Paul Mpagi Sepuya: In the gaze of desire

© Paul Mpgai Sepuya, Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles

What is the exhibition at the Sprengel Museum Hannover about?

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, California) is one of the most important voices in contemporary photography in the United States. The exhibition at the Sprengel Museum Hannover is the artist’s first major solo exhibition at a German museum. It reveals how the artist deconstructs the classical portrait in his poetic works, how he uses the camera as a tool while simultaneously creating spaces of intimacy, fragmentation, and reflection. Through the deliberate use of mirrors, fabrics, and studio elements, Sepuya questions the mechanisms of seeing—who is looking, who is being looked at, and how does photographic intimacy arise?

Sepuya’s practice is characterized by queer perspectives, a deliberate play with visibility, and a deep engagement with the photographic act itself. His images are not mere representations, but performative processes—open, sensitive, and always mindful of the medium’s power structures.

The exhibition, developed in collaboration between the Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Feb. 28–June 14, 2026), places Paul Sepuya’s artistic, media-based, and political endeavors regarding Blackness, the body, and spaces, as he describes his aim to “rethink the structures of photography, portraiture, and queer sociality in new ways” and “to acknowledge the fundamental position of Blackness as material—or Blackness and darkness as a place from which and into which one looks” (Paul Sepuya).
 

Curated by Stefan Gronert