19 Facts About Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga was born on 1978 and is a Canadian artist working in Paris, France.

Kapwani Kiwanga's work is known for dealing with issues of colonialism, gender, and the African diaspora.

Kapwani Kiwanga has said that she gained her perspective on colonialism and Canada's Indigenous people from her time in Brantford, which is situated on the Haldimand Tract in the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples.

Kapwani Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, and art at the "La Seine" program at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Kapwani Kiwanga's work is shaped by her academic background, and often involves multiple formats and media in order to present a diversity of experiences for the viewer.

Kapwani Kiwanga explores the social and political aspects of the world by presenting these multiple perspectives, a skill she formed growing up in Canada, visiting family in Tanzania, and spending much of her adult life in France.

Kapwani Kiwanga employs strategies of social scientific research and documentary modes of presentation in her work.

In Safe Passage, Kapwani Kiwanga goes through the history of blackness in America, from slavery to contemporary time and the effect of technology on issues like visibility.

Since her first solo exhibition in 2014 at Jeu de Paume, Paris, Kapwani Kiwanga has received increasingly widespread critical attention for her interdisciplinary approach to art-making that prods the realms of history, psychology, and other social sciences, alongside the "pure" sciences.

Kapwani Kiwanga's work aims to offer nuanced and subversive insight into what constitutes knowledge, truth and authority, both historically and in the present, especially in matters related to the administration of bodies, cultural identity, and behavior.

In Linear Paintings Kapwani Kiwanga deploys research into the psychology and sociology of colour and architecture through paintings on drywall panels each featuring two coloured blocks.

The colours selected by Kapwani Kiwanga were sourced from technical manuals and social-architectural theory about the proposed effects of certain colours on prison populations, coastguards, industrial workers or hospital patients, among other contexts.

Critic Simon Wu notes that, like the one-way mirrors used for Jalousie, Kapwani Kiwanga often refers to the historical contexts and power dynamics that inspired the works obliquely, leaving the viewer's experience of the artwork to reveal and reflect different things to different viewers.

In collaboration with the gallery, Kapwani Kiwanga acquired a number of these floodlights, extracted and transformed their aluminium parts into a light absorbing paint that was applied to a beaded curtain and triangular wall panels interspersed with mirrored panels.

Solo exhibitions of Kapwani Kiwanga's work have been held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, CCA Glasgow, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo in Almeria, Spain, Salt Beyoglu in Istanbul, the South London Gallery, the Jeu de Paume, the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Paris Photo, and The Power Plant.

Kapwani Kiwanga was the 2016 Commissioned Artist at the Armory Show.

From 8 February 2019 to 21 April 2019, Kapwani Kiwanga was exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in a solo show titled Safe Passage.

Also in 2024 Kapwani Kiwanga presented her solo exhibition Where salt and freshwater meet and crooked trees filter the sun at Serralves Museum in Porto.

Kapwani Kiwanga has received two BAFTA nominations for her film and video works, and has received the following awards for her work:.