Sandra Mujinga: Skin to Skin

The Norwegian artist creates an eerie, gallery-spanning installation with green light for the Stedelijk

Sandra Mujinga – Skin to Skin, installation view, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2025. Photo: Peter Tijhuis.

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
13 September – 11 January 2026

by ALLIE BISWAS

The title of Sandra Mujinga’s new installation for the Stedelijk Museum may allude to physical contact, or proximity of at least some kind, but Skin to Skin instead seems more intent on creating a sense of distance. One of the largest galleries has been filled with 55 identical sculptures that loosely draw on the human body (each stark structure is faceless and flat, standing three metres high, its limbs formed from grey fleece that doubles up as clothing). Appearing at once medieval and futuristic, with their draped and serrated garments, they stand next to each other in rows, spreading out, uninterrupted, across the entire room. In addition to these groupings are a dozen or so mirrored boxes that have been placed in between or underneath the sculptures, which result in them multiplying and towering even further. Neither menacing nor benign, familiar nor unrecognisable, their presence is obscured by the liminal position they hold, lessening the impact of these static forms, and any clear alliance with the viewer, despite their abundance. Their visual cohesion, though, implies that there is unity between themselves.

The green light that serves as a backdrop to all of this congeals the warped, otherworldly quality to which the figures hint – a technological element that sets the tone. At intervals, the light slowly changes. Numerous tubes installed across the ceiling first brighten before becoming dim; a sequence that moves horizontally from one side of the gallery to the other, adding to the strange aura. The remaining component of the installation – an ambient score consisting of prolonged electronic sounds – functions, like the sculptural figures, ambiguously, within a middle ground.

Sandra Mujinga – Skin to Skin, installation view, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2025. Photo: Peter Tijhuis.

Mujinga has spent the last decade working on sculptures and installations that ask how we respond to those who are not familiar to us, and her physical renderings of the beings that form the linchpin of these works – the unfamiliar in question – align with her interest in Afrofuturism and the post-human figure (the artist, who is of Congolese heritage, has spoken about her work in relation to how Black bodies are perceived and the endless surveillance to which they are subjected). Previous depictions of these figures have incorporated technological means that have resulted in pronounced visibility, such as 2019’s oversized hologram Flo, or otherwise relied on the potency of fabric to create concealed forms that nonetheless exude autonomy and intrigue, as with her hooded Spectral Keepers (2021) or the monumental proportions explored in Time as a Shield (2024). Skin to Skin continues to explore these ideas, considering what it might mean to control how one is seen, or hide in plain sight, yet the artist’s approach here is more muted. As this is Mujinga’s most ambitious work to date, in terms of scale, it will be interesting to see how her figures develop.

Sandra Mujinga – Skin to Skin, installation view, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2025. Photo: Peter Tijhuis.