Niklas Obermann - Publications

Generations & Memories

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

"This publication in many ways reflects a still ongoing conversation and process. Aside from just documenting the ideas that shaped the fellowship and the artworks, we also wanted to make the publication into an extension of the exhibition – including works of poetry, photographic essays and experimental texts. Hopefully, this reader will serve as a companion to the visitor, adding layers to the work on display, but also allowing these to resonate beyond the exhibition space."

When Only Images Remain

In: Weganda Review, Issue 9, September 2025

"Waleed´s images then highlight this making of collective and individual identities, as he explains in conversation. Sometimes copying the entire photograph, sometimes only their central figure, Waleed uses painterly technique to reveal something new in these archival documents, rendering them distorted, covering them with cotton wool or placing them in a void of abstract colors. Several portraits highlight women, exhibiting different dress-codes, from a headscarf to short dresses, traditional earrings and expensive watches. They speak towards the very “collective in-betweenness” but are united by a shared sense of ease – whatever they wear, the women in these images seem to exude a sense of ease and confidence."

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 and the idea that all discourse and critical models within artistic practice emerge from a micro even when they are not defined or restricted by it. Here we see move with the queer body splitting and merging, we join in the bravery of women gathering and feel pain relieved in moments of intimacy. These perspectives of 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."