INGRID MWANGI: ENACTING THE BODY AS STAGE

The artist Ingrid Mwangi was born to a Kenyan father and a German mother and has lived in both Africa and Europe. Identifying herself as a “hyphenated person ” and displaying the inherent problematics of racially based notions of national identity, Mwangi presents her own body as the troubled unity of both subject and object in her art. Michael J. C. Echeruo (1999: 10) maintains that choosing a subjective identity is absurd, for identity is constructed from the subject but is also everything the subject is not. It is through this approach to identity as construct that Ingrid Mwangi performs her identity by creating herself as a site of discourse. When she says in a commentary on her 2001 work Coloured, “I am the stage, ” she posits her own body as the location of a discourse that is dependant on the confused racial signifiers of skin colour. The body politics of cultural framing are enacted in her works, denying any sense of stability or unity. She confronts the viewer’s understanding of racial categories through the constant affirmation/denial of her bodily self. In this paper, I examine Mwangi’s performance and installation works as critiques on the placement/role of the physical body in identity discourse