Current

27.09. – 16.11.2025

Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya

Utopia – Dystopia

Image credits below

Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya
Utopia – Dystopia
27.9.–16.11.2025

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

Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya (*1992, Kisumu, Kenya) studied Fine Arts at the Mwangaza School of Fine Arts Kisumu and at the HFBK Hamburg. His works have been exhibited at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, JO (2025), at ICAT, Hamburg, DE (2024), in the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, DE (2024), as part of the Fluctoplasma Festival, Hamburg, DE (2021), at the MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum Kulturen und Künste der Welt, Hamburg, DE (2021), and at the Alliance Francaise, Nairobi, KE (2018). He lives and works in Hamburg.

Exhibition text
Audio guide

Installation views: Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya: Utopia – Dystopia, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2025; Photos: Antje Sauer
Image 1: Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya, In Trail Pursuit IV, 2025, Courtesy the artist
Image 2: Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya, Transit Point, 2023, Courtesy the artist
Image 3: Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya, Rite of Passage, 2020, Courtesy the artist
Image 5: Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya, In Trail Pursuit III, 2025, Courtesy the artist

Kindly supported by

Hamburgische Kulturstiftung
07.08. – 02.11.2025

Whisper Down the Lane –
Laurel Chokoago

Laurel Chokoago, Proverbs, 2025, Courtesy the artist, Photos: Jaewon Kim

Whisper Down the Lane –
Laurel Chokoago

7 August – 2 November 2025
Kunsthaus foyer

Laurel Chokoago’s artistic practice combines subjective experience with theoretical research. Her multimedia works create spaces in which established notions of cultural identity are challenged and individual experiences can become visible. Pop cultural references and a thorough examination of social dynamics form central points of reference in her work.

This is precisely the intersection at which Proverbs (2025) operates – a new work that the artist developed especially for the exhibition series Whisper Down the Lane at the invitation of her predecessor Luzia Cruz. Its visual starting point is a scene from the music video for the song Sagacité by Douk Saga. The image is veiled by a semi-transparent surface, through which it is only vaguely discernable. On it you can read a quote taken from the song – a poignant line typical for the Coupé Décalé music style: “Les gens n‘aiment pas les gens mais les gens aiment l‘argent des gens”.

In the experimental and communicative exhibition format Whisper Down the Lane, the roles and functions of hosting and being hosted become fluid: in line with the eponymous children’s game, the exhibiting artists themselves choose the next person. With the project, the Kunsthaus transfers part of the curatorial responsibility to the artists themselves, with the aim of creating alternative institutional modes of access and rendering local network structures visible both in terms of personal ties and with regard to artistic approaches. So far, works by Jaewon Kim, Fritz Lehmann, Altay Tuz and Pia Pospischil and Luzia Cruz have been shown as part of Whisper Down the Lane.

Laurel Chokoago‘s (*1997 in Hamburg, DE) artistic practice encompasses time-based media, photography and installation. In 2025, she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the HFBK Hamburg. Her work has been exhibited at Camera Austria, Graz (2025); Friese Künstler:innen Haus, Hamburg (2024); RaumPro, Bremen (2023); MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg, DE (2021); and HVW8 Gallery, Berlin (2020), among others. She lives and works in Hamburg.

Thursday, 7 August 2025, 6 pm
Opening
in the context of Panorama XV with Dong Zhou & Isa Schwarzenberg

04.04.2024 – 01.03.2030

Katharina Duve

My Hand Seeks the Way

Image 1-3: Installation view: Katharina Duve – My Hand Seeks the Way, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2024, Photos: Antje Sauer
Image 4: Nina Rippel, Der geflüsterte Film (film still)

Katharina Duve
My Hand Seeks the Way

From 4 April 2024
Kunsthaus foyer

Situated between the street and the exhibition space, the foyer of the Kunsthaus is a place of transition; a threshold where modes of perception shift and questions about accessibility become evident. Following on from that observation, the Hamburg-based artist Katharina Duve has designed a new work for the stairs of the space.

My Hand Seeks the Way (2024) draws on an experimental film by Nina Rippel from 1992, which deals with the richness of human sensory impressions based on the perceptual world of blind people. Quotes from Rippel’s Der geflüsterte Film (“The Whispered Film”), her text Das Nicht-Sichtbare als Evidenz – Betrachtungen einer filmischen Praxis (“The Non-visible as Evidence – Reflections on a Cinematic Practice”) as well as poetic reflections by Katharina Duve herself were flocked onto eight seating elements made from felt in Braille and black letter. Thus, the work invites people with and without visual impairments to engage in an exchange about the complexity of perception through touch. Because not seeing does not mean perceiving less, but rather referring to an alternative spectrum of perceptions.

 Katharina Duve (*1980, Schwerin, GER) works in the fields of film, costume and performance. She is part of the filmmakers’ group Auge Altona, a collaborator of the music group Deichkind and a member of the performance collective geheimagentur. Since 2022, she has been a professor of Time-based Media at HAW Hamburg. Her artistic works have been shown at the Falckenberg Collection (2023), the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (most recently in 2022), the Tate Modern, London (2017) and Brut, Vienna (2017), among others. She lives and works in Hamburg.

11.11.2023 – 31.12.2026

Jil Lahr

Sticky Business

Installation view: Jil Lahr. Sticky Business, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2023, Photos: Antje Sauer

Jil Lahr
Sticky Business

From 11 November 2023
Kunsthaus Hamburg

Like in the cabinets of curiosities from the early phase of the museum history, Jil Lahr mixes objects of different origins and purposes to create space-related installations, drawing on an extensive collection. Removed from their original settings, the objects of global everyday life trigger new associations, which often reveal the bizarre and humorous nature of massproduced items. By taking them out of their conventional context of use, the artist addresses Western consumerism and refers to entertainment culture.

For the toilets of the Kunsthaus, Jil Lahr has developed the permanent installation Sticky Business. She intuitively redesigned the rooms using stickers that depict stones from her own archive. The natural objects, charged with personal memories, float in space and provide a wry commentary on the functional interior.