Sleeping Heads
by Wangechi Mutu, 2006
Mixed media, collage on Mylar; “wounded wall”: punctured latex
Wangechi Mutu was born in Kenya, but now resides in New York. She attended the Yale School of Art and has been featured in countless shows and galleries across the globe. Mutu is known for her highly detailed collages which address issues such as geopolitics, race, colonialism and gender. Sleeping Heads is one of eight pieces done by Mutu using mixed media and being approximately 17 X 22 inches in size. Sleeping Heads features women’s body parts, which Mutu cut from fashion and porn magazines. Sleeping Heads is a somewhat grotesque image, in that it uses other body parts to makeup an image- completely unnatural. The only part which seems to be in place is the lips, although they are frontal when the figure is standing at profile. Even then, though, why is there an arm between the lips, when it serves no purpose to the contours of the face as with the other images? To the left of the composition, on the edge of the figure is a spatter of red paint, which, to us at least, emulates blood as if by a gunshot. The image of the hand around the neck also seems to represent the taking of the life of this figure- the control over it.
In all, the image would be classified as disturbing and perfectly goes with Rankine’s text. In the page adjacent to the image, she ends with “the worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you-” This is restated in the image, as the figure seems to have endured many injuries, but she is not truly herself- she is just a culmination of multiple other people.
Questions that might come up:
- Who might these works be intended for?
- What about collage might be more expressive than other mediums?
- Having lived in both Kenya and the United States, which experiences shaped the artist’s work more?
- Do you have to know where the images come from to comprehend the work, or can it be open to interpretation?
Research from the following websites, follow the links below for more information:
Image Source (for top image)
~ Research by Teddy Salazar and Sarah Schaaf
