Kapwani Kiwanga

The intersection of art and anthropology can be traced to the long-standing human desire to collect, classify, and display across cultures and time. In Western societies, the systematic accumulation and exhibition of objects considered to be culturally valuable dates back to the Renaissance-era cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer, the precursor by several centuries to the modern art museum. Meant to inspire and amaze, these cabinets began in private, domestic spaces but over time expanded to entire rooms in the public sphere, eventually becoming what we know today as natural history, anthropology, and ethnographic museums. It wasn?t until the late seventeenth century that the first art museums appeared, taking their cue from these private curio collections turned public, where art collections of the royal, wealthy, and ruling elite made their way into public spaces for exhibition. In many ways, art museums evolved in opposition to natural history museums, the relationship between the two echoing undercurrents of the longstanding discussion between ?high? and ?low? art. In tandem, anthropological endeavors aspired to remain a comfortable distance from notions of fine art, averse to ethnographic methods becoming aestheticized and the inherent colonialist impulses present in both fields. (...)

Taking the politics of making as its point of departure, this group exhibition explores the cultural meanings that emerge from the materials artists use. Drawing on the writings of Édouard Glissant, guest curator Daisy Desrosiers assembles a selection of works that engage often-overlooked narratives within cultural histories, considering the itinerant and opaque legacies that surround certain materials. Ideas of belonging, witnessing, domesticity, and migratory journeys are brought to the fore, engaging shared and self-reflective experiences and inviting audiences to be guided by the stories that they tell.

In April 1955, representatives of 29 newly, and struggling-to-be, independent countries from Asia and Africa gathered for a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, to champion common interests of national sovereignty, decolonisation, anti-imperialism and economic development. The international meeting of new geopolitical alliances represented 54% of the world population at the time and signalled a pivotal moment for postcolonial political order. From this encounter emerged the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) formed by nations that embraced the above and shunned the polarities of the Cold War – the Third World. [...]

From April 12 to 27, Black.Art.Empowerment: I see, I speak, I am movement, curated by Rhodnie Désir, will feature gatherings and socio-artistic laboratories by Afrodescendant artists from Montreal and the diaspora. The focus will be on issues and experiences of civil rights social engagement. This three-week event is organized in conjunction with performances by five international artists.
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Kapwani Kiwanga
AFROGALACTICA : A brief history of the future [performance]
19/04/2019 20h

As part of the Demonstration Rooms project, Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga and Judy Radul have been invited to reflect on the presentation of the collection in the Albertinum. In various rooms of the museum they have developed artistic interventions that interrogate customary viewing habits and spatial perception. Hence, this project builds upon the ideas of El Lissitzky who in 1926 created a ?Demonstration Room? for the Dresden International Art Exhibition, through which he sought to make the viewing of art a more active process by taking an unconventional approach to interior design. Even today, the progressive designs of Mondrian and Lissitzky still have the potential to inspire innovative thinking.

In an era when humanity is facing new challenges posed by big data, bioengineering and climate change, Whitechapel Gallery has invited ten groups of artists, architects and other cultural practitioners to explore the potential of collaboration and offer their visions of the future. They imagine scenarios in which queer desire, house music and fracking meet on a mountainside; grief and microbes generate new possibilities for housing; or machines dispense objects and emotions to support our place in the technological world of tomorrow.

At the core of Safe Passage, Kiwanga?s exhibition at the List Center, is an engagement with racialized surveillance and the power dynamics inherent in seeing and being seen. Kiwanga follows the lineage of surveillance and positions it in relation to blackness in America, from its roots in slavery to the role that technology performs today. Safe Passage presents four recent interconnected bodies of work that address the history of forced visibility, strategic concealment, and networks of resistance.

Grace Wales Bonner explores mysticism, ritual and magical resonances within black cultural and aesthetic practices. Over the course of one month, a multi-sensory installation and a series of happenings will invite contemplation and activate the spaces of the Serpentine.

The exhibition will include a series of site-specific shrines by Kapwani Kiwanga, Eric N. Mack, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Grace Wales Bonner. The musician Laraaji will lead a series of meditation workshops during the exhibition?s opening days that will become a lasting shrine of sound within the space, whilst Rashid Johnson?s installations using carpets will create a sense of grounding throughout the Gallery. Interested in the improvisation, intentionality and repurposing of shrines from the Black Atlantic, Wales Bonner will draw upon their relational nature, as material portals into multiple worlds and frames of experience.

If one of the main purposes of science fiction is to predict the future by simultaneously analysing the present and the past, it is important to emphasise that this genre?s literary tradition was continually hostage to the patriarchal and white narrative of its authors. Over recent decades, Afrofuturism has defended an artistic practice that combines scientific fiction with elements and traditions of a diaspora that is attentive to its historical roots in an Ancient Africa well before the colonial era. Can a community whose past has been deliberately erased seek out marks from its history and imagine possible futures?

