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Revolutions Are Geological, Not Just Political Acts of Defiance

Kapwani Kiwanga, <em>Subduction Study #5,</em> 2017, Photo: Paul Litherland, Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town, London/Galerie Poggi, Paris/Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin — Kapwani Kiwanga, *Subduction Study #5,* 2017, Photo: Paul Litherland, Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town, London/Galerie Poggi, Paris/Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin

As a prelude to the opening of Kapwani Kiwanga. Changing States the artist will be in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, who is also one of the author of the exhibition's catalogue.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography, a concept that connects two ideas. On the one hand, by referring to the inhuman, the term points to the need to decentre the human scale in the study of geography and geology, foregrounding non-human forces, materials and temporal arches. On the other hand, it makes visible the inseparable link between violence and geography, showing that geography as a discipline and geological matter and matters are deeply shaped by extractive, colonial and racial logics.

In her text about Kapwani Kiwanga's work, Yusoff approaches geology as a space of reciprocity, in which human bodies are also mineralogical bodies, chemically and politically related to the earth. "Our mineralogical bodies are drawn by gravity into a conversation with the earth as a reciprocal geography." According to the same logic, she argues that any revolution must also be a mineral and ecological, not only a political one.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interrogates geologies of race, extraction and colonial power through critical environmental humanities. She is author of Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (2024, Duke University Press) and A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019, University of Minnesota Press). She is a memeber of the Planetary Portals Collective and was co-curator of the British Pavillion, GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, which received a special mention.

Kapwani Kiwanga is a Canadian and French artist who lives and works between Paris and Berlin. She studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Joan Miró Prize (Spain, 2025), the Zurich Art Prize (Switzerland, 2022), and the Marcel Duchamp Prize (France, 2020), among others.
Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at leading international institutions in Europe and North America, such as Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Serralves Foundation in Porto, Bozar in Brussels, CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, MOCA Toronto, the New Museum in New York, and Haus der Kunst in Munich, among many others.
She represented Canada at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024 and has also participated in other major international biennials, including the Biennale of Sydney, the Hawaii Triennial, the Singapore Biennale, and the São Paulo Biennial.