Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya: Utopia – Dystopia

In his multimedia works, Nicholas Mboya addresses socio-political realities in his home country of Kenya alongside experiences of the African diaspora in Germany. In his first institutional solo exhibition, the Hamburg-based artist reflects on the field of tension between idealized notions of belonging and actual experiences of exclusion.

The kinetic installation Transit Point is the central work of the exhibition. Its motorized doors, which open and close as if by themselves, serve as a metaphor for translocal experiences and social as well as linguistic thresholds. The work transforms the space into a panopticon of controlled freedom of movement, hinting at the internalization of bureaucratic surveillance in the lives of migrants. New, large-scale paintings entitled In Trail Pursuit negotiate waiting as a social choreography – as a transitional moment, in which hope, exclusion and belonging manifest themselves. They are complemented by self-portraits from the series Rite of Passage, drawn on copies of official documents, which illustrate the weight of administrative procedures between the registration and attribution of identities.

Utopia – Dystopia explores migration, structural invisibility and external as well as self-perceptions in a present shaped by colonial continuities. It places the body at the centre – as a site of political inscription, as an archive of individual and collective memory, as an actor in the midst of social negotiation processes. And it invites us to question existing systems – poetically condensed and politically urgent.

Curated by Anna Nowak

The exhibition is kindly supported by Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.

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