Niklas Obermann - Publications

Solidarity in Practice

A Reader - Nairobi Print Project, 2026

"In October 2024, Nairobi Print Project and wherewithall hosted an online symposium bringing together arts practitioners from Southern and Eastern Africa to talk about the role solidarity in their work. The conversation aimed at gaining a better understanding of the conditions that enable mutual support between small-scale arts organisations and collectives. In bringing these different voices and their practices together, we wanted to imagine the art scene not as isolated practitioners, but a far-reaching community whose makeshift and resourceful modes of working are reinforced by collaboration and shared knowledge."

In this valley of dying stars

Exhibition Catalogue, The African Arts Trust, 2026

"We might read these clapping hands as a rebuttal, a parallel timeline, to what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes as the colonial shutter that left only “worlds shredded violently into legible pieces to compose historical narratives”. What the artist achieves in these pieces is to make visible this violent indexing of worlds and question its apparent neutrality. Indeed, space is not just mapped, it is made, as well as the narratives that are inscribed into it. Within this framework the black canvases take on a larger meaning. They become a rhythm of silences, representing the blind spots of the colonial lens and the presences it attempts to erase."

Generations & Memories

Edited by Niklas Obermann, Suzanne Mieko, Eric Manya, Exhibition Catalogue, Trust for Indigenous Cultures and Health, 2025

"Throughout this journey, one question kept resurfacing: “Why tell these (hi)stories?”. It is easy to respond to this by reducing the past to a simple lesson, or an empowering narrative. The most fruitful elements of our discussion, however, were those moments when history became visible in all its complexity. Not a clean linear narrative, but entanglements of agencies, identities and belongings, that shape the present – its lasting injustices and lingering traumas, but also surprising moments of kinship and recognition."

When Only Images Remain

In: Weganda Review, Issue 9, September 2025

"Reading his paintings against this backdrop, they speak to something more than a hopeful nostalgia. In his paintings, the figures are displaced, removed from their original photographic context. A monochrome void warps around them, emphasizing their composition and posture, but also placing these figures outside of reality in a subtle way. These images seem to live in our collective imagination as much as in the archive. In some of them, we find images within images, hanging just behind the main subject of the portrait is another portrait and, upon looking closer, even this one is blurry. These figures occupy a world of fading images, reminding us of the layered nature of grief and silence, and how they form their own lineages of resistant memories."

The Ties That Bind

Exhibition Catalogue, Goethe-Institut Nairobi, 2025

"We find here both glimpses into the artists personal obsessions, but also confrontations that shed light on the societal shifts and lingering questions that shape contemporary Kenya. Their pieces locate themselves at the intersection of personal and collective identities, asking us to (re)consider the ways in which we relate to each other and the world around us. "

Strange Places

Nairobi Print Project - Journal #2, Edited by Niklas Obermann

"The migratory experience has brought forth new ways of seeing and being in the world. Whether we move by free will or not, our mobility and the worldview it shapes are deeply entangled with violent histories and their effects today, contesting our conceptions of modernity, identity and citizenship. Through the lens of art, Strange Places highlights this breakdown of geographical perimeters of belonging and conceives it as a site of radical imagination, challenging restrictive identities and our own apathy to the lived realities of migrants"

Hybrid States

Nairobi Print Project - Journal #1, Edited by Niklas Obermann

"The positions gathered here remind us of the always transgressive power of art, not just as a gesture of protest, but as way towards understanding and feeling more deeply, and reimagining our world in the process. Although the works are deeply rooted in the artists experience, all of them point beyond the individual. Here we see the queer body splitting and merging, we join in the bravery of women gathering and feel pain relieved in moments of intimacy. These perspectives on empathy and communing, ultimately ask us: What new ways of being can be imagined through art?"

Into the Museum Archive

with Leonie Chima Emeka. In: Sam Hopkins / Marian Nur Goni (Ed.): Invisible Inventories. Johannesburg / Lagos / Bayreuth 2021.

"Investigating how Oldman operated provides new perspectives into the construction of European collections. In the beginning of the twentieth century, through collections, museum professionals prominently stated that they had discovered and studied the true, authentic Africa. Looking at Oldman’s practices, one gets quite a different impression: that of a long chain of acquisitions and a vast market across the continents. Every time an object changes hands it changes its meaning as well; the ndoome had to be far removed from the people who created it to be labelled “authentic” by Western Museums."

Black Panther hievt die Restitutionsdebatte auf die große Leinwand

Mit Tim B. Boroewitsch.

All of this belongs to whom?

Mit Merten Lagatz und Mathis Rufing.

Beides in: Merten Lagatz / Benedicte Savoy / Philippa Sissis (Ed.): Beute - ein Bildatlas zu Kunstraub und Kulturerbe. Berlin 2020.

"Die Nationalmuseen Großbritanniens, unter ihnen auch das V&A, garantieren einen kostenfreien Zugang zu ihren ständigen Sammlungspräsentationen. In diesem Sinne ist der Ausstellungsclaim von All of This Belongs to You durchaus nachvollziehbar. Das Museum ermöglicht Besucher*innen zu den regulären Öffnungszeiten freien Zutritt zu den ausgestellten Stücken seiner Sammlung und fordert sie dazu auf, den gewährten Zugang zur selbstbestimmten Auseinandersetzung mit den Objekten zu nutzen. [...] Viele Sammlungsstücke des V&A aber stammen nicht aus der unmittelbaren geografischen Nähe der Institution. So muss es doch ebenso legitim sein zu fragen, wen das »You« des Ausstellungstitels eigentlich ein- und wen es ausschließt."