First we want to say that we know what it's like to be sleep-deprived, so we're all the more grateful to Kenyan artist Jimmy Ogonga for staying up waaaaay past his bedtime to let us know how the opening for My Vision went in Mannheim, Germany on February 3. Jimmy collaborated with IngridMwangiRobertHutter (the husband and wife collective) on an installation for the show.
The show, titled My Vision: Ideen für die Welt von morgen, is mounted in Anna Reis Hall at the Reiss Engelhorn Museum, and the MwangiHutter/ Ogonga collaboration consists of video depicting one near-anonymous figure carving hatch marks into the back of another near-anonymous figure. We were reminded of similar depictions of scarification by Carl Pope in the 2000 WhiBi. Jimmy told us that the video grew out of ongoing conversations between the three artists--conversations that eventually arrived at the difficulty and pain around the idea of multiculturalism. Says Jimmy, "It is important to note that multiculturalism is the product of a clash, not a comfortable convergence."
The current piece, called "Conscious of the Wall," extends the work all three have done on loss, displacement, and trans-location. In fact, it was through a show on these ideas that we first started noticing Mwangi late last year.
Although the three have no specific plans to collaborate in the future, we've heard that coincidentally all three will be in Bamako, Mali in April for a video workshop titled Faces and the City, and that anything is possible from that confluence.
My Vision closes April 15.
