Orlando-based Elizabeth Mputu is part of a rising wave of new media artists using digital platforms to express powerful political and social ideas through their work. Her art deals thoughtfully and forcefully with issues of feminism, gender, sexuality, inequality, and race, all projected through the lens of someone who has grown up saturated in all aspects of digital culture.
Mputu’s work combines abstract conceptualism, experimental video, performance, poetry, found digital ephemera, selfies, music (and much more) into defiantly cohesive trains of thought. Although her work is profoundly contemporary it is also increasingly informed by traditional and mystical concepts. Mputu has introduced her personal ancestral history and its healing spirituality into her practice, further reflecting the radical complexity of her thinking.
Mputu’s latest project, Broken Windows, was made for the popular new media art hub NewHive as part of a series exploring privacy, surveillance, and prison reform. Broken Windows is an interactive digital collage which guides us through a potent and personal reflection on a violent police state and the weaponized surveillance of those that live within it.
I spoke to Mputu about this project, the origins of her practice, and the place of spirituality and healing in her work.
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