Wangechi Mutu and the deep time of her recent work series

From the AD HOC NEWS Art Desk » Work Series & Retrospective Desk - The editors cover exhibitions, auctions, collections, prizes and artistic positions. Published: August 22, 2026 · Last checked: August 22, 2026, 5:18 PM

Wangechi Mutu has built one of the most coherent bodies of work in contemporary art around hybrid, often wounded figures and fragile ecologies. In recent years her large collages, sculptural installations and films have turned increasingly to questions of origin stories and planetary time, from Edenic gardens to aquatic spirits.

Recent series across continents

Mutu’s practice now stretches across several recent series that unfold in different institutional contexts, from Venice to Los Angeles, Reno, Bergen and New York. Taken together, these chapters show how she treats myth and geology as continuous, overlapping timelines rather than static backdrops.

At the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, she presents The End, Where All began, EdEN, a cosmological installation that reframes the Garden of Eden through an eco-feminist, African diasporic lens. The project anchors a strand of her work that treats creation narratives as mutable and contested, rather than fixed scripture.

From water spirits to ‘Ongoingness’

Water and aquatic beings have become a persistent motif across Mutu’s recent series. In Venice, the bronze sculpture SimbiSiren continues her line of aquatic creatures that fuse woman, animal and myth, aligning marine habitats with questions of gender and power. In parallel, her exhibition The SeasSpirit at Victoria Miro in Venice focuses on collage-paintings around feminine water spirits, showing how this imagery migrates between sculpture and collage.

In the group exhibition Ongoingness at Vielmetter Los Angeles, she appears alongside other artists in a setting that explicitly foregrounds temporal layering and continuity. The title mirrors her interest in long cycles of regeneration and decay, which she renders as bodily experiences rather than purely environmental data.

Into the time horizon and underground worlds

Mutu’s presence in Into the Time Horizon at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno connects her work to a broader curatorial inquiry into geological scales and environmental histories. Here, her sculptures and collages sit alongside projects that track climate shifts and land use, situating her hybrid figures within a data-heavy context she subtly disrupts.

At Bergen Kunsthall, the exhibition Iter Subterraneum frames her work within subterranean imaginaries and mineral ecologies. The emphasis on underground routes and strata resonates with her use of Kenyan earth, horns and other organic materials, which carry both ritual and environmental connotations.

New humans and ancestral films

Mutu also appears in New Humans: Memories of the Future at the New Museum in New York, where the curatorial framework focuses on how artists envision future subjectivities. Her figures, often part-animal and part-machine, stand as alternative templates for embodiment that resist simple futurist or dystopian readings.

Her animated film Mumbi wa Mumbi, shown as part of the Biennale installation, centers on Kirinyaga, the Kikuyu name for Mount Kenya, where Ngai is said to have created the first man and woman. By combining animation with sculptural environments, Mutu compresses ancestral narratives and speculative futures into a single spatial experience.

The work core and materials

Across these series, Mutu works with collage on paper, bronze, ceramics and assemblies of earth, horns, crystals and found books, often in large-scale installations. Her figures, usually female-coded, embody both violence and care, articulating how colonial histories remain lodged in the body and landscape.

Current state of the practice

Overall, Mutu’s recent series at Biennale Arte, Nevada Museum of Art, Bergen Kunsthall and the New Museum confirm a practice focused on long temporal arcs rather than single events, with no publicly announced new opening falling exactly in the immediate 30-day window.

This article was produced with a.i. support and editorially reviewed. All statements without guarantee; auction results, exhibition dates and awards may change at short notice.