition puts us in a liminal space, placing the viewer suspended between amazement and fright, becoming both spectator and subject. It’s a direct confrontation with systemic power and it’s difficult not to feel like a forgotten figure in its looming shadow. As the exhibition material asks: “When you’re seen anywhere, can you still be seen at all – or do you end up hidden in plain sight?”