Kapwani Kiwanga

On the occasion of the Biennale de Lyon, Manifesta invites the Galerie Poggi for a group exhibition bringing together the vast majority of the artists in the gallery's program, entitled The Thread of Time. Tiny, fragile, often invisible, the thread is however what links things together, sometimes even in a mysterious way. It also appears perhaps against the grain, when one takes a distance and the narrative thread linking several events together gradually appears. It is to this ambiguity that The Thread of Time looks, by placing side by side works by Kapwani Kiwanga, Djamel Tatah, Sidival Fila, Troy Makaza, Georges Tony Stoll, Kees Visser, Ittah Yoda, Paul Mignard and Vera Pagava.

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Installed in the  New Museum's Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition debuts a new body of work that bridges historical research with a site-specific spatial intervention. Invoking both the use of police floodlights in targeted urban areas and the early eighteenth-century New York legal codes known as ?lantern laws??ordinances that required all enslaved individuals over the age of fourteen to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark?Kiwanga?s installation continues the artist?s investigation into disciplinary architectures and complex regimes of visibility. Weaving together different layers of opacity and transparency through textile and sculpture, Off-Grid subverts the application of artificial light as a means of control. Instead, the exhibition is solely illuminated by shifting patterns of natural light that change throughout the day. Disconnected from the electric lighting system, the exhibition also stages a type of speculative scenario, evoking both the sudden closure of cultural institutions during the COVID- 19 pandemic and a not-so-distant future when museums and society will have to operate with limited access to power.

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In the Grande halle of Le 109, more than forty artists, including Kees Visser, Kapwani Kiwanga and Ittah Yoda, will explore the symbolic aspects of the flower, from metamorphosis to the evolution of life, from power to fragility, taking on contemporary societal and environmental issues.

As far back as ancient Greece, frescoes or friezes of flowers have seduced spectators and the motif even became established long before that of the landscape, accompanied by the notion of the sublime in the 18th century. In the history of art, the flower was very early on the bearer of symbols and attributes of saints or of various gardens of Eden, when Dutch paintings assigned to it a role as much as a representation of opulence, as a testimony to the fragility and finitude of life.

Even today, visual artists are far from considering it as a simple decorative object. As shown by the forty-two artists in Power Flower, some of whom will be creating works especially for Le 109, the flower accompanies the subjects that today feed the field of contemporary art, but also societal or environmental debates.

Thus, the flower is displayed as a feminist or political tool, its form having an assumed sexual connotation. Admired in its natural or urban context, the flower questions modernity and ecological progress, while at the same time being a projection towards a prospective or futuristic world. From the root to the ridge, it rises and creates the link between the past and the future, especially if we think of the transformation from its state of bud to blossom.

In contemporary art, it is as much intellectual as it refers to the various senses, and is it not said that the sense of smell remains the one that is most permanently inscribed in the memory ? The flower thus symbolises the metamorphosis and evolution of the living, displaying a form of power grab, although it is soft, subtle, infra-thin, sometimes close to the invisible… but always very intoxicating.

Program

La Galerie Poggi est fière d'annoncer que Kapwani Kiwanga est invité à la 59e exposition internationale d'art de La Biennale di Venezia, sous le commissariat de Cecilia Alemani. La Biennale de Venise se tiendra du 23 mai au 27 novembre 2022.

French-Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga is awarded the prestigious Zurich Art Prize 2022, worth 100,000 francs. Her socially relevant themes distinguished her according to the jury of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich.

From the 100,000 francs she receives, the artist must dedicate the largest part (80,000 francs) to the production of an exhibition. The prize is awarded by the Haus Konstruktiv museum in Zurich. Kapwani Kiwanga's exhibition at the Haus Konstruktiv museum will be on view from October 27, 2022 to January 15, 2023.

Sarah Maldoror: Tricontinental Cinema is the first exhibition dedicated to the work of Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020). It offers a chance to discover not only her cinematographic oeuvre but also the theatre, poetry and politics that complete her multifaceted production where documentary alternates with fiction as part of a revolutionary and decolonial cinema that is determinedly anti-racist and unapologetically irreverent. 

