7

Standout

Venice

Biennale

Artists

Exhibiting

around

the

World

This

Year

An astonishing 7 million beads are used in 'Trinket', Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition for the Canadian pavilion at the Biennale. Huge, curtain-like swathes made up of tiny blue glass orbs caress the building’s exterior brick walls, evoking Venice’s history as a center of glass manufacturing and the beads’ historical commodification within a global, colonial network of trade. Kiwanga’s works are frequently research-heavy, drawing on her background as an anthropologist, and this pavilion, which was created in collaboration with Zimbabwean and Canadian artisans, is no different.

At Goodman Gallery in New York, a selection of the artist’s recent series is on view: experiments in sisal (a type of fiber that Kiwanga has worked with extensively), as well as glass lenses blown from silica. These works highlight the same themes that Kiwanga’s presentation at the Biennale pinpoints so effectively: the impact of colonial capitalism on the materials that shape our world, and the symbolic weight of even the most miniature object.