Kenya / Germany

Ingrid Mwangi was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1975 to Kenyan and German parents. After moving to Germany in 1990, she attended the University of Fine Arts Saar, in Saarbrücken, Germany. There, she first studied Graphic Design and then changed her major to New Artistic Media. From 2001, she was an instructor at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Ingrid Mwangi works in a range of media, including video, installation, photography and performance art. Her works confront issues of race, identity and gender. Often using her body as subject, Mwangi explores her physicality, as well as issues of blackness and heritage, in relation to sociopolitical systems. She investigates identity in the context of personal experience and cultural positions on the foreign and exotic. From 1998 to 2002, she received a stipend from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Mwangi often collaborates creatively with her husband and fellow artist, Robert Hutter. Their work has been shown across Africa, Asia, Europe, United States and South America, at the Bienal de São Paulo, Venice Biennale, The Brooklyn Museum, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Dak’Art Biennale, Smithsonian Institution – National Museum of African Art and the Mori Museum Tokyo, among others. Mwangi lives and works in Berlin, Ludwigshafen and Nairobi.

Filmography

Within a Shadow Lies What Will Fall (2003)
View other video works here (mwangi-hutter.de)