Program

On a surface of 1500 m2, Cloud Seven hosts part of Frédéric de Goldschmidt's contemporary art collection, presented in cycles. Although the inauguration is scheduled for February 2022, the exhibition will be open from November 11th with 315 works (Louise Bourgeois, Julian Charrière, Theaster Gates, Roni Horn, Anne Imhof, Imi Knoebel, Kapwani Kiwanga, Alicja Kwade, François Morellet, Damián Ortega, Wolfgang Tillmans, David Wojnarowicz...) Its title, "Inaspettatamente (Unexpectedly)", takes the name of an embroidered piece by Alighiero Boetti, an artist who is very present in the collection of Frederic de Goldschmidt.

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In the fall of 2021 the Moody Center for the Arts will present a solo exhibition of work by Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada), her first in Houston. For the Moody, Kiwanga will create two site-specific, immersive installations, Maya-Bantu and Dune, both of which address linkages between trade and labor, as well as society and the environment, on local, national, and global scales.

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The FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents a large group exhibition, dedicated to Le Mont Analogue, a story by the Reims-based author René Daumal (1908-1944). Combining art and literature, the exhibition celebrates the influence of René Daumal - and in particular that of his last book, Le Mont Analogue - on the artists of his time and of today.

The artist Kapwani Kiwanga presents two works from the "Subduction Studies" series.

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The exhibition "Liminal Identities in the Global South" which will run at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) from May 20th to November 20th 2021 will focus on the work of women artists from Latin America (Ana Mendieta, Lygia Clark & Lygia Pape), the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), the African Diaspora and South Africa.

Kapwani Kiwanga will present the sculpture Ivory Coast from her Flowers For Africa series of bouquets.

Echoing the commemorations of the bicentenary of the death of the Emperor, the musée de l?Armée is presenting, for the first time in its history, a contemporary art tour at the Invalides. The presentation of pre-existing works and specially commissioned orders entrusted to renowned or emerging artists, from France and abroad, evokes the figure of Napoleon as well as the impact of his action in today?s world. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Napoleon Is No More, the curation of this contemporary tour was entrusted to Éric de Chassey, Director of the Institut National d?Histoire de l?Art, and Julien Voinot, Collections Manager in the Department of 19th-Century and Symbolic Art of the musée de l?Armée.

List of artists:

Marina Abramovich, Adel Abdessemed, Art & Language, Stéphane Calais, Pascal Convert, Hélène Delprat, Damien Deroubaix, Pablo Gosselin, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Fabrice Hyber, Hervé Ingrand, Kapwani Kiwanga, Alexander Kluge with Georg Baselitz, La Méduse, Ange Leccia, Célia Muller, Yan Morvan, Hans Op de Beeck, Pavel Pepperstein, Edgar Sarin, Julian Schnabel, Shu Rui, Assan Smati, Georges Tony Stoll, Laure Subreville, Agnès Thurnauer, Yan Pei-Ming.

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When our eyes touch is the first chapter of AISTIT / coming to our senses, a year-long series of exhibitions organized by the Finnish Institutes in Benelux, France, Germany, Great Britain and Ireland, in collaboration with the Maison Louis Carré, to explore the complexity of our sensory perceptions and question the ways in which they shape us as human beings. Curators Hans Rosenström and Satu Herrala were invited to reflect on the theme of the senses ("aistit" in Finnish) and their contemporary physical, political and technological dimensions.

Participating artists: Etel Adnan, Axel Antas, Simone Fattal, Terike Haapoja, Anna Maria Häkkinen, Kapwani Kiwanga, Laurent Millet, Maija Mustonen, Laure Prouvost and Hans Rosenström.

At the same time, the artists Axel Antas, Laurent Millet and Dafna Maimon will be presented at the Finnish Institute, Paris.

The Centre d'art contemporain d'Ivry - Le Crédac, supported by the Drac Île-de-France, presents "Cima Cima". The opening of Kapwani Kiwanga's solo exhibition, from April 26th 2021, is for the moment reserved - until sanitary conditions allow - for professional visits.

Scheduled from April 23rd to June 28th, 2020, the exhibition was postponed following the health crisis. Therefore, a separate project from the one previously conceived has been designed to represent the 2021 edition.

