Grada Kilomba

Heroines, Birds and Monsters series, Creon Act III, 2020

Kilomba’s distinctive practice draws on the repressed history of colonialism and its traumatic legacy to create new forms of knowledge.

In her new series of photographic works “Heroines, Birds and Monsters”, Kilomba carefully captures the complexities of the characters in her video trilogy, “A World of Illusions” (2019); a series of filmic installations in which the artist brings the African oral tradition of storytelling into a contemporary context to illuminate memories and realities of the postcolonial world. Through this work, Kilomba poses the questions; “What if history has not been told properly? What if only some of its characters have been revealed as part of the narrative? And what if our history is haunted by cyclical violence precisely because it has not been buried properly?”