Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga (Canada, 1978) is a French-Canadian artist living and working in Paris. Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal and studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

In 2022, she won the Zurich Art Prize (CH). She is the winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR) in 2020, the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the Sobey Prize for the Arts (CA) in 2018. She will represent Canada at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in 2024. Kiwanga is represented by Galerie Poggi, Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town and London; and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin.

As part of her residency at the French Academy in Rome, she is developing Remédiations, a performance project dealing with the theme of toxicity and anchored in the history of Rome, Italy and beyond. Toxic or contaminated land can be cured, just as our toxic habits can be changed to be healthier. Some poisons have antidotes: a dual force is exerted here. A force that exposes the structures and reasons why we poison ourselves; but also the gestures and forms that allow us to recover, and perhaps remedy, our toxic world.

The artist’s proposal is in line with her artistic gestures or “exit strategies”: works that invite us to multiply perspectives in order to sharpen our view of existing structures and to envisage the future in a different way. Thus, Remédiations aims to expose not only the environmental toxicity that characterises our current reality, but also other forms of social and structural toxicity.

 

Photo portrait © Bertille Chéret
Video portrait © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis