1975–present
Ingrid Mwangi
In 2000 Ingrid Mwangi (born 1975) photographed her face hidden behind masks made from her own dreadlocks and called the series “Neger Don’t Call Me”. She was born in Nairobi, has lived in Germany since the age of fifteen and studied with Ulrike Rosenbach. Since 2005 she has worked with Robert Hutter under the joint name Mwangi Hutter: video, installation, photography, performance.
Biography
In 2000 Ingrid Mwangi made a series of photographs in which her face is covered by masks woven from her own dreadlocks. The series is called “Neger Don’t Call Me”.
Ingrid Njeri Mwangi was born in 1975 in Nairobi to a German mother and a Kenyan father. At fifteen she moved to Germany, by some accounts first to Ludwigshafen am Rhein. From 1996 to 2002 she studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar (the University of Fine Arts of Saarland) in Saarbrücken, with Ulrike Rosenbach. Her own specialisation there is described as performance and multimedia. Mwangi’s subjects are social conventions, identity, the Western view of Africa, and the relations and contradictions between the European and African worlds. She works with photography, sculpture, sound and video installations, objects and performance. A year after “Neger Don’t Call Me”, in 2001, came the series “Static Drift”: images evoking national and racial identities were projected onto the artist’s body. Her first solo exhibition took place in 2002 at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken. In 2007 photographs from “Static Drift” were included in the exhibition “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
In 2005 she and her husband, Robert Hutter, merged their names and biographies and became a single artist: Mwangi Hutter. They explain the decision as a way of resisting fixed notions of identity based on gender, race and cultural background. They themselves are the material of the work. The couple’s subjects are border-crossing and the search for identity, understood both politically and very personally. The opposites of female and male, African and European, black and white are reduced in their work to the border between “you” and “me”.
From 2006 the couple showed their work in solo exhibitions: “Man of War” at the Kunstverein Ingolstadt (2006), “MASK” at the James Cohan Gallery in New York and “GOTH” at the Yokohama Museum of Art (both 2007), and “Along the Horizon” in Genoa (2008). In 2009 there were shows at the Darb 1718 centre in Cairo and at the Goethe-Institut in Nairobi (“Intruders”) and in Dar es Salaam (“Sleepers on the way”). In 2011 “Constant Triumph” was shown at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta.
Today Ingrid Mwangi lives and works in Berlin.
Profile notes