Ingrid Mwangi’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Ingrid Mwangi (born 1975) is a Kenyan-German artist. She attended Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken, Germany from 1996–2002. She works with photography, sculpture and in multimedia, performance, and installation art.

Life and career

Ingrid Njeri Mwangi was born in Nairobi in 1975 to a German mother and a Kenyan father. She moved to Germany at the age of 15. Mwangi works and lives in Berlin, Germany with her husband and collaborator Robert Hutter.

Mwangi’s work is concerned with social conventions and identity. She participated in the 2007 Brooklyn Museum exhibition Global Feminisms. Her 2001 series of photographs, Static Drift, was included. The work makes use of images evoking national and racial identities projected onto her body. Mwangi’s 2000 work Neger Don’t Call Me features photographs of her face covered with masks made from her dreadlocks.

Mwangi Hutter

In 2005, she and her husband merged their biographies and names to form one artist, Mwangi Hutter. As a creative strategy to resist fixed notions of identity based upon gender, race, and cultural backgrounds, Mwangi Hutter strategically merged names and biographies to become one artist. They consciously use themselves as the sounding board to reflect on changing societal realities, creating an aesthetics of self-knowledge and interrelationship. Mwangi Hutter reflect on the subjects of border-crossing and finding identity, which both can be understood in a political, as well as a very personal, intimate sense. Their works can be seen as a vision of unification and the pacification of contrasts: female-male, African-European, black-white and the borders separating you and me. They have four children.

Exhibitions

Solo shows

• 2002: Ingrid Mwangi – Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Saarbrücken
• 2006: Man of War – Video, Installation, Fotografie – Kunstverein Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt
• 2007: IngridMwangiRobertHutter: Select Videos, 2006-2007 – BRIC Rotunda Gallery, New York City, NY
• 2007: MASK – James Cohan Gallery – New York, New York City, NY
• 2007: GOTH – Reality of the Departed World – Yokohama Museum of Art, Nishi-ku, Yokohama
• 2008: IngridMwangiRobertHutter – Along the Horizon – Galleria Il Trifoglio Nero, Genoa
• 2009: IngridMwangiRobertHutter: Masked – Emerson Gallery at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
• 2009: In the Eye of the Beholder – Darb 1718 Contemporary Art and Culture Center, Cairo
• 2009: Intruders – Goethe-Institut Nairobi, Nairobi
• 2009: Sleepers on the way – Goethe-Institut Tansania, Dar es Salaam
• 2011: Constant Triumph – Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
• 2013: Mwangi Hutter – Single Entities / @ Salon – ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES BERLIN | BEIJING, Berlin