The title of the exhibition, Cima Cima, refers to the "cimarrones" or "maroons," terms of Arawak origin passed into the Spanish language to designate people in a condition of slavery, who became fugitives in the Americas. Once emancipated, these women and men had to develop strategies to preserve their freedom. This involved the establishment of precarious villages ready to be abandoned to return to the road, developing exceptional agriculture to allow them to survive, and taming plants brought back from their native lands to be adapted to a new environment.

Program

The group exhibition Structures of Radical Will examines the notion of physicality at play in forms and practices associated with minimal art. The focus of the show lies in the sensory experiences offered by artworks that strongly rely on the activation of the space and time in which they are presented. From the conception to the reception of the art selected, the perceiving body plays a central role, yet remains mostly absent from representation. Through a ceaseless back and forth between apprehension and cognition, Structures of Radical Will ambitions to also shed light anew onto the critical and political scope of a formal vocabulary and attitude that have by now fully entered the dominating artistic canons. The title of the show takes its origin in the combination of two historical references. On one hand, Primary Structures, the exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, introducing then pionniers of so called minimal sculpture. On the other hand, Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag’s second collection of essays published in 1969, dedicated to various contemporary art forms and the states of consciousness they may convey and produce. Alongside works by historical figures from the 1960s and 1970s, Structures of Radical Will, in its turn, features also recent productions by lesser known or younger artists.

Master symposium
As part of the symposium series Womxn in the Arts and Leadership
17 – 18 March 2021

With contributions by Maria Thereza Alves, Ursula Biemann, Regina Bittner, Barbara Casavecchia, Anja Kirschner, Kapwani Kiwanga, Maria Lind, Otobong Nkanga, Lydia Ourahmane and Myriam Amroun, Filipa Ramos, Kerstin Stakemeier, as well as Yvonne Volkart and Peter Spillmann

Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
Research Associate: Marion Ritzmann

The symposium is open to the public via Zoom and will be held in English.

→ PROGRAM AND ZOOM LINKS

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On Monday, October 19th, 2020, the jury met to choose the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2020 from among the four artists nominated for this edition: Alice Anderson, Hicham Berrada, Kapwani Kiwanga and Enrique RamÍrez. These deliberations followed a presentation of the artists by their rapporteurs, respectively : Annabelle Gugnon, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Emanuele Coccia, Ángeles Alonso Espinosa.

The jury composed of seven personalities - Bernard Blistène, Gilles Fuchs, Chris Dercon, Michèle Guyot-Roze, Gitte Ørskou, Akemi Shiraha and Marie-Cécile Zinsou - awarded the Marcel Duchamp 2020 Prize to Kapwani Kiwanga.

We would also like to extend special thanks to Emanuele Coccia, who defended the artist before the international jury, as well as to the Canadian Cultural Center and Fleurs d'ici for their precious support in the realization of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou.

In parallel to the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, the gallery presents the project 'Nations' which we hope to present to you before November 20th.

The gallery initiated its collaboration with Kapwani Kiwanga in 2015, during the exhibition 'Hysterical Materialism', and has realized since then about ten projects with her in France and abroad.


Congratulations to Kapwani !

Kapwani Kiwanga's PLOT project at the Haus der Kunst München consists of a series of artistic interventions and events, for which sculptures and installations will be presented in the central hall, the colonnades and the surrounding landscape of the museum, challenging the notion of public sphere.

This project is part of the cultural program linked to Canada's presence as a guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.

Curator: Damian Lentini

For his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, Kapwani Kiwanga presents New Work at the FKA Witte de With in Rotterdam, from September 20th, 2020 to February 14th, 2021.
The exhibition is organized by guest curator iLiana Fokianaki, and coordinated by Wendy van Slagmaat-Bos.

Group Show with Kapwani Kiwanga, avec Marwa Arsanios, Raven Chacon, Bethany Collins, Tamar Guimarães, Kapwani Kiwanga, H??ng Ngô, Aliza Nisenbaum, Alison O'Daniel, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Elle Pérez, Charlotte Prodger.