Kapwani Kiwanga creates works across installation, sound, performance, sculpture and video that marry her training in anthropology, comparative religion and documentary film with her interests in history, memory and storytelling. Presenting rigorous research in imaginative ways, Kiwanga intentionally confuses truth and fiction in her work to enable marginalized narratives to flourish. With a veracious appetite for exploring different pockets of knowledge, she has tackled subjects as far ranging as space travel, anti-colonial struggles, geology and disciplinary architectures.

In the third chapter Variations on Time, Karma Ltd. Extended presents the work of female artists who deal with non-anthropocentric, organic tenses and question the traditional time patterns. By providing access to forms of knowledge and understandings that the dominant linear and anthropocentric time culture suppresses, they invite us to imagine different ways of interspecies co-existence and counter-narratives.

Working with sound, film, performance, and objects, Kapwani Kiwanga (born in Canada, based in Paris) relies on extensive research to transform raw information into investigations of historical narratives and their impact on political, social, and community formation. Her work focuses on sites specific to Africa and the African diaspora, examining how certain events expand and unfold into popular and folk narratives, and revealing how these stories take shape in objects and oral histories. Trained as an anthropologist, Kiwanga performs this role in her artistic practice, using historical information to construct narratives about groups of people. Kiwanga is not only invested in the past but also the future, creating speculative dossiers from future civilizations to reflect on the impact of historical events. In the series Subduction Studies (2015-2017), Kiwanga observes the space between Earth's continents, specifically Africa and Europe. The speculation of Pangaea Ultima suggests a supercontinent occurring again, which will see Europe slipping underneath Africa.

Kiwanga is the winner of the 2018 Frieze Artist Award. Her work has been shown at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), Tate Liverpool (2017) and Portikus (Frankfurt, 2017), among others. Kiwanga’s performances have been presented at Documenta 14 (Athens, 2017), Momentum 9 (Oslo, 2017), Tate Modern (London, 2014) and Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2014), among others.

Kapwani Kiwanga is the winner of the Frieze Artist Award, a major opportunity for an emerging artist launching at Frieze New York 2018. The artist will realize an open-air installation in Randall?s Island Park, for the Frieze New-York art fair in may of 2018.

Stories of Almost Everyone is an exhibition about the willingness to believe the stories that are conveyed by works of contemporary art.

The Or Gallery is a non-profit, artist-run centre in Vancouver, Canada, with a focus on contemporary, conceptual practices. Since its inception in 1983, the Or Gallery has acted as a space for research, conceptual experimentation and documentation. The exhibition Kapwani Kiwanga: Flowers for Africa is scheduled for September 9 ? October 14, 2017 with an opening reception on Friday, September 8, 2017.

Kapwani Kiwanga?s ongoing series, Flowers for Africa,is a conceptual project that questions the material from which history is understood and imaged. Starting with research into visual archives relating to decolonization, Kiwanga located archival photographs that pictured different flower arrangements used in ceremonies or events related to the independence of African countries. She then took these images to a local florist and worked with them to recreate the bouquets found in the photographs, as closely as possible using available flowers. The fresh arrangements are then displayed in the exhibition and left to wilt over the duration of the show, just as memory might fade over time.

For the exhibition at the Or Gallery, we will recreate all of the works to date in Kiwanga?s Flowers for Africa series. These works exist in the form of a protocol; each time they are exhibited the organizing institution recreates the artworks. This exhibition is organized by artist and writer, Kathleen Ritter, and accompanied by a conversation between Ritter and Kiwanga on the use of archival research in contemporary cultural production. A publication will be produced after the exhibition.

Working with sound, film, performance, and objects, Kiwanga relies on extensive research to transform raw information into investigations of historical narratives and their impact on political, social, and community formation. Her work focuses on sites specific to Africa and the African diaspora, examining how certain events expand and unfold into popular and folk narratives, and revealing how these stories take shape in objects and oral histories. Trained as an anthropologist, Kiwanga performs this role in her artistic practice, using historical information to construct narratives about groups of people. Kiwanga is not only invested in the past but also the future, telling Afrofuturist stories and creating speculative dossiers from future civilizations to reflect on the impact of historical events.

Kiwanga was born in 1978 in Hamilton Canada and lives in Paris, France. She graduated from McGill University, Canada with a degree in Anthropology and Comparative Religions. She has been artist-in-residence at L?Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris. Le Fresnoy: National Contemporary Art Studio (France); MU Foundation, Eindhoven (Netherlands); Le Manège, Dakar, Senegal. She has exhibited her works internationally and her film and video works have been nominated for two BAFTAs and have received awards at international film festivals.

Patrick Beaulieu, Vincent Chevillon, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, Raphaëlle de Groot, Kapwani Kiwanga,
Nadia Myre, Eléonore Saintagnan, Sébastien Rémy et Cyril Verde.

Curator: Ann Stouvenel

Everything begins with a journey, from the idea itself to the physical displacement. From oceans crossed to populations encountered, from a simple click on send to treading on well-worn paths, globe-trotting artists are full of wonderful tales. These stories recall fortuitous discoveries made on stopovers, here and there, somewhere in our global and post-digital world. Curiosity leads to the collection of information from those who are most willing to share it. The transfer of these stories, from their point of origin to here, is led by these great travellers who navigate the depths that sublimate reality. Artists immerse themselves in these depths. From their chosen raw materials, they collect, cut, assemble, divert, re-appropriate, and create relationships. They have returned with unique beliefs and customs, memories of a history marked by the collateral damage of modernism, the feedback of the journey itself, and moments of reverie. Back home again, distance is re-established and opens the door to other worlds, revealed, questioned, mystified, re-enchanted.The works on view here have been specifically produced or recreated for this exhibition context.

Ann Stouvenel / Translation Jo-Anne Balcaen

16h / Kapwani Kiwanga - conférence-performance / 26 min

Béatrice Balcou, Marcelline Delbecq & Ellie Ga, Ben Evans & Luís Miguel Félix, Ricardo Jacinto, Kapwani Kiwanga, Anouchka Oler, Catarina de Oliveira, Onze Heures Onze Orchestra, Pétrel | Roumagnac (duo), Projecto Teatral

With: Natalie Czech; Kapwani Kiwanga
Episodes by: Chiara Camoni, Douglas Coupland, David Horvitz, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass Jr.

Flowers are Documents ? Arrangement I and II gathers and juxtaposes the positions of various artists whose ongoing interest in the subject of flower arrangement opens out into investigations of several parallel fields of research.

Drawing on this traditional ?theme? in painting and responding to the landscape of the South Tyrol with its rooted and blooming floricultural industry, the exhibition proposes practices that focus on and problematize notions of decoration and ornament, the ephemeral and the marginal.
Bouquets and ikebana become agents that make it possible to move alongside historical events and extreme presents so as to address issues like decolonization, legality, cultural identity and placemaking. At the same time they question what a document is by offering oblique ways of understanding both the nature of ?the exhibit? and the act of exhibiting itself.

As consecutive seasons, the two chapters Arrangement I and Arrangement II unfold around real flower compositions by four artists as an accumulation in space. Four new commissions are accompanied and supported by ?episodes? conceived by other artists, designers and writers: vases, books, videos and exhibition projects. By changing the configurations of the works, the successive arrangements intertwine the ?event? of blossoming with the process of ageing so as to stress the time-based nature of the ?matter?

Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power combines an exhibition with a public program of lectures, panel discussions, performances and screenings to present stories from the history of feminist struggle. Issues of race, gender and class are covered from a so-called intersectional perspective, an approach that works to bring to the fore the combinations of discriminatory practices and the dynamics they engender. The project’s title refers to the 2009 lecture of the same name by Gloria Wekker, renowned Surinamese-Dutch scholar with an established reputation within the transnational and Black European feminist discourse.

Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power wishes to extend its scope beyond Western, white feminism and to trace the beginnings of a transnational and intersectional perspective in Belgian feminism and beyond. The project’s starting point was the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts and its first (and thus far sole) female head Chantal De Smet, who held the position from 1989 to 1996. In the early 1970s, De Smet was a central character in the Ghent Dolle Minas, one of the first initiatives of the second feminist wave in Flanders. She was also one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Angela Davis Committee.

It was the second feminist wave that pushed the United Nations to taking measures to improve the position of women, resulting in the UN declaring the period 1976-1985 the decade of the woman and the organisation of women’s conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). FORUM ’85, the alternative conference of women’s movements and non-governmental organizations taking place alongside the official UN conference in Nairobi was a key moment in the history of transnational feminism. Attended by 14,000 women, activists and feminists from mainly non-Western countries, it was the first occasion of that scale to stage worldwide encounters and exchanges of ideas.

Documents from public archives that provide insight in these historical and local contexts make up the backbone of the exhibition. In addition, visual artists Marwa Arsanios, Saddie Choua, Amandine Gay, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ato Malinda, Eva Olthof and collective Study Group for Solidarity and TransActions were invited to make new work, connecting with these archives and themes and approach them from a postcolonial, transnational or politically emancipatory context. They offer new critical perspectives on history and in turn help to shape the guise of another new wave of feminism.

The public program wishes to think about how feminism can radically rethink notions such as class, gender and race from a postcolonial perspective. The program starts with a screening of Françoise Dasques’ film La conférence des femmes – Naïrobi (1985) about FORUM ’85, followed by a conversation between Paola Bacchetta (professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley) and French political scientist Françoise Vergès.

Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who is in Power is organized by KIOSK and KASK / School of Arts Ghent in the context of The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989, a project initiated by the museum confederation L’Internationale with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union. The project is curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Wim Waelput and assistant curator Rachelle Dufour.

In cooperation with Amsab-
ISG, AVG-Carhif and Sophia asbl/vzw.

Patrick Javault invites Kapwani Kiwanga, artist, and Oulimata Gueye, curator.

CURATOR: CAROLIN KÖCHLING

Kapwani Kiwanga's artistic approach is grounded in her anthropological background. Historical facts, fictional, magical and supernatural elements are interwoven in Kiwanga's research-based projects. In her lecture-performance Afrogalactica: A brief history of the future (2012-ongoing) she takes on the role of a fictional anthropologist to speculate on the future, investigating Afrofuturism as a means to examine the past from an African or African disaporic subjectivity.

Born in Hamilton, Canada and based in Paris, Kapwani Kiwanga produces works across installation, performance, and video that marry her training in anthropology and comparative religions with her interests in history, memory, and mythology. Presenting rigorous research in imaginative ways, Kiwanga intentionally confuses truth and fiction in her work in order to enable fantastical narratives.

For her first solo exhibition in the United States, Kiwanga presents a site-specific installation, video, and prints that draw on the artist's research into the design of institutional spaces, including materials found in the University of Chicago's Special Collections Library. Across the elements of Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts, Kiwanga deconstructs the physical and psychological qualities of different built environments including schools, prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities. In the main gallery, Kiwanga brings together architectural elements from historical and contemporary versions of these spaces including wall sections, lighting fixtures, and surface treatments creating a spatial collage that escapes the sum of its fragments. For these works, Kiwanga has drawn from her extensive research into disciplinary architectures throughout time, extracting specific details from the designs of late 19th century workhouses and reformatory schools in Britain and France respectively.

A distinctive feature of the exhibition is the artist's transposition of two-tone color palettes, often used in the interiors of institutional spaces, onto the gallery walls. Social hygiene movements and hospital reforms at the turn of the 20th century inform the artist's selection of colors as well as the work of Chicago-born color consultant and color theorist Faber Birren. A student in the College at UChicago in the early 1920's, Birren later established a consulting company, advising on the use of color in industry and the workplace. Drawing from color design studies by Faber Birren and Company held at the University of Chicago's Special Collections Library, Kiwanga thereby recalls the application of color theory to the conditions of work, learning, surveillance, healing, and care. Also on view is a selection of prints that reproduce images from Birren's archive and a new film A primer that delves deeper into the spatial histories of different building typologies. The new commissioned film A primer is co-produced by Logan Center Exhibitions, University of Chicago and The Power Plant, Toronto.

Portikus is pleased to present the exhibition House of Commons with works by younger and internationally established artists. Throughout its duration, House of Commons changes constantly and thus sees itself less as a static group exhibition than as a dynamic project. Art works will be added, swapped out, and rearranged weekly. Each of these presentations will be enhanced by discussions of the works, film screenings, and performances. The exhibition is kicked-off with the juxtaposition of only two works: Danh Vo?s sculpture WE THE PEOPLE (2011), a one-to-one replica of the Statue of Liberty in 225 fragments, of which Portikus shows a part of the foot, and Passer en Angleterre, Accès terminal transmanche, Calais, juillet 2007, a photograph by Bruno Serralongue that captures a moment of waiting in the lives of refugees on the French coast. Starting from this dual presentation, the exhibition continues to grow, and in subsequent chapters presents more photographs, paintings, sculptures, and video works.

House of Commons arose in response to the political events of recent months in Europe and the United States. A general change in mood can be sensed?events such as the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump call into question the basis of democratic action and reveal the importance of constructive debate over different opinions and views. Against this backdrop, the exhibition presents both artistic works that deal explicitly with political or social issues as well as works dealing with more fundamental questions inherent in art itself. In this way, Portikus takes a political stance, argues through art, and using the simple gesture of juxtaposition, emphasizes the importance of dialogue and engagement with opposing opinions for our common coexistence.

RUN, RUN, RUN, an exhibition about the concept of artist -run space, designed by twenty European structures and more than forty artists, transforming the Villa Arson in vast project of creation and experimentation. Project upon the 20th anniversary of La Station (Nice).

Curator : Clelia Cloussonnet

Artists : Alberto Baraya, Joscelyn Gardner, Sasha Huber & Petri Saarikko, Kapwani Kiwanga, Pia Rönicke, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

The exhibition Botany under Influence investigates the economic and diplomatic implications of nature?s uses and exchange flows. In the colonial era, for instance, Western powers built their wealth looting human and natural resources; systematically appropriating or exporting workforce, plants and minerals. As an aftereffect, control over flora and seeds has become a symbol of national, political and food sovereignties.

