The first comprehensive mid-career retrospective of the Canadian and French artist Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978) brings together an expansive work to create a unique aesthetic and insightful, physical experience.
With a practice based on the artist’s studies in anthropology and comparative religion, Kiwanga uses the power of color, light, and material to narrate global histories from new perspectives. Delicate ornamental plants hold toxic power, colors unfold manipulative effects, and light is unmasked as a political instrument.
With her so-called exit strategies, Kiwanga searches for a vocabulary to look at existing structures and power relations from new angles and to think about them differently in the future. Her installations, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photographs, as well as her sound and video works and lecture performances, thus contain a historical-political dimension that becomes more apparent at a second glance. Kiwanga reveals “hidden” social mechanisms, structural injustices, as well as global and everyday power asymmetries. In a poetic way she expands the viewer’s social horizon.
