Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga (Canada, 1978) is a French-Canadian artist living and working in Paris. Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, and art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 2022, she was awarded the Zurich Art Prize (CH). She won the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR) in 2020, the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the Sobey Award for the Arts (CA) in 2018. She will represent Canada at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Kiwanga is represented by Galerie Poggi, Paris; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town and London and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin.

As part of her residency at Villa Medici, she is developing Remédiations, a performance project dealing with the theme of toxicity and anchored in the history of Rome, Italy and beyond. Toxic or contaminated lands can be healed, just as our toxic habits can be changed to be healthier. Some poisons have antidotes: here, a double force is at work. One that exposes the structures and reasons why we poison ourselves; but also the gestures and forms that enable us to reclaim and perhaps remedy our toxic world. The artist’s proposal is a continuation of his artistic gestures or “exit strategies”, works that invite us to multiply our perspectives in order to sharpen our gaze on existing structures and envisage the future differently. In this way, Remédiations seeks to expose the environmental toxicity that characterizes our current reality, as well as other forms of social and structural toxicity.