Curator : Raffaella Frascarelli

Artists: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Meris Angioletti, Franc esco Arena, Kader Attia, Elisabetta Benassi, Daniel Buren, Loris Cecchini, Zhen Chen, Isabelle Cornaro, Michael Dean, Tomaso De Luca, Giulio Delvé, Maria Adele Del Vecchio, Gabriele De Santis, Flavio Favelli, Piero Golia, Petrit Halilaj, David Horvitz, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jannis Kounellis, Marko Lulic, Emiliano Maggi, Masbedo, Rosalind Nashashibi, Alessandro Piangiamore, Gianni Politi, Valerio Rocco Orlando, Michal Rovner, Marinella Senatore, Sissi, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Adrian Tranquilli, Guido van der Werve, Nico Vascellari, Tris Vonna Michell, Sislej Xhafa.

Curator : Chris Sharp

A Change of Heart is an exhibition all about flowers. Directly addressing a subject matter that has always been historically marginalized as a subgenre, seen as little more than the byproduct of a charming amateurism, and minor art making, A Change of Heart embraces the floral still life in all its formal, symbolic, political and aesthetic heterogeneity. The exhibition seeks to mobilize and put into dialogue a radical and even dizzying diversity of approaches, including the queer, the decorative, the scientific, the euphemistic, the memento mori, the painterly, the deliberately amateur and minor as a position, and much more. To this end, the exhibition combines a broad selection of recent historical works
starting from the ‘60s and the following decades up to a selection of emerging positions which address the floral each in their own way. At once quaint and absurd, the exhibition intends to touch, provoke and overwhelm through the concentrated and manifold complexity of its singular and timeless subject matter. The exhibition will be accompanied by a print handout of selected floral poem.

Opening April 24th at 4pm

free shuttle bus from Opéra Bastille 3.30pm to La Ferme du Buisson  / reservation at (+33)1 64 62 77 00

After a number of well-received exhibitions abroad, La Ferme du Buisson is now presenting her biggest solo show to date. Kapwani Kiwanga draws on her training in the social sciences for experimental projects in which she plays the part of a researcher.


For her exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson, she is occupying all the art centre?s exhibition spaces with previous works and three big, site-specific installations. Via this blending of materials and ideas relating to economics, agriculture, magic, anthropology and museology, she extends earlier research, undertaken at the Jeu de Paume and the South London Gallery, into belief systems and pre- and post-independency trajectories in Tanzania.

Her project combines two lines of research : the first focusing on the magical powers attributed to plants in situations of political and social resistance ; and the second into the concept of Ujamaa, the origin of pan-African socialism. In organic installations, videos, sound pieces and performances, Kapwani Kiwanga takes us on a journey through belief systems involving supernatural powers and political utopianism. This leads her, in turn, to scrutinise our ability to continue believing in various forms of resistance despite the failures of the past.

La Ferme du Buisson, scène nationale de Marne-la-Vallée
Allée de la Ferme
77186 Noisiel

More information on : http://www.lafermedubuisson.com/

2016 is a meaningful year for Ireland as it marks the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a moment of great significance in the struggle for liberation from British colonial rule. Responding to the context of the centenary, EVA International 2016 curated by Koyo Kouoh will be entitled Still (the) Barbarians and will investigate the post-colonial condition of Ireland as a point of departure from where artistic reflections, critical redefinitions and political transformations are articulated.

Still (the) Barbarians participating artists:

Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley (Ireland) / Liam Gillick (UK) / Yong Sun Gullach (Denmark) / Carsten Höller (Belgium) / Dorothy Hunter (Northern Ireland) / Jeremy Hutchison (UK) / Joanna Hutton (UK) / Alfredo Jaar (Chile) / Michael Joo (USA) / Journal Rappé(Senegal) / Kapwani Kiwanga (Canada/France) / Abdoulaye Konaté (Mali) / Syowia Kyambi (Kenya) /Kemang Wa Lehulere (South Africa) / Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong) / Charles Lim Yi Yong (Singapore) /Alice Maher (Ireland) etc.

With Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Fadlabi, Rana Hamadeh, Kapwani Kiwanga
Curator : Jens Maier-Rothe

Shifted from a familiar mental movement, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle - in between things, between this and that sense, between one fiction and many others. "Between One Time and Another" unhinges a series of narratives and stories, re-choreographing them in a different way. Documented as fragments, suspended in time and decomposed into narrative textures and ideological strands, they are investigated, filtered and rearranged in a new light. Narratives and stories take on a different sort of legibility, giving insight into the workings of their historical effects. Arranged in seemingly static configurations, the artists refract the light of historical facts, turning cartographies upside down. They speculate on future pasts, question stratigraphic oracles and expose new concepts of "otherness" as outdated strategies of alienation. Mute things are given a voice and once forgotten ideas reappear as fantastic interpretations of today's power relations, yielding a collection of told stories and untold histories, strange encounters with local heroes and fossil witnesses of colonial inversion. Together they create a multi-perspective projection machine, sharpening our sensesfor the narrative layers of power, violence and hegemony over the supposed "Other".

Opening : March, 4th, 6.00 pm

Le Granit
1 Faubourg de Montbéliard
90002 Belfort

The 2016 Commissioned Artist is Kapwani Kiwanga, appointed by the Focus curators, Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba, and The Armory Show. The Armory Show launched its distinguished Artist Commission in 2002, extending its commitment to supporting artists' development by providing a global stage for their work. In this capacity, Kiwanga will inform the visual identity of the fair by contributing to the design of the official fair Catalogue, realizing an on-site commissioned project and producing a limited edition artwork with proceeds benefitting The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Group show

With Alighiero e Boetti, Ian Hamilton Findlay, Douglas Gordon, Kapwani Kiwanga, Laure Prouvost etc.

Place du Château
87600 Rochechouart, France

Group show

With Paolo Codeluppi & Kristina Solomoukha - Kapwani Kiwanga - Nicolas Milhé - Bruno Petremann -Slimane Raïs - Erwan Venn - Fabien Zocco.

63 Bd Besson Bey | 16000 Angoulême

Group show

Artists: Jane Alexander, Berry Bickle, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Loulou Cherinet, Safaa Erruas, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Amal Kenawy, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nicène Kossentini , Mwangi Hutter , Fatima Mazmouz, Julie Mehretu, Myriam Mihindou, Aida Muluneh, Wangechi Mutu, Otobong Nkanga, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Sue Williamson, Billie Zangewa, Amina Zoubir.

Curatorship: Orlando Britto Jinorio

HALLS 4 AND 5

Group exhibition organized by Paula Doepfner

With works by Ulf Aminde, Kerstin Brätsch, Annabel Daou, Mariechen Danz, Antje Engelmann, Thomas Helbig, Sejla Kameric, Kapwani Kiwanga, Michael Müller, Marinella Senatore and Anna Witt

Kapwani Kiwanga produces works across installation, performance, and video that marry her training in anthropology and comparative religions with her interests in history, memory, and mythology. Presenting rigorous research in imaginative ways, Kiwanga intentionally confuses truth and fiction in her work in order to enable the flourishing of fantastical narratives.

For her first solo exhibition in the United States, Kiwanga presents a selection of newly commissioned work. Across sculptural installations and prints, Kiwanga deconstructs the physical and psychic qualities of built environments including schools, prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities. In the main gallery, Kiwanga brings together architectural elements from historical and contemporary versions of these spaces including wall sections, lighting fixtures, and surface treatments to propose a spatial collage that escapes the sum of its fragments. A distinctive feature of the show is the artist?s transposition of two-tone color palettes, often used in the interiors of institutional spaces, onto the gallery walls. Kiwanga thereby recalls the application of color theory to the conditions of learning, surveillance, healing, and care. A separate single-channel video in an adjoining gallery delves deeper into the spatial histories of different building typologies.

Performance

LaM, 1 allée du Musée
59650 Villeneuve d’Ascq
France

Opening : 22 Oct, 2015

Jérôme Poggi is pleased to present the first solo show of Kapwani Kiwanga at the gallery. Entitled Continental Shift, the show is part of the "Afrotunnel" project, currently developed by the artist. It refers to a hypothetic tunnel linking Europe to Africa via the strait of Gibraltar, that has been studied for a number of years but has yet to be realised. Parallel to this exhibition, the gallery presents at FIAC (Secteur Lafayette) a solo show untitled Flowers for Africa by Kapwani Kiwanga and publishes an interview with Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.
The Afrotunnel project is developped with support of Centre National des Arts Plastiques (soutien pour une recherche artistique).

Solo show

FIAC has retained this radical project consisting only of flowers that Kapwani Kiwanga proposed for the Lafayette sector in the Grand Palais. Flowers for Africa is a conceptual project that questions the material from which history is wrought, its fragility, its infallibility, its visibility and its hierarchy. Starting from a long and patient work on visual archives relating to decolonization, Kapwani Kiwanga defined a protocol calling for a recovery from iconographic documents of the time ; bouquets of flowers have been used for obviously symbolic purposes in ceremonies or events related to the independence of African countries.
On this occasion, the gallery will publish an interview between Nata?a Petre?in-Bachelez and Kapwani Kiwanga about the Flowers for Africa project.
Kapwani Kiwanga will perform in the auditorium of the Grand Palais for the FIAC opening on Thursday, October 22nd, 2015, thanks to the "Association des directeurs de centres d?art".
 
