Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga was born in 1978 in Hamilton, Canada, and currently lives and works in Paris. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalized or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga co-opts the canon; she turns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories. In this manner Kiwanga has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that she described as “exit strategies,” works that invite one to see things from multiple perspectives so as to look differently at existing structures and find ways to navigate the future differently. In 2018, Kiwanga received the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and was also the winner of the annual Sobey Art Award (CA). Recent solo exhibitions include: Safe passage, MIT, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA (2019); Sunlight by Fireside: The Ash Annals, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada (2019); Flowers for Africa: Rwanda, Art Basel Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland, Goodman gallery, Galerie Jérôme Poggi, France, Tanja Wagner Gallery, Germany (2019); A wall is just a wall (and nothing more at all), Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada (2018); Ring the bells that still can ring... there is a crack in everything, ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas, USA (2018); A wall is just a wall, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2017); Afrogalactica, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turino, Italy (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include: Is This Tomorrow?, Whitechapel Gallery, London, GB (2019); Grace Wales Bonner, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, GB (2019); The Artist is Present, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2018); Sobey Art Award, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada (2018); Walls Turned Sideways : Artists Confront the American Justice System, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, USA (2018); The Landis Museum, Center for Contemporary Art, Derry-Londonderry. Ireland (2018); Stories for Almost Everyone - Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA (2018); Nouveau parcours et nouvelle présentation des collections contemporaines, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2017).