Trained as an anthropologist, Kapwani Kiwanga (1978) is a multidisciplinary Canadian and French artist living and working in Paris and Berlin. She views her research-based work as an experimental archive that considers power imbalances past and present. Her installations invite audiences to reflect on the impact that the spaces we inhabit have on their users, both through their design and their history.
Trained at McGill University in Montreal and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Kiwanga constructs her pieces from intensive research, often based on forgotten or silenced histories. The artist deliberately blurs reality and fiction in order to destabilise hegemonic narratives and open up spaces for marginalised discourses.
Her work has been exhibited in the world’s leading contemporary art centres, including the New Museum in New York, MOCA in Toronto, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, CAPC in Bordeaux and the Museu Serralves in Porto. In 2024, she represented Canada in its pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where she presented her installation Trinket, a poetic and critical reflection on global trade and unequal exchange through the history of glass beads.
Some of the awards she has received include the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2020), the Sobey Art Award (2018) and the Zurich Art Prize (2022), all of which have consolidated her as an artist of international renown. Her work explores the relationship between power, architecture and societal structures, developing a unique visual language that she defines as ’exit strategies’: forms that allow us to imagine alternative futures and rethink dominant structures.
Kapwani Kiwanga. © Photo Angela Scamarcio