More information

October 22nd, 12.00, Auditorium

In "A Conservator's Tale", Kiwanga assumes the role of a conservator in charge of very specific and subjective archives. She makes silent objects speak, embodies forgotten accounts and tells fantastical stories. Unusual anecdotes, unspoken facts and mythical beasts all have their place in the stories told by Kiwanga. By combining readings, sound and video extracts, the artist explores the status of the document, but also the possibilities of oral transmission.

English conference and happening. Free entry (within the limit of available seats)

Since her performance at Tate Modern in April 2014, Kapwani Kiwanga is particularly visible on the
London art scene. The South London Gallery just devoted a significant solo show to her (Kinjiketile
suite, 15 April to 7 June 2015). This fall, Kiwanga will have simultaneously three solo shows at 1:54,
at FIAC where she will present her «Flowers for Africa» project that will be one the highlight of the
Lafayette section, and at the Paris based galerie with her new project «Continental Shift».
In 2016, Kapwani Kiwanga will also have an important solo show at Armory Show, being named as a
«Commissionned artist» of the 2016 New York art fair.

More information

Performance

Jarrestraße 20, 22303 Hamburg, Allemagne

Curated by Fabienne Bideaud

With Ivan Argote , John Armleder, Madeleine Berkhemer, Pauline Boudry et Renate Lorenz, Robert Filliou, Kapwani Kiwanga, Vaclav Magid, Emmanuel Van der Meulen.

Curated by Elena Agudio & Michael Arzt

With Ricardo Basbaum (BR), Paolo Bottarelli (IT), Rod Dickinson (GB), Ivana Franke (HR), Satch Hoyt (GB/JM), Kapwani Kiwanga (CA/FR), Daniel Pinheiro (PT), Fabian Reimann (DE), Alberto Tadiello (IT), Suzanne Treister (GB)

Curated by Christine Macel

What We Call Love explores how the notion of love has evolved within the 20th century. How have seismic sociological changes concerning sexuality, marriage and intimacy, alongside developments in gender issues, affected the way we conceive love today? How does visual art, from Surrealism to the present day, deal with love and what can these artistic representations tell us about what love means in our contemporary culture?

With Marina Abramovi? and ULAY, Sadie Benning, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Brassaï, Victor Brauner, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Cecily Brown, Miriam Cahn, Sophie Calle, Michele Ciacciofera, Dorothy Cross, Attila Csörgö, Salvador Dalí, Annabel Daou, Vlasta Delimar and Jerman, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dupuy, Elmgreen and Dragset, Max Ernst, VALIE EXPORT, Jean Genet, Jochen Gerz, Alberto Giacometti, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Jim Hodges, Rebecca Horn, Jesper Just, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ange Leccia, Ghérasim Luca, Vlado Martek, André Masson, Annette Messager, Tracey Moffatt, Séamus Nolan, Nadja, Henrik Olesen, Yoko Ono, Meret Oppenheim, Ferhat Ozgür, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Nesa Paripovic, Garrett Phelan, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Carolee Schneemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Paul Sharits, Jeremy Shaw, Wolfgang Tillmans, Andy Warhol, Cerith Wyn Evans, Jun Yang, Akram Zaatari.

Le Cube - independent art room gathers for the third edition of its “Curator’s Zone” the artist Soufiane Ababri and the curator Karima Boudou. The project What’s The Name Of This Nation (WTNOTN) proposes through the format of the magazine an exploration of various processes through which African identitycan be re-assessed, through the prism of Ancient Egypt. In dialogue with the magazine and its contributors (artists, poets, choreographers, activist, art critics), Le Cube hosts fragments of narration and proposals by Soufiane Ababri in direct echo with the magazine, questioning the way the past can be contained in a wider dimension than culture. A series of gatherings and presentations is organised at Le Cube during the residency.

Artist: Soufiane Ababri | Curator: Karima Boudou

Contributors magazine: Kool Moe Dee, Lili Reynaud Dewar & Alexis Vaillant, Mohamed Hmoudane, Kapwani Kiwanga, Mohamed Leftah, Maha Maamoun, Stéphane Léger, Lorraine O'Grady, Alexandre Paulikevitch,  Montassir Sakhi, Fred Wilson

In partnership with the French Institute Rabat

Curator: Fabienne Bideaud

Avec Anna Adahl, Donatella Bernardi, Jagna Ciuchta, Lukas Hoffmann, Kapwani Kiwanga, Václav Magid, François Mazabraud

Kapwani Kiwanga’s practice revolves around research in anthropology and literature, as well as archive work. Her films, installations and performances focus, notably, on Afrofuturism, a literary, musical and more broadly cultural aesthetic born in North America that weds Afrocentric gazes, science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, magical realism and non-European systems of thought in order to (re)think the experiences, past and present, of peoples hailing from the African diaspora. For AFRICA ACTS, the artist presents Afrogalactica: A Short History of the Future.

