Hotel Warszawa Art Fair, Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya & Agnieszka Sejud

04.09.2026 – 06.09.2026 | Room 213

Agnieszka Sejud: Choreography for Absence is a series of analogue photograms, produced as chromogenic prints, in which the artist performs inside the photographic darkroom. In the spirit of twentieth-century avant-garde pioneers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Christian Schad, Sejud returns to the photogram as a direct, contact-based technique, leaving imprints of her body on the light-sensitive emulsion of colour photographic paper. Exposure to multiple coloured light sources generates overlapping gradients, and the body gradually slips into abstraction. Shown together prints form a kind of dance: a record of choreography made for a time when the artist’s body will no longer exist.

Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya: Beautiful Fences is an ongoing body of work that examines institutional bureaucracy through the lens of soft power-the ability to influence what others desire through attraction, culture, values, and the production of a positive image, rather than through military force or direct economic coercion. Coined by political scientist Joseph Nye, the concept of soft power describes forms of influence that operate through persuasion and attraction, encouraging others to follow a particular model willingly. Yet beneath this seemingly benign form of influence, systems of access, regulation, and institutional control can produce barriers that foster exclusion and marginalisation. The series explores diasporic experiences from the Global South within the Global North, particularly the promise of integration as a prerequisite for improved living conditions and social mobility. It considers the tensions between the ideals of inclusion, opportunity, and belonging, and the bureaucratic structures and social conditions that can make these possibilities conditional, distant, or unevenly accessible. The works incorporate image transfers of photographs taken from concrete walls and surfaces in public spaces across Hamburg.

These photographic fragments document the material traces of the urban environment while evoking the institutional and architectural structures through which belonging is negotiated. Over these transferred images, I introduce brightly coloured acrylic patterns inspired by the jaali—a traditional architectural element found across Indian and Islamic design traditions and within the urban landscapes of East Africa. Typically constructed as stone or lattice screens featuring geometric or organic motifs, jaalis serve practical and aesthetic functions, including ventilation, passive cooling, light modulation, and privacy. Their perforated structures can also create a one-way visual condition: those on the inside may observe the outside, while those outside are prevented from seeing clearly inward, depending on differences in light. Within Beautiful Fences, the jaali becomes a metaphor for proximity without equal access. Its ornamental beauty suggests openness and permeability, while its function as a screen establishes a boundary between those who can see, participate, and move through a space and those who remain at a distance. This tension reflects the experience of navigating institutions and societies in which inclusion may appear attainable while remaining structured by invisible or opaque conditions. By bringing together bureaucratic structures, urban surfaces, diasporic experience, and architectural forms of screening,

Beautiful Fences considers how power can operate through attraction and aspiration while simultaneously producing distance. The work asks how seemingly welcoming systems can maintain boundaries, and how exclusion can be concealed within the visual language of openness, beauty, and opportunity.

Photo Credit: Agnieszka Sejud