Ausstellungseröffnung: Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya: Utopia – Dystopia

In the organizer's words:

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

The kinetic installation Transit Point (2023) is the central work in the exhibition. Its motorized doors, which open and close as if by themselves, stand as a metaphor for translocal experiences and social and linguistic thresholds. The work transforms the space into a panopticon of controlled freedom of movement and thus also refers to the internalization of bureaucratic surveillance in migrant life realities. New, large-format paintings negotiate waiting as a social choreography - as a moment of in-between in which hope, exclusion and belonging manifest themselves. They are complemented by self-portraits, made on copies of official documents, which illustrate the weight of administrative procedures between identity registration and attribution.

Utopia - Dystopia explores migration, structural invisibility and the perception of self and others in a present characterized by colonial continuities. It focuses on the body - as a place 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 orders - poetically condensed and politically urgent.

Friday, 26.9.2025, 7 pm
Opening
Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya
Utopia - Dystopia
Introduction: Anna Nowak
DJ set: yung_womb

Free admission

Price information:

Exhibition openings at the Kunsthaus Hamburg are always free.