Kapwani KiwangaTransfer II (Metal, breath, beads), 2024
Kapwani 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; she turns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories. In this manner Kiwanga has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that she described as “exit strategies,” works that invite one to see things from multiple perspectives so as to look differently at existing structures and find ways to navigate the future differently.
‘Transfer II’ 2024 was included in Kiwanga’s Venice Biennale solo presentation for the Canada Pavilion commissioned by the National Gallery titled ‘Trinket’ and explored how Venice set up its trading relationship with the Continent through exchange of the glass ‘contori’ bead for commodities such as gold, ivory, exotic hard wood or people in the form of the translantic slave trade.
