Kapwani Kiwanga’s work revolves around the epistemologies of botany, its histories and their relation to acts of resistance. The artist examines the role of plants in self-medication, subsistence, and self-protection, while considering plants as witnesses to human history. Kiwanga looks at how plants can metamorphose from pharmakon (medicine) to poison. For her, the tenuous balance between the two further highlights another important concept: opacity, or, the visibility and invisibility of resistance. 

Scholars and theorists looking into the histories of racial inequality have proposed opacity as an expression of resistance. Kiwanga’s desire to unveil plants as protagonists of the “opacity of resistance,” links the histories of resistance from previous centuries to the modern histories of the civil rights movement and the current antiracist global movement. 

Kapwani Kiwanga (b. Hamilton, Canada) is Franco-Canadian, she lives and works in Paris. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2020, Kiwanga received the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR). She was also the winner of the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the annual Sobey Art Award (CA) in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include: Palais de Tokyo Paris (2022), MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto ,  Kunstinstituut Melly (Fkwa Witte de With), Haus der Kunst Munich, MIT List Visual Arts Center a.o.

*The newly commissioned work Bequest (2021) is a collaboration of the artist with weaver Vasso Damkou.

Opening: Friday, 10th of December, 14:00 - 20:00

iLiana Fokianaki