Kapwani Kiwanga (courtesy of National Gallery of Canada, photo by miv photography)
Kapwani Kiwanga, a Hamilton-born multidisciplinary artist, has won the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp for Flowers for Africa, which addresses the legacies of colonialism.
The prize, worth some $54,000, is one of France’s top art honours, and is awarded by the Association for the International Dissemination of French Art.
Kapwani Kiwanga, “Flowers for Africa: Ivory Coast,” 2015
private collection, photo by Rachel Topham
Kiwanga, who lives in Paris, showed the work, which recreates floral arrangements at independence ceremonies in various African countries, at Vancouver's Or Gallery in 2017.
She commissions a florist to make the works based on archival photographs. The bouquets are displayed on plinths and allowed to wilt during the show.
Bernard Blistène, director of the Centre Pompidou and chair of the prize jury, praised the complexity of the work, saying it "opens up a vast poetic and political program, a true laboratory of today’s thought on memory and archives as sources of the world’s transfiguration.”
The work is on display at the Pompidou until Jan. 4 with the work of the three finalists — French-British artist Alice Anderson, Morocco-born artist Hicham Berrada and Chilean artist Enrique Ramirez.
Kiwanga won the Sobey Art Award in 2018.