Nine Lives takes shape around a diverse set of protagonists, as if this exhibition were a collection of short stories or personal essays, told from different points of view. These figures?whether real or imagined?come forward in the artworks in the exhibition, which offer intimate but imperfect access to their individual lives. Each work holds the residual impression of a moment, a journey, an effort, or a thought, with varying degrees of legibility. As these individuals move quietly through everyday settings or navigate more extraordinary circumstances, larger dimensions also begin to emerge. While a notion of the self remains central to the exhibition, that self moves in relation to society and history, with an ongoing tension between public and private experience. Everyone is the main character in the own life story, but any given story overlaps with those being written or maintained by other people.

Motifs of reading, writing, and translating appear throughout the exhibition. This takes familiar forms, such as books, newspapers, and documents from an archive, but the artists are also thinking about these kinds of activities in more expansive ways: how textiles can also be texts, for example, or how a musical score is waiting to be enacted. In bringing the work of eleven artists together, Nine Lives is weighing how stories are told, where they can be found, and what their effects might be, within single lives and on a more collective scale. Not all stories are told in the present tense and many follow us from the past, infusing daily life, carried on through language but also in our bodies. As such, some of the artists in Nine Lives, or their protagonists, are also considering how traces of the past are interpreted or understood. They are developing new appraisals of history, as it is felt here and now, and how it can be re-examined or rewritten.

This exhibition is part of the Feminist Art Coalition, an expansive platform for projects inspired by feminist thought, experience, and action that will unfold at dozens of museums around the country beginning in the fall of 2020. Informed by this backdrop, Nine Lives echoes various feminist legacies, especially artists and filmmakers who have explored what it is for women to tell their own stories or to make space for narratives otherwise obstructed or unwritten. As feminist dialogues continue to evolve, Nine Lives embraces how these efforts have expanded to include greater multiplicities, geographies, and gender identities.

Curated by Karsten Lund and Caroline Picard.

The starting point for this exhibition project of the Albertinum is the art and visual culture of the international solidarity movements of the former GDR. Angela Davis (*1944), a symbol of global civil rights and social movements, has been campaigning against inequality for decades.

The exhibition "On the Threshold" will focus on themes related to nature and the concept of life in an artistic context. The works selected for this project will invite the viewer to dive into environments and narratives that address social, political and speculative scenarios of the present and the future. The exhibition conceived by Tom Eccles and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, co-artistic director and Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, senior curator of Luma Arles, will evoke the intense cross-fertilization of art and media disciplines that exists today, as well as the rich connections between art and other disciplines.

With the help of the Crédac, Kapwani Kiwanga invites local actors, researchers, intellectuals, artists, musicians and dancers to intervene in a sculptural setting in the form of a discussion, conference or performance to discuss the questions raised by her project.

The work of the native Antiguan and Barbudan artist Frank Walter (1926–2009) encompasses numerous paintings, drawings, sculptures, writings, and tape recordings that will here be on view in a museum for the first time.

The works by John Akomfrah, Khalik Allah, Kader Attia, Marcel Broodthaers, Birgit Hein, Isaac Julien, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell and Rosemarie Trockel revolve around colonialism in the Caribbean in the past and present as well as the intellectual contexts? of colonial and post-colonial thought. They address the visual regime of racism that also finds expression in the exoticizing gaze, and describe the complexities of identity, class and racialization. Julien Creuzet, Kapwani Kiwanga and Carolyn Lazard have produced new works specifically for the show.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and KADIST present the exhibition Things Entangling, the culmination of a major, long-term curatorial collaboration.Trees, fossils, books, artifacts—these are some of our companions as we live in and make sense of a world in which realities and histories collide and reverberate continuously. This exhibition features artworks by twelve artists/groups that trace and animate the trajectories, nexuses, and mutations of things that resonate with a specific time and place. These things might be material objects or living subjects, but they are always also mediators of meaning, ideology, and memory. When these artists’ practices invoke anthropology, archaeology, or historiography to seek rootedness, they aim less to excavate or clarify the past than to open up a new politics of interpretation for building the present.

The title of this exhibition, which is taken from the magnificent song by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, invites us to see the world differently. Like a poetic journey, the Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) invites us to explore the works of emerging and established international artists who, in a sensitive and committed way, question their environment, drawing on their own experiences.

