The Afrofuturism of Wangechi Mutu

The last few years have seen the rise of a culturally significant type of creative. In literature, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole and many others have produced highly publicised and much-discussed complex narratives. In film and television, cross-cultural transplants feature in films and popular TV shows - Zimbabwean-American Danai Gurira and British-Nigerian Chiwetel Ejiofor come to mind. In contemporary art, diasporic Africans such as artists Chris Ofili, Julie Mehretu and Yinka Shonibare have found international acclaim.

The Tate Modern recently wrapped a major (and long overdue) exhibit of the modernist art of Sudanese-born Ibrahim El-Salahi, and earlier this year The Brooklyn Museum opened a floor to the awe-inspiring, house-sized pieces by Ghanaian artist El Anatsui in a widely viewed traveling exhibit. Also currently on exhibit at the museum is a survey of the work of Kenyan-American artist, Wangechi Mutu. This is an "Afropolitan" moment.

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is a brief (50 pieces) but immersive exploration of the evolution of an artist. Although Mutu is a multimedia artist, she is perhaps best known for her large-scale, wildly colourful collages on Mylar. This thoughtfully presented survey includes presentations in a number of other media: video, site-specific fabric installations and, importantly, selections from the artist's sketchbooks dating back to 2005, the first time they have been on display. The exhibition rooms themselves are dimly lit with walls cast in soothing earth tones, a common curatorial choice which, in this case, effectively highlights the expansive energy of each piece.

There is no singular question at the core of Mutu's work. The collages themselves are complex, multi-layered, explosively hued pieces in which many themes are addressed simultaneously. This work is the ultimate existential mash-up. Mutu explores the complexities of this world by asking and answering a thousand questions at once.

A piece featured early in the survey is one that fully encapsulates the Mutu aesthetic. The themes with which she grapples in Riding Death in My Sleep are threaded throughout almost all of her work. A maybe-woman, alien-like in appearance, sits astride a globe. Her features are cross-racial, the skin is white. On top of her head is a winged and tailed fantastical elephant and to her side, an eagle head – the enduring symbol of the United States. The creature squats, poised as if to spring right out of the frame. At play are questions about multiculturalism, the sexualisation and objectification of the (black) female body, race, hybridity and all that it represents; conflict, isolation and "otherness".

At this point, Mutu has spent more time outside of Kenya than years spent there. Yet by her own admission, the imprint of her home continent is unmistakable. Representations of the art of the Makonde find a home in many of her pieces, as do birds in varying form – explained by the artist during a recent public presentation as the Kikuyu symbol of the spirit.

Suspended Playtime, a piece that occupies a central space in this curation, is a collection of balls made out of black plastic bound in twine and suspended with gold thread from the ceiling. This piece is intentionally reminiscent of the improvised soccer balls that children in cities and rural towns across Africa create and play with – a commentary on the resourcefulness of the children but also on lives often lived in comparative deprivation. Similarly, the rough grey fabric that clings to the walls like a fungus in a number of the installations is identifiable to a familiarised eye as the blanket fabric used in some township homes, dormitories and even prisons across southern Africa during cooler months. It's cheap, plentiful and these days probably made in China.

Mutu's use of specific and intentional imagery and symbols can be fairly easily contextualised, making her art essentially, accessible. In Your Story, My Curse, one of the central figures' rear end is partially covered by bananas and banana peels suggesting quite plainly Josephine Baker, arguably the first publically eroticised black female body in western culture who (in)famously performed in a banana skirt as part of her repertoire.

Over the years, Mutu has repeatedly addressed the same themes, yet her work is far from stagnant. While earlier pieces such as Yo Mama (2003), an easily digested tribute to Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, mother of Fela, may lack the intensity and complexity of her newer work, standing alone it is tremendous. In this diptych, a wide-legged Eve triumphantly slings a headless snake across her shoulder while her stiletto boot drives down into the earth pinning down the snakes' head. The newer pieces may have more flash and glory and the earlier work may be sparer and plainer, but it's almost as though the artist knew she would have many opportunities to make her point. Hers is a talent that has been nurtured and allowed to cook slowly on the backburner, producing a rich, unctuous and sustaining broth.

In stark contrast to the collages is the video. In Eat Cake, a 12-minute loop in which the main character is played by the artist dressed in elaborate gothic garb, Mutu creates something akin to a horror movie. A wild creature, with talons for nails and unkempt hair squats over a cake as though defecating and proceeds to destroy it. Something in this piece feels borrowed, but from what? A "witch doctor" or medicine man "bringing the bones" and speaking the language of the spirits he calls forth? It's terrifying but mesmerising stuff.

In a specifically commissioned collaborative animated film, The End of Eating Everything, boundary-bending musician Santigold portrays a medusa-haired creature with an insatiable appetite. This piece places itself firmly in the emergent so-called genre Afrofuturism – a label that attempts to categorise similarly minded genre-flexible art which might include anyone from musicians Janelle Monae and Sun Ra to filmmaker and fellow Kenyan Wanuri Kahiu, whose short film, Pumzi, created a stir at Sundance a few years ago. In Afrofuturism the black experience is re-examined, often with alternate endings. Science fiction allows Africans and those of African descent to grapple with the painful legacies of the racialised past. Mutu's work will be included in an exploration of Afro-futurist art, opening soon at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York.

While this survey is comprehensive, a more complete viewing of Mutu's work would have to include more of the artists' extraordinary non-collage pieces. Two notable works, Exhuming Gluttony: Another Requiem, an installation in which wine bottles drip onto a huge wooden table in a room lined with animal pelts and the Blackthrones series – an assemblage of towering black chairs, are not included. Still, based on the vast and extraordinary body of work that Mutu has produced over the last decade, the well from which her inspiration springs, is deep. Undoubtedly, she has much more to show us.

Chiwoniso Kaitano is a writer and founder and curator of TheSALON, a literary reading and culture series in New York