Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga is a French and Canadian artist living and working in Paris. Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University, in Montreal, and art at Beaux-Arts de Paris. She is the winner of the 2022 Zurich Art Prize, 2020 Marcel Duchamp Prize, 2018 Frieze Artist Award, and 2018 Sobey Art Award. She will represent Canada at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in 2024.  

Kiwanga’s work is research-driven, instigated by marginalized or forgotten histories and articulated across materials and mediums, including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. At Radcliffe, she is conducting research into botany, legislation, and history to inform the creation of performative, painting, and silkscreen works that examine the relationship between plants and resistance through historic examples of acts of emancipation. 

Kiwanga has had solo exhibitions at Albertinum, in Dresden; Esker Foundation, in Calgary; Haus der Kunst, in Munich; Jeu de Paume, in Paris; MIT List Visual Arts Center; the Moody Center for the Arts, at Rice University; the New Museum, in New York; the Power Plant, in Toronto; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, at the University of Chicago; and the South London Gallery, among others. Her work also was included in group exhibitions at such institutions as the Centre Pompidou, in Paris; Hammer Museum at UCLA; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Museum für Moderne Kunst, in Frankfurt; Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, in Marrakech; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Serpentine Galleries, in London; the Venice biennale; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai.

The Nature of Archives (Harvard Magazine, 11/22)