For the 2020 Capture Photography Festival, Franco-Canadian, Paris-based artist, Kapwani Kiwanga has created Counter-Illumination (2020), a site-specific commission. This work is featured on the façade of the Dal Grauer building, a modernist power structure, partly obscuring its dominant glass façade.

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, Das a cumulative exercise of sharing knowledge and community with each edition building on scholarship and themes of previous iterations, dynamically responding to its time.

In her work, Franco-Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, CA) questions the ways in which the writing of history, power systems and the generation of knowledge function, undermining the official understanding of truth by expanding history with popular belief, spirituality, magic and mythology. She reacts in particular to the power dynamics of architecture and examines the effect of public buildings on the human body, focusing on design elements and on forms of racist surveillance.

This solo exhibition across 800 m² will reflect Kiwanga's career with a selection of significant, representative works and new site-specific pieces. It will function as a narrative that places emphasis on the impact of disciplinary architecture and spatial elements on the human body as well as the research into post-colonial histories and stories in which truth and fiction are combined.

Kapwani Kiwanga lives and works in Paris. She was awarded the Sobey Art Award (CA) and the Frieze Artist Award (USA) in 2018.

Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold is a contemporary exploration of the sun, as an activator of sensory engagement, provoking deeper contemplations on sensuality, eroticism, pleasure, and politics of desire. Inspired by Dionne Brand?s descriptions of her young protagonist Maya and her awakening self-awareness, the selected works by Kapwani Kiwanga, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Rajni Perera, draw attention to a multilayered sensory ecology that weaves together embodiment, space, and the radiance of the sun.

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System features work by artists from across the nation that addresses the criminal justice system, mass incarceration, and the prison-industrial complex. Representing the full range of contemporary art production made in the studio and the social realm, the exhibition includes artworks that take social justice issues as a subject matter; and position the prison and court systems as structures for dismantling through institutional critique. The artworks in the exhibition are extraordinary for the scale and ambition by which they mobilize in order to bring visibility to offenses within the justice system.

Leave No Stone Unturned [Remuer la terre] is the first collective exhibition in Morocco that initiates reflections on nature, politics and power structures, moving from Morocco to Tunisia, Israel/Palestine, South Africa, Haiti, Turkey and even deserts. It is essential to encourage dialogue on the issue of flora and systems of meanings, particularly from a postcolonial perspective and in a South-South exchange. Rummaging through soil, seeds and plants, we discover another nature: a nature not only constructed by its relations with man - often through domination and exploitation, but also through respect, spirituality and healing - but that reclaims its agency.

Clelia Coussonnet

The Sun Ra Repatriation Project is an artistic endeavour to repatriate Sun Ra to his homeland: Saturn. Sun Ra was an influential American jazz musician and composer who affirmed his extraterrestrial origin. He created an "Astro-black" philosophy, which he transmitted until his death in 1993. Inspired by Sun Ra's mythology, The Sun Ra Repatriation Project fashions a four-stage system of interplanetary communication: Phase I - Image production those who knew Sun Ra provide physical descriptions of him during videoed interviews. A composite sketch of Sun Ra is produced from these accounts. Phase II - Coding and Transmission the composite portrait is transformed into a radio wave and sent to Saturn. Phase III - Reception and Observation the project monitors Saturn. this data is sonified and broadcast into the exhibition space. Phase IV - Decoding, Analysis, Interpretation this observational data is decoded and archived regularly. this record creates a research document to be analysed and possibly decipher a message confirming Sun Ra's safe arrival.

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.

Serpentine Galleries present the third instalment of this year-long symposium and research project, presented as part of the General Ecology project. The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Plants brings together scientists, anthropologists, artists and theologians around plant sentience, plant intelligence, communication with the vegetal world and forms of mysticism and healing. Participants include Saelia Aparicio, Antoine Bertin, Vivian Caccuri, Teresa Castro, Amy Hollywood, Kapwani Kiwanga, Natasha Myers, Michael Marder, Tabita Rezaire, Kim Walker, Elvia Wilk and more to be announced. A new commission from Chris Watson will be presented on the night.

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).

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)

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

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.