Sandra Mujinga - 2016

Sandra Mujinga's artistry invites you to a contemporary world, a hybrid of clubs, music videos and social media. Her aesthetic expression is attractive; short clip-ins are interspersed with haute couture mixed with musical loops. In the center is a body, sometimes her own, sometimes a family member's, sometimes people browsing images online, sometimes a hired model.

Through performance, video and spatial installations, Mujinga examines how it happens when we "read" what we look at. When we attribute to what we see different meanings and narratives. Her works often direct our gaze towards the background; to everything that surrounds what our gaze would normally be fixed on, and that has a bearing on how we perceive what we see. Here, sounds, objects and movements from different contexts are combined in combinations that manipulate the original narrative and draw our attention and our associations in different directions. Music is an important tool in Mujinga's exploration of visual processes. Many of her works are seductive music videos where the sound takes over and changes how we see what we see. In her performance acts, she often takes on the role of DJ. Through music and visual expressions, she directs people's movements in art rooms or in club environments. Often her musical loops represent the sounds that are part of the background noise that governs our experiences in the physical world. Through the works, Mujinga insists that we become better listeners.

In the video installation and performance act When I Stopped Playing Hard To Get (2015), Mujinga used, among other things, video footage from Congolese weddings she found on YouTube. The wedding photos have, like so much else online, probably been uploaded for private use, to be made available to family and friends. One of the installation's video projections shows excerpts from wedding scenes where different women dance. By replacing the videos' original soundtracks with their own electronic music loops and evocative beats, the experience of the women's dance changes and their movements suddenly create associations with dance styles such as hip-hop or funk.

In many ways, Mujinga's works reflect the visual processes and hybrid genres that spread across the Internet. Where social media sites such as Instagram, SoundCloud, Vine and YouTube have revolutionized the ability to produce and distribute one's own material and thus participate in a wider sense-making.

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On these digital platforms, specific conditions and time limits apply to the type of material you can post. In the video installation I Gave the World a Word (2016), Mujinga investigates how Instagram and Vine have limitations that affect the conditions of creation and its reception.

Films posted on these sites are designed according to a rule that a video may be no longer than 15 and 6 seconds respectively. In addition, you must consider that your lmade material will be played as a loop. The short format means that the images are more easily distributed on different platforms and can thus reach a wide audience. At the same time, the format causes the lms' information to be compressed, resulting in their original meaning being easily lost when the videos are taken out of context. This means that you as the creator must accept that you will lose control over the video the moment you upload it online and that it can be used by others on social media in relation to completely different types of narratives, thus generating other meanings than the ones you originally intended.

In I Gave the World a Word, Mujinga has produced your pieces of music that are no more than 15 seconds long, thus studying the short seconds of meaning-making in relation to the viewer's perception and experiences. The name of the work is a quote taken from an interview in the music magazine The Fader where Kayla Newman says "I gave the world a word". Newman is known for his video diary on the short lms site Vine. Every day, she records short videos of herself with her cell phone while sitting in the passenger seat of her mother's car. In a six-second long lmloop, she looks contentedly at the shape of her eyebrows in the mobile camera while saying “We in this bitch. Find get crunk. Eyebrows on eek. Da fuq.” The footage became an internet hit and spread across social media. At the time of writing, the video on her Vine account has been viewed over 38 million times. The expression "on eek", which in Swedish roughly means "safe" or "cool", was not an accepted expression before Newman's Vine. After the spread of the video, it has started to be used more and more frequently. I Gave theWorld aWord examines the premises of Instagram and Vine's new formats for creativity and meaning production. The meeting between big business and grassroots movements creates a new type of territory within which new questions arise about copyright, cultural consumption, the private, celebrity, censorship and forms of producing meaning.

Mujinga's performances and video works are rarely about the specific meanings that different visual expressions have. Rather, her work examines the path to the creation of meaning. How the combination of aesthetics, cultural forms, objects, bodies and sounds orients us towards different types of narrative. Her works highlight the potential of mastering the meaning-making process. How one

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conscious displacement of given meanings can make accessible what at first glance seems difficult to access, alien and strange.

Background

When asked why Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989) wanted to become an artist, she points out that an important part of her career choice was that she was given the opportunity to choose at all, that she had many people who supported her growing up and who still support her. Mujinga was born in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo but moved to Norway early on. In 2015, she graduated from the Master's program at the Academy of Arts in Malmö. Today she lives and works in Malmö and Berlin. Mujinga has always been fascinated by thoughts and ideas that do not fully conform to what is accepted. Through her artistry, she gets access to a space to explore the thoughts that make her insecure, things that appear to be crooked, strange or alien.