Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
In 2018, Kiwanga received the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and was also the winner of the annual Sobey Art Award (CA).
Solo exhibitions include MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (USA); Albertinum museum, Dresden (DE); Artpace, San Antonio (USA); Esker Foundation, Calgary (CA); Tramway, Glasgow International (UK); Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Turin (IT); Power Plant, Toronto (CA), Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago (USA); South London Gallery, London (UK); and Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR).
Selected group exhibitions include Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK); Serpentine Galleries, London (UK); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CHN); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA); CCA – Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry (UK); Centre Pompidou (FR); The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (CA); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA).
Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities.
Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance.
Kiwanga co-opts the canon; sheturns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories. In this manner Kiwanga has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that she described as “exit strategies,” works that invite one to see things from multiple perspectives so as to look differently at existing structures and find ways to navigate the future differently.