Goodman Gallery presents One soul, one memory, an exhibition by the Berlin-based Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba, which marks her debut solo presentation in the UK, following her acclaimed large-scale installation and performance, O Barco | The Boat (2021), at Somerset House in 2022, a 32 meters sculpture memorialising the Middle Passage.
For this exhibition, Kilomba presents a series of new works, using the boat as a metaphor to explore cyclical violence and the relationship between narrative, power and repetition. “When history is not told properly, its barbarity repeats itself” the artist states.
At the center of the exhibition is 18 Verses (2022), a sculptural installation, revealing the silhouette of a shipwreck, alluding to the dramatic migrant routes that cross the Mediterranean waters today, echoing images, gestures and sounds that insinuate a sense of historical repetition.
This work explores the material duality of ancient techniques and contemporary sound technologies, as the wood goes through a traditional process of burning, and is immersed in a sonorous landscape where human breathing negotiates its own space amidst the sound of the wind and waves.
Artworks
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In a gesture of affection and warmth, each verse of the poem is translated into several languages: Yoruba, Kimbundu, Creole from Cape Verde, Portuguese, English and Arabic from Syria - evoking a timeless yet present narrative between old empires and postcoloniality. The burnt wooden pieces are mantled in long meters of fabric, used as symbolic water or as an imaginary female entity, guardian of the verses. The use of fabric in Kilomba’s ouevre is a common visual metaphor, which, in this exhibition, is used to explore issues of identity, displacement, water surveillance, and violence.
The poem, from which the exhibition title borrows the verse One soul, one memory, extends itself into the gallery rooms as written words, in a new series titled the sounds of the water (2023). This will have its public debut in the exhibition, and reproduce some of Kilomba’s most piercing pieces of writing.
Another key work in the exhibition is Kilomba’s seminal piece Table of Goods (2017), exhibited for the first time in the UK, which comprises a unique composition of soil, coffee, sugar, dark chocolate and cocoa - the materials that fuelled the slave trade. The work seeks to memorialise centuries of labour and deaths that took place on the plantations and reminds us that the exchange of these goods remains inextricably linked to our colonial past and present.
Artist Bio
Grada Kilomba (b. 1968, Lisbon, Portugal) is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work draws on memory, trauma, gender and post-colonialism, interrogating concepts of knowledge, power and violence. “What stories are told? How are they told? And told by whom?” are constant questions in Kilomba’s body of work, to revise post-colonial narratives.
Kilomba subversively translates text into image, movement and installation, by giving body, voice and form to her own critical writing. Performance, staged reading, video, photography, publications and installation are a platform for Kilomba's unique practice of storytelling, which intentionally disrupts the proverbial ‘white cube’ through a new and urgent decolonial language and imagery.
Her work has been presented in major international events such as: La Biennale de Lubumbashi VI; 10. Berlin Biennale; Documenta 14, Kassel; 32. Bienal de São Paulo. Selected solo and group exhibitions include the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; The Power Plant, Toronto; Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin; MAAT-Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; Secession Museum, Vienna; Bozar Museum, Brussels; PAC-Pavillion Art Contemporanea, Milan, among others. Kilomba’s work features in public and private collections worldwide.
Strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, Kilomba studied Freudian Psychoanalysis in Lisbon – at ISPA, and there she worked with war survivors from Angola and Mozambique. Early on she started writing and publishing stories, before extending her interests into staging, image, sound and movement.
Kilomba holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin. She has lectured at several international universities, such as the University of Ghana and the Vienna University of Arts, and was a Guest Professor at the Humboldt Universität Berlin, Department of Gender Studies. For several years, she was a guest artist at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, in Berlin, developing 'Kosmos 2', a political intervention with refugee artists. She is the author of the acclaimed 'Plantation Memories' (Unrast, 2008) a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. Her book has been translated into several languages, and was listed as the most important nonfiction literature in Brazil, 2019. In 2021 she unveiled _O Barco / The Boat_, a large-scale installation with an accompanying performance at MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, Portugal.
The artist lives and works in Berlin.