Jeudi 25 juin / 19-20h
STORY of a CONSERVATOR
Performance by Kapwani Kiwanga

In Story of a Conservator, Kiwanga assumes the role of a conservator in charge of very specific and subjective archives. She makes silent objects speak, embodies forgotten accounts and tells fantastical stories. Unusual anecdotes, unspoken facts and mythical beasts all have their place in the stories told by Kiwanga. By combining readings, sound and video extracts, the artist explores the status of the document, but also the possibilities of oral transmission.

This event concludes the seminar The Place from Where We Look organized by Kadist Art Foundation from June 22 to 25, 2015 in Paris, in the frame of Collecting Matters, a program initiated in 2012 by Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Nomas Foundation (Rome) and David Roberts Arts Foundation (London), to encourage new ways of thinking, sharing and thinking the notion of collection. The Place from Where We Look is supported by Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF).

Bétonsalon - Centre for Art and Research contributed to select the group of international participants for the seminar - Marianna Hovhannisyan, Yu Ji, Moses Serubiri, Simon Soon, Yesomi Umolu and Natalia Zuluaga – and hosts the last day of professional encounters.

More information about the public program of events is available on
www.kadist.org / http://collecting-matters.tumblr.com

Kapwani Kiwanga wishes to thank Jeu de Paume, Marta Ponsa and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.

Mediated measures
Curator : Simone Frangi

The core of Kapwani Kiwanga?s Milanese project is the assumption of the haptic ? touching, brushing against, squeezing ? as minim procedure of relation with the urban contest: the fabric of the city of Milan ? taken as the extreme edge of that economical hogback called Blue Banana and equally as the prototype of that European hallway from Manchester to Genoa - is measured using the body as a structure of mediation.

This strategy, employed for reading the anonymity of the urbanity through the intimate subjectivity of the body, proceeds from a performative and ethnographic work on the environment assuming art handler white gloves as a device for recording and collecting the context. Hailing from a previous research on the manipulation of pesticide-treated ?ethnical objects? in ethnographic European museum, the figure of the glove ? surface and barrier between the body and the object ? circulates in Kiwanga?s production as an analogy of the oscillation between fascination and cultural rejection. In the mist of the project at Viafarini, the glove recurs in its inverted signification, namely as an occasion of blemishing, spoiling and contaminate ?purity?. Opening up to the intrinsic narrativity of materiality, Kiwanga amends the implicit authority of historical and urbanistic narratives with the aim of focusing through a set of installation works and a wall drawing on these ?fugitive? layers of every day objects: fluxes, transient states and transitions where one can eventually detect evidences of the social and political belonging of the users.

Viafarin via Procaccini 4, Milano

What we identify as history is shaped by a mixture of elements, frequently less bound to sanctioned facts than to other more intangible belief systems. This inquiry stands at the core of the work of Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga whose practice interweaves a research-based investigation influenced by her earlier training in social sciences, with a more subjective and fictional observation of culture.

For her first UK solo exhibition, Kiwanga continues her research into the legacy of the 1905-1907 Maji Maji uprising against German colonial rule in what was then Tanganyika, German East Africa. According to oral history, the rebellion was fuelled by the prophecies of the spiritual medium Kinjiketile, who galvanised the Maji Maji fighters against the colonial rulers with his belief in a sacred water, which would make anyone who consumed it invincible to the German bullets. Kiwanga uses this event, and its adaptation in folklore and popular culture, as a starting point from which to trace how historical accounts linger in consciousness and weigh on a nation?s identity long after their occurrence. 

Kapwani Kiwanga?s versatile practice takes shape through video, sound and lecture performances. For Kinjiketile Suite, she translates her research-based practice into the exhibition space, weaving together material from various sources. These source texts are represented as recordings and performances by actors, who interpret the transcripts both in English and Swahili.

Additional ephemera and archival matter compiled in the course of Kiwanga?s research, is housed within a custom-made exhibition architecture. The exhibition also features a large collection of castor oil plants (Ricinus Communis Zanzibarensis) which is cultivated across the gallery space and will continue to grow throughout the duration of the exhibition. According to accounts, this fast-growing species, native to Tanzania was one of the secret ingredients that made up the sacred water that Kinjiketile distributed to his followers. 

Interspersed throughout the exhibition space is an erratic sequence of short audio vignettes delivered by Kiwanga herself. The narration offers a subjective and personal entry point to the story of the Maji Maji uprising, and functions as a fragmented guide through the show.