USA and Kenya / 2003 / Installation, Video Art

within the shadow lies what will fall is a two-channel video installation in which Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter engage in a dialogue about cultural identity, place and contextual exchange. While traveling in Kenya, the artists film one another as they cut their hair. Projected side-by side, the artists present the hair cutting process as a symbolic act of transformation.

Mwangi Hutter

Artist duo, Mwangi Hutter (Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter), merged names and biographies to become one artist, to resist fixed notions of identity based on race, gender and cultural backgrounds. Ingrid Mwangi was born in 1975 in Nairobi, Kenya. Robert Hutter was born in 1964 in Ludwigshafen, Germany. They both received New Artistic Media degrees from the University of Fine Arts Saar, Saarbrücken, and have received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, and residency scholarships of the Rhineland-Palatinate studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Mwangi’s work has been shown at the Museum for African Art, NY and the Bienal de Sao Paulo, amongst others. They have collaborated on works for several exhibitions including: Next Flag 1, The Casino Luxembourg Forum of Contemporary Art; Exhibition of Video Works Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, Center of Contempory Art of East Africa, GoDown Arts Center, Nairobi; and A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Mwangi and Hutter live in Ludwigshafen, 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. Robert Hutter’s work centers on the body as an interface between self and society, using computer and performance techniques to investigate such themes as the virtual body.
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