For The Met’s 2027 Great Hall Commission, Norwegian-Congolese artist Sandra Mujinga (born 1989) will create two sculptural works that respond to the scale, architectural context, and perpetual movement of the Museum’s grand historic space, where the vast majority of visitors to The Met Fifth Avenue enter. Working across installation, sculpture, performance, text, and digital media, Mujinga envisions alternative worlds in which technology, humans, and nonhumans merge. Informed by the histories and legacies of colonialism, science fiction, Afrofuturism, and post-human theory, she thinks carefully about who is seen, who chooses not to be, and what remains when a body leaves a room. In the Great Hall, where visitors gather, orient themselves, and move on, those questions take on new weight.
Born in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mujinga is an artist and a musician who lives and works in Oslo. Working across a range of media, she often conjures spectral figures that resist fixed identities and legibility, while drawing upon artifacts of archaeology and speculative creatures from both the deep past and the distant future. In responding to the vibrant dynamism of The Met’s iconic interior space, her installation will consider the politics of being seen and the traces that bodies leave behind. Mujinga’s project continues the series of commissions for The Met’s Great Hall. It is part of the latest in The Met's series of contemporary commissions, which invites artists to create new works of art in dialogue with The Met collection, its building, and its visitors. As The Met prepares to open the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, in 2030, these commissions offer a highly visible platform for living artists and reflect the Museum’s commitment to art of our time.