Opening: 04.02.2026, 6 p.m.

05./ 06./ 07./ 08.02.2026, Admission from 6 p.m., last entry at 9p.m.

in English, German, Lango, with subtitles

Who are we, those of us who have multiple origins? And to whom some of those origins are denied? How do we recognize the richness that emerges from our multiple heritages?

Filmmaker, curator, and multimedia artist Mona Okulla Obua presents her first comprehensive solo exhibition in Berlin at Ballhaus Naunynstraße. As part of the festival Black Berlin Black – Festivity, she will present all three performance spaces over five days with immersive film installations, some of which will be shown here for the first time.

The works Yao, Lawino/Mirror, and INDIGO, presented in the exhibition Untitled Origins by Mona Okulla Obua, invite viewers to listen deeply to themselves and to the world. Full of poetry and meditative rhythms, the film installations tell of a search for new connections to what is stored in the body: unconscious, suppressed and unsettled. Lawino/Mirror functions like a mirror welcoming the audience, except that instead of presenting a single identity in a Eurocentric sense, it shows two faces that are one. Right next door, in Yao, the shea tree takes centre stage – the sacred symbol of Lango culture and a living witness to northern Uganda, scarred by multiple wars. Here the making of shea butter becomes a ritual of resistance and survival. The images form an intimate meditation on healing, intergenerational memory and cultural resilience. At the same time – much like in INDIGO – they speak of an approach to the complexity of being. For Mona Okulla Obua understands her works as a dialogue between diaspora and continent, tradition and the present, past and future.

Few artists manage to weave cinematic poetry and politics together as successfully as Mona Okulla Obua. This is evident both in her own works and in the film series Black Eyes on Black Bodies, which she has curated at Ballhaus Naunynstraße since November 2023. Now, with Untitled Origins, her most extensive work to date can be experienced in Berlin.