Ingrid Mwangi

Memory in the Skin

Simon Njami

Ingrid Mwangi is a relatively young artist. Her career, which started only a few years
ago, has seen a remarkable rise in the past two years: from exhibitions to performanc-
es, she is polishing a language-her own language-that is progressively distancing
her from the inherited techniques of her studies. Where the African artists who emerged
in the 1980s and '90s were primarily self-taught, Mwangi is part of the new generation
that has gone through art school, but she has reached the crucial point where one is no
longer a prisoner of one's training but where, on the contrary, everything that one has
learned contributes to constructing one's own identity, a language that corresponds per-
fectly to one's own expression. The question of identity, inevitable in a project like "Look-
ing Both Ways;' is the platform that unites all the artists in this exhibition. Each is African
and each explores his or her Africanness from a particular vantage point, for there can be
no shareable identity. Identity here is linked not to a notion of territory but to the intimacy
of personal experience.
If the question that is asked of most artists today has to do with their position in an in-
creasingly globalized world, it is no doubt asked with greater pointedness when the
artists are African in origin. Most have had to make the trip to the West, through the hap-
penstance of their parents' lives or by deliberate choice, in order to express themselves
under better conditions, those offered by the international circuit. But here again there is
a difference between Mwangi and the others: she is certainly African, her family name at-
tests to that, but her German mother helped her avoid a trap: the comfort of the estab-
lished image that can be identified and described. It was never an issue for her to acquire
the language of the other, since she was at once the same and other. She spent the first
fifteen years of her life in Kenya, where she was born, before leaving for Germany, where
she lives and works today. Her dual belonging is not only symbolic, it is physical. It runs
through her veins and is read on her body. And that richness, which makes her both from
here and from there, creates a fragility in her, a prism through which she tries to see her-
,
self and see the world.
i
The essential question in philosophy is found engraved on the frontispiece of the Tem-
ple of Delphi: "Know thyself:' Starting in childhood, Mwangi no doubt confronted the real-
ity of not really being from anywhere. I imagine her in Nairobi beside her friends with her
too-light skin. I imagine her a few years later with her friends in SaarbrUcken, her skin too
dark. This skin became a screen, a metaphor. The materialization of her quest for the self
required this passage, a sort of personal psychoanalysis, an exorcism for the world. This
is no doubt why Mwangi's first subject had to be herself. She had to go through a metic-
ulous deconstruction of the image she projected to others and confront it in the interior
image she bore within herself, had to find, in time, a balance and a harmony between
these two extremes. No dou bt the process contained a certain violence-like a cry, at Cat 25 (a-b)
Static Drift) 2001, by Ingrid Mwangl in collaboration with~'
once desperate and calm-as well as an invitation to look beyond obvious facts and Robert Hutter. Photographic diptych, 75 x 102 em, each,j
hackneyed truths. Photo: Courtesy of the artist. ~

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 In the evolution of Mwangi's work up to
today, I can make out three fundamental
stages corresponding to the three modali-
ties of a single body image defined by the
French psychoanalyst Franc;;oise Dolto:
"base image, functional image, and eroge-
nous image, which together constitute
and assure the Image of the living body
and the narcissism of the subject at each
stage of his evolution.'" The first was at
once physical and intellectual, like a reve-
lation. It was the translation of a sensation,
an unconscious, that invited her to defy
the inconsistency of the world and the
gaze brought to bear on her. The second
was a reaction, the will no longer to be the
inert and passive object upon which judg-
ments were passed, but instead to dictate
the conditions of her belonging to the "

world. In the same spirit as the Intellectu- f

Fig. 86 Coloured, 2001. by Ingrid Mwangl. Still from
als of the Negritude movement, she held fast to being the narrator of her own story. performance. Photo: Courtesy of the ;irtlst.

This second phase, illustrated by works like Coloured (2001), Neger-Don't Call " ,
Me (2000) and Static Drift (2001), IS extremely personal and necessarily flirts with a •I
"

certain form of narcissism (Figs. 85, 86, 87 a-b, Cat. 25 a-b). Being her own expen-
mental subject, Mwangi made her body the open book on which her story had to be
written and read. Her choices of medium were naturally linked to this intention: per- ,
formance, video, and photography, unlike installations or painting, offer us "real" im- "

ages. In performance the artist presents herself. Her movements, her voice, support
the entire mise-en-scene and the dramaturgy of the scenes she offers us. In video and
photography she is her own model. In consequence the images have a meaning that
goes beyond their simple contextualization: the personality of the artist necessarily im- Fig. 87 a-b Neger (Negro) - don't call me, 2000,
by In~Jrld Mwangi. Stills from video installation.
I'holo- C(JlJltesy 0+ tilp :1dhl

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I prints them with a direction that it is up to us to decipher, and that takes us by the hand
!r to reveal a sort of trompe l'oeil autobiography in which the illusion of reality leads us to
confuse the fiction of the work with the being of their author, as if both represented a sin-

! gle entity.

