Kapwani Kiwanga’s installation Rumours that Maji was a lie... (2014), included in Things Entangling at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, a curatorial collaboration with KADIST (17 March - 14 June).
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. Haunted by different time spans and territories, positions and subjectivities, the artists reveal unexpected intersections, elusive networks, and fleeting affinities between things. Through their work they aspire to open up the closed circles, exclusive territories, and static systems that are around and also within us.
In the installation, Rumours that Maji was a lie..., Kiwanga treats the voids present in the living memory, as well as the material traces of the Maji Maji War: an anti-colonial uprising which took place between 1905, and 1907 in present-day Tanzania. The installation centers around a shelving system, which functions simultaneously as a storage unit, an exhibiting structure and a projection machine. It embodies storytelling in the form of a subjective archive through totality or exhaustiveness when treating historic events.
