Review: ‘Constant Triumph' at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

The body is both metaphor and medium in “Constant Triumph,” the provocative exhibition that just opened at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

The show is the first American survey of the work of IngridMwangiRobertHutter, a husband-and-wife art collaborative from Germany. Mwangi, who is part Kenyan and part German, lived in Nairobi until she moved to Germany at 16 years old. Hutter is a German native.

The title piece is a touching tribute to Mwangi’s sister, who copes with and ultimately dies of cancer, a tribute to the will to embrace life. The video is projected through a diaphanous, billowing gold scrim, which complements its themes of ephemerality and spirit.

Most of the video performances and photographs exhibited here, however, deal with race, conflict and identity -- recurring themes at an institution devoted to art by or about women of the African diaspora. What distinguishes the work is not only the particulars of the artists’ personal histories and resulting global perspective, but also the physical extremes that it entails.

In “Splayed,” Mwangi cuts the words into her own arms with an X-Acto knife. In “Conscious of the Wall,” artist Jimmy Ogonga uses a tattoo needle to mark a series of tallies on Hutter’s back, which Mwangi films. The images are large, direct and disturbing.

Both pieces have striking presentations. In the former, the three-monitor setup suggests Christ on the cross: In the top monitor, her bodiless unemotional head watches the monitors of the outstretched arms. In the latter, Hutter has made body prints on a piece of old metal wall, on which the video is projected. The body prints, which splotch the video, add texture and thematic density.

One can talk about the metaphorical suggestion of psychic scars, or reference to torture and dehumanization. One can talk about the African scarification, rites of passage as tests of endurance, and tattoos as trophies. One can talk about treading the line between sanity and insanity, and the fluid meaning of ‘’sanity.’’

Ultimately, the notion of making art out of self-inflicted pain is beyond my ken. McCallum and Tarry, a mixed-race American artist couple who have exhibited at Spelman and deal with similar issues, go right up to the line that MwangiHutter dare to cross. Does that make one braver than the other? Crazier? Is the art more meaningful, or is it obscured by the drama?

In an easier-to-watch piece, Mwangi fashions and refashions her dreadlocks into artful compositions, many of which cover her face and resemble African masks, as she speaks about being half-black in Germany, which has its own fraught relationship to race.

In the video “Headskin,” the leitmotifs skin and hair come together. (The title makes reference to German skinheads and racial violence as well as racial difference.) It shows the back of the artists’ heads side by side as an unseen razor shaves their hair. It’s interesting to see that when finally shorn of their locks, their skulls look remarkably the same.

Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of ArtsCriticATL.com.

Review