Stone Ihiga

Wangechi Mutu

• Saatchi & Saatchi
• 375 Hudson Street

Wangechi Mutu’s Stone Ihiga*, a multi-layered performance and installation created in collaboration with riveting composer and vocalist Imani Uzuri, takes as its starting point the disturbing stories of women who have been found guilty of adultery or promiscuity being executed through stoning. For Stone Ihiga, Mutu creates an evocative curtained environment, scattered throughout with Mutu’s ‘Thrones’, simple wooden chairs perched on elongated legs, suggesting a hush arbor, or so-called safe haven—typically surrounded by trees—where African-American slaves would gather to mourn their losses in song and prayer. The audience enters a haunting sound work composed by Uzuri that is a mix of overtone singing, chants, guttural vocals, and utterances. Ultimately, Mutu and Uzuri build a highly personal visual and aural ceremony that ruminates on the human capacity for prejudice and violence.
* Ihiga: A stone in the Gikuyu language

Wangechi Mutu (b. Kenya, 1972) has trained as both a sculptor and anthropologist. Her work explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and makes reference to colonial history, contemporary African politics and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction and funkadelia, Mutu’s works document the contemporary myth making of endangered cultural heritage. Mutu’s collages seem both ancient and futuristic. Her figures aspire to a super-race, by-products of an imposed evolution. In this series of work, she uses old medical diagrams, to convey the authenticity of artefact, as well as an appointed cultural value. Satirically identifying her ‘diseases’ as a sub/post-human monsters, she invents an equally primitive and prophetically alien species; a visionary futurism inclusive of cultural difference and self-determination.

A Performa Commission supported by the TOBY Fund, Performa Producer’s Circle Members Mimi Brown and Alp Ercil, the Performa Visionaries, and Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Nov. 13, 9pm
Nov. 14, 9pm
Nov. 15, 9pm

TIckets: $15 / $10 Performa Members