Kapwani Kiwanga to Represent Canada at 2024 Venice Biennale
Kapwani Kiwanga (photo ©Bertille Chéret)
Kapwani Kiwanga, a Canadian and French artist based in Paris, will represent Canada at the next Venice Biennale in 2024, the National Gallery of Canada announced Thursday.
Kiwanga, who was born in Hamilton, Ont., has a strong international exhibition record and explores marginalized or forgotten histories using sculpture, installation, video and performance.
She has won numerous prizes, including the Sobey Art Award and France's Marcel Duchamp Prize, both in 2020, as well as New York's inaugural Frieze award in 2018.
Her exhibition at the Biennale, which opens April 20, 2024, will be curated by Gaëtane Verna, the former director of Toronto's Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and now executive director at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus.
"Kapwani Kiwanga delves into the archives of the world and conducts in-depth research that is woven elegantly throughout her artworks," said Verna. "She is interested in the role of art as a catalyst for revealing and addressing alternative and often silenced, marginalized socio-political narratives that are part of our shared histories."
Born in 1978, Kiwanga studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal before moving to France for graduate studies in art. She is of Tanzanian and Scottish heritage.
Exhibitions at the Canada Pavilion, situated in Venice's Giardini park are commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and produced in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts.
Kiwanga was chosen by a committee that includes Daisy Desrosiers, director and chief curator of the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio; Heather Igloliorte, associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal, where she holds the University Research Chair in Indigenous Circumpolar Arts; Michelle Jacques, chief curator of the Remai Modern in Saskatoon; Adelina Vlas, head of curatorial affairs at the Power Plant in Toronto; and Tania Willard, an assistant professor of creative studies at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna.
The committee co-chairs – Michelle LaVallee, the National Gallery's director of Indigenous ways and decolonization, and Jonathan Shaughnessy, the director of curatorial initiatives – cited Kiwanga's "eye-opening investigations into the structures, systems, and narratives underlying today’s power asymmetries."
The Venice Biennale is one of the world's most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions with more than 80 participating countries.
Canada's official representative to last year's Biennale was Vancouver's Stan Douglas. Kiwanga was one of a handful of Canadian artists whose work was included in The Milk of Dreams, curator Cecilia Alemani's main exhibition, which highlighted the work of women, femme-identifying and non-binary artists.
The biennale, now heading into its 60th iteration, will continue to Nov. 24, 2024.
Previous Canadian representatives to the Biennale include Jean Paul Riopelle, Michael Snow, Geneviève Cadieux, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Rebecca Belmore, David Altmejd, Shary Boyle, BGL, Geoffrey Farmer and Isuma.