~
This autobiography is pure fiction, of course. It leads us into a world that is dreamed,
sublimated, in the sense that it is only signified. The signifier, the body, erases itself to
~ make room for the narrative, which may assume historical, personal, or political em·

I phases or even these three elements at once. Instead of creating an awkward similarity,
the obvious resemblance between the subject and the artist creates a distance, a crack,
within which the artist can mock our preconceived ideas and presupposed knowledge.
We think we know about her but in fact she is making fun of us. Lead actor in and direc-
tor of her scenarios, she uses images as a succession of signs and symbols, an enigma
that she invites us to decode by constantly leading us down the wrong path. She is both
protagonist and memoirist of her uncertainties, using her own body, a woman's body,
like a field of exploration, to connote all the parallel readings that that reality necessarily
implies. It is as if she were questioning herself about a history that she intends to appro-

I
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priate completely, to correct a distorted image that she no longer wants to bear.
With the third phase one could say that Mwangi approaches maturity. The danger
in which she places herself is no longer
Fig, 89 To be In the World, 2002, by Ingrid Mwangi In
coiiaboration with Robert Hutter. Video and sound installa-
tion. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

the simple affirmation of the self, the exhi-

bition of her wounds and her anxieties, but
dissolution in the other. She decides to ex-
press the fundamental ambiguity that she
inherited at birth. Moreover she is ab-
solutely conscious of this, since she de-
clares, "My artistic strategy became in-
creasingly one of identification; taking the
place of the other, in order to feel, to un-
derstand," This new approach appears in
all its fullness in works like To be in the
world (2002). Here Mwangi places char-
acters in front of a screen showing images
of violence and records them on video.
(Fig. 89) The btle itself is already evocative
of her intention: through these anonymous
faces she is watching her own reactions.
The others in this case are her own dis-
mantled image: she is inviting herself into
the chaos of the world, forgetting her per-
sonal injuries for a while, as in a rebirth.
Her feelings are translated in the upset
and dejection of the viewer. The images
onscreen don't even matter so much; we
can imagine them, which is surely worse
than having them before our eyes. This is
the third modality described by Dolto: "It is
thanks to the functional image that the life
drives, after being subjectified in desire,
can attempt to manifest themselves in Or-
der to obtain pleasure, to objectify them-

,en
 Fig. 90 a-d Shades of Skin, 2001, by Ingrid Mwangl.
Photographic four-piece work, 75 x 96 cm each.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
selves in the relationship to the world and to others."2
This process is clearly illustrated in Mwangi's most recent work, If (2003). Formal·
Iy the game at hand is to play hide-and-seek with reality. The image we are offered is
simple enough: a photograph taken from Der Spiegel that shows Hitler surrounded
by women no doubt chosen to represent the perfection of the Aryan race. The propa-
gandist goals of the photograph escape no one. The manipulation in which Mwangi
engages may seem anodyne: she replaces all the women's faces with her own. But
contrary to what Yinka Shonibare did in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998, Fig. 102 a-
b), she has not created a fictional scene-the scene is real. She has suddenly invited
herself into a story that scarred the twentieth century.
Mwangi, dark one, substitutes herself for the Aryan ideal. The game might seem
trivial if this transformation did not highlight the German part of herself. Having been
an icon of peoples long in the camp of the oppressed (the black race), she slides into
the skin of the oppressors, embracing by that gesture a collective unconscious and a
misdeed that, like original sin, flows in her veins. It is hardly necessary to go further in
the analysis of a work whose force and multiplicity of meaning are self-evident. Mwan-
gi has decided to attack the whole of her personal history by taking the most radical
path. This ever present, obvious fact reminds me of a Robert Ludlum novel I read
many years ago: Memory in the Skin.' The title seems to me a perfect metaphor for
Mwangi's journey.

1. Fram;:oise Dalto, L'lmage mconsciente du corps (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984).

2. Ibid.
3. "Memory In the skin"-La Memo/re dans la peau-is the French title of Robert Ludlum's thriller The Bourne